FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers (Issue 36): Family

20-Jan-2025

Call for Papers (Issue 36): Family

 

The family as an ostensibly biological group has been naturalised as the fundamental unit of collective organisation. Yet, as feminist and queer theorists have endeavoured to show, the family is neither an innocent nor an immutable category. Protecting certain familial structures has long provided justification for the ongoing legal regulation of sex, marriage, and reproduction, making the family a contentious site for feminist, queer, and racially-marked subjects.

However, as sexual historians and theorists demonstrate, the ideological unity of the family is belied by its historical and geographical contingency. Queer theory, for example, explores the family as a form that is socio-culturally produced, with foundational texts like Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) inviting ‘us to consider the family as an artificial social group’ (73), and to explore the objects, logics, institutions, and technologies through which the family is reproduced and naturalised.

Equally, from the queer (and not always human) networks of association and affiliation discussed in the Queer Ecologies (2010) anthology to the capacious and resistant family-making practices of Sadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), the family has also been and continues to be a productive site for the examination, critique, and reworking of social organisation, affect, and academic method.

 

The 36th issue of FORUM invites contributions from across the arts and humanities that engage with the concept of 'Family'. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • Family and normativity: normative family forms; censorship (‘family friendly’); eugenics; heteronormativity; amatonormativity; racism and colonialism; ableism
  • Non-normative family forms: chosen families; queer families; queer reproduction; non-reproduction; nonhuman and posthuman families; adopted families; the family-less
  • Histories and temporalities: family forms throughout time; (hetero)futurity; genealogy; inheritance; generation
  • Place and space: family forms in different geographical and cultural contexts; the home; hospitals; schools; the workplace; phenomenology
  • Affects of and within family: intimacy; love; desire; exclusion; failure; abandonment; grief
  • The family and social forms: nation; race; class; religion; professional organisations; marriage; reproduction
  • Medicine and technology: family planning; pediatrics; obstetrics; assisted reproduction; surrogacy and adoption; contraception; abortion
  • Genres: children’s literature; science fiction and fantasy; romance; (auto)biography; sitcoms; documentaries; family portraits
  • Familial logic and aesthetics: repetition; reproduction; similarity; evolution; growth; development; continuity
  • Family as metaphor and method: genealogies; psychoanalysis; queer historiography; afrofuturism; autotheory; Oedipal and anti-Oedipal feminism
  • Family as a framework for relation and exclusion: familiarity and unfamiliarity/alterity
  • Broken/dysfunctional family: domestic abuse; domestic violence; familial trauma; generational trauma; divorce; child custody

 

Send the full article by 6th April 2025 at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/forum/about/submissions. Suitable submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review. For questions email Forum.Journal@ed.ac.uk.

N.B. We are usually only able to accept submissions from postgraduate students or from early career researchers within three years of having finished a postgraduate qualification.