Subject: Call for Papers: “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship”

Call for Papers:

“All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship”

A Special Issue of *Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory*.

Issue Guest Editors: Shanté Paradigm Smalls (University of New Mexico) and
Jessica N. Pabón (New York University)**

Submission deadline: *May 1, 2013*

*Women and Performance *invites submissions for a special issue, “All Hail
the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship.” The
editors welcome scholarly articles and performative texts that foreground
feminist and queer performance studies approaches to hip hop culture,
consumption, and production.

Contemporary rap music, as a stand-in for hip hop culture and production,
is virtually synonymous with misogyny and homophobia in the mainstream US
and academic imaginary. We want to explore the range of understandings and
theories that inform how women and queers experience hip hop culture and
performance; this issue underscores the multiplicity of hip hop culture and
rejects a myopic totalizing view of what “the culture” does and is. We seek
to engage with the wide range of hip hop scholars and practitioners working
at the intersections of various methodologies not always associated with
scholarly considerations of hip hop (including psychoanalysis, feminist and
queer theory, and performance theory), as well as methods typical to hip
hop studies—sociology, Black studies, literature, history, musicology, and
urban studies. An emerging class of hip hop scholars pressure the givens of
race, gender, performance, sexuality, region, nationality, artistry, and
iconography—as a culture that has been in a state of constant development
for the past forty years, hip hop scholarship is more than due for a queer
feminist remixing and reimagining.

As coeditors, we challenge the readers of *Women & Performance* to ask:
What would a specifically queer feminist performance studies approach to
hip hop’s culture and production generate in terms of scholarship? How does
a queer feminist experience and critique revise hip hop studies? Why has
performance studies had so little to say about hip hop, what interventions
does performance studies yield? The issue’s focus on producing knowledge
about hip hop culture that centralizes women, girls and queer people will
include a range of elements, both popular and subcultural: DJ culture,
dance, graffiti, human beat boxing, rap music, as well as fashion, media
and print, organizing, and other forms of knowledge production. No matter
the genre, hip hop is often conceived and misrepresented as a
male-dominated culture which casts women and girls as an addendum to hip
hop rather than as primary producers, critics, and consumers. Within the
pages of this issue, contributors revisit the centrality of feminist and
queer artists to the production of all elements of hip hop culture and of
feminist and queer critique to hip hop scholarship. “All Hail the Queenz”
intends to tease out the nuanced negotiations women, girls, and queer
people develop as hip hop artists, critics, and consumers participating
within this climate.

Through re-centering feminist and queer critiques and female and queer
performance, “All Hail the Queenz” recalibrates hip hop’s center. By
recalibrating the center, contributors to this issue refashion hip hop
historiography and hip hop aesthetics beyond the art of rapping by the
cisgendered male body. In a kind of textual reperformance, this issue takes
its title from Queen Latifah’s lyrical demands for respect on her first
womanist rap classic album, “All Hail the Queen,” and reminds readers once
again that “stereotypes, they got to go!”

Potential Topics:

– Alternate Hip Hop historiographies
– Artist Scholars
– DJing, technology, gender, sexuality
– Feminist, queer, trans* aesthetics
– Feminist, queer, trans* pedagogy
– Graffiti and gender/sexuality
– Hip Hop culture and dis/ability
– Hip Hop diasporas
– Hip Hop fashion
– Hip Hop feminism
– Hip Hop festivals
– Hip Hop’s hybridity
– Human Beatboxing
– Media culture and social networking
– Nation, Empire, and hip hop
– Queer feminist hip hop critique
– Queerness and/in/of hip hop
– Trans* in/and hip hop

Article submissions should be 6-8,000 words in length and adhere to the
current Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), author-date format. Performative
texts should be 2-3,000 words and in any style the author chooses (same CMS
style as above if using citations). Photo essays are welcome. Questions and
abstracts for review are welcome before the final deadline.

Complete essays and texts for consideration must be submitted by 11:59 PM
EST, May 1, 2013.

Please send all work to both Shanté Paradigm Smalls and Jessica N.
Pabón via email (MSWord attachment): shantesmalls@gmail.comand
jnp250@nyu.edu.

Further submission guidelines may be found at:
http://www.womenandperformance.org/submission.html. *Women and Performance* is a
peer reviewed journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

Thanks for circulating!

Best,

Jessica N. Pabón

ABD, Performance Studies New York University
American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow, 2012-2013
Curator, bob bar gallery, NYC
Email: jnp250@nyu.edu
Blog: artofgettingovaries.wordpress.com
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/ArtofGettingOvaries
TedxWomen Talk: http://tedxwomen.org/speakers/jessica-pabon/