•  
  •  
 

Deliberately Queer Journal

Call for Manuscripts

The Volume 2 Submission Period is now open.

Deliberately Queer Journal will accept 300-word abstracts until December 31, 2025 at 11:59 p.m., your local time.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must not be under review elsewhere or have appeared in any other published form. Manuscripts should be no longer than 25 pages (double-spaced) or 7,000 words (including notes and references) and can be prepared following MLA, APA, or Chicago style. All submissions should include an abstract of no more than 150 words and have a detached cover page listing the author/s’ name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Authors should remove all identifying references from the manuscript. To be hosted on the Deliberately Queer Journal website, media files should not exceed 220 MB in size. Authors must hold rights to any content published in Deliberately Queer Journal, and permission must be granted and documented from all participants in any performance or presentation.

Special Call: Reflections on Queer Politics, Tensions, and Pathways Forward

In Volume 1: Deliberately Queer(ing), we engaged with the notion of queering deliberately and intentionally in varying contexts. As we continue this line of scholarship, we situate this call as timely and critical given the current US sociopolitical climate that continues to erase queer and trans* communities, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) policies and efforts through a series of fascist executive orders and bills across federal, state, and local levels. We observe these sociopolitical tensions that rhetorize queer and trans* bodies as pathological, “ungodly,” and as such undeserving of spaces within varying institutional contexts.

As we theorize these dynamics within the US context that extend into global and international implications to dictate which bodies should have access to the US Global North, we rely on Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality theory and Lugones’s (2007) coloniality of gender that delineate the underlying systems of power that disable and oppress queer bodies. Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory offers a method to deconstruct the structural politics of policy that hinder representations of othered bodies. Crenshaw advocates for a systemic analysis of power systems that demonize these bodies as (in)valid, exacerbated when accounting for the added layers of intersections that oppress these othered bodies. Lugones’s coloniality of gender rejects the universalist notion of gender and sexuality, elucidating the pre-colonial histories of gender and sexuality in which the third gender was a prominent societal structure within Indigenous People and others of the Global South. Lugones contends that the binary of gender and sexuality located as white patriarchy was the core ploy of colonialism to create a system of power dominated by white men.

In emphasizing the theorizations of power and control from both Crenshaw’s and Lugones’s perspectives, we are interested in scholarship that recognizes these power dynamics as represented within contemporary queer politics and contentions. We invite submissions that may expand within and across the following thematic areas, though abstracts that fall outside of these thematic areas are welcome:

Defining Queer Politics

Work capturing the nuances and evolution of defining queer politics may engage questions, such as what does queer politics mean in this current political moment? How has queer politics changed over time, space, and place? What does it mean to queer politics?

Politics and Queer Communities

Work in this thematic area may include research focusing on how the ongoing, heightened political attacks against queer communities impact the lives of queer people. Scholars may engage with questions, such as how are queer communities represented or accounted for in local, state, and federal laws? What are the lived, embodied results of anti-trans*, anti-queer legislation?

Transnational Political Queerness

Work in this thematic area of transnational political queerness may engage questions, such as what is a transnational political queerness? How are Global South-Global North queer political tensions represented in this current political moment? How may we, as queer scholars, mitigate these transnational political tensions?

The Editors welcome submissions from a variety of qualitative, quantitative, mixed, and reflexive methodological approaches, including critical and cultural analyses, web-based and new media research, autoethnography, poetic and arts-based inquiry, performance scripts, as well as other methods. We are also especially interested in work that employs theoretically and methodologically dynamic and innovative applications to centralize queer discourse.

Key Dates and Deadlines

Abstract Submission: December 31, 2025

  • Submission of 300-word abstract (not including references), and 100-word author bio
  • Submit abstracts to https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dqj/

Invitations for Full Manuscripts: January 31, 2026

  • Invitations sent to authors to submit full manuscripts

Full Manuscripts: May 1, 2026

  • All manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review by two peer reviewers

Revised Manuscripts Based on Peer Reviews: October 31, 2026

  • Authors submit revised manuscripts for final publication decision

Final Publication of Volume 2: December 2026

  • Publication of Volume 2: Reflections on Queer Politics, Tensions, and Pathways Forward

References

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x

For additional information and questions, contact the editors-in-chief at deliberatelyqueer@gmail.com.

Preparing Submission Materials

To submit your manuscript through OpenSIUC, click on “Submit manuscript” in the left sidebar. You will want to have the following materials ready:

  • Contact information for you (and co-authors, if applicable)
  • Article title
  • Shortened article title (for running head)
  • Key words
  • Abstract (150-word maximum)
  • Cover page footnote (could include a short description of your institutional affiliation, any acknowledgments to individuals who contributed to the article, and anywhere the article was presented prior to publication)
  • Full text of submission (manuscript in Word Doc or RTF format which not does exceed 25 double-spaced pages or 7,000 words and does not include any identifying information about the author)

Publication

Authors are completely responsible for the factual accuracy of their contributions and neither the Editorial Board of Deliberately Queer Journal nor Southern Illinois University Carbondale accepts any responsibility for the assertions and opinions of contributors. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to quote lengthy excerpts from previously published articles.

Please e-mail deliberatelyqueer@gmail.com for inquiries.