CFP: Special Issue of Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics: ” Composing at the Intersections: Queer, Transgender and Feminist Approaches to Multimodal Rhetorics”

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Dear Colleagues:

I’m excited to share a call for proposals for a special issue of The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, "Composing at the Intersections: Queer, Transgender and Feminist Approaches to Multimodal Rhetorics," edited by Ruby Mendoza, Constance M. Haywood, Floyd Pouncil, and myself.

The full CFP is linked here and pasted below. Proposals are due using this Google Form by December 1st 2024.

Please contact us at multimodalcomposingFall2024. We’re happy to talk through any ideas and are committed to mentoring contributors!

Thanks for considering!

Composing at the Intersections:

Queer, Transgender and Feminist Approaches to Multimodal Rhetorics

Call for Proposals

Ruby Mendoza, Constance M. Haywood, Floyd Pouncil, and Nick Sanders

multimodalcomposingFall2024

Link to Submit

While thinking about this special issue, Ruby, Constance, Floyd, and Nick joked about the prevalence of Royster and Kirsch’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices that showed up across several syllabi during their shared times in graduate school. As scholars, we have come to understand the power and utility of utilizing rhetoric and composition to do work in the world. Multimodal composing, as a component of rhetoric and composition, when taken alongside queer, transgender, and feminist praxis, incites a focus from form to utility. Consider, for example, self-published activist pamphlets circulated by the Combahee River Collective (1977) during the 1970s in Boston, Massachusetts. You might also consider the communal and political activism embedded in the The Black Panther newspaper. More recently, consider events like ‘chalk walks’ on college campuses that address and engage issues of sexual violence. Or, you can take some time to consider how online publics frequently organize around hashtags to establish communities and coalitions of folks that strive towards the same goal (whether that might be to organize/protest, support each other through healing and shared experience, or else).

We can clearly see these types of multimodal compositions as materially consequential: they compose disruption as social, civic action. As scholars and practitioners of writing and rhetoric, we believe that our disciplines’ knowledge and practices are socially good because they do real, consequential work in the world. In addition to the work of designing a first year writing assessment, for example, writing and rhetoric via multimodal composition holds the capability to create avenues that produce grants on behalf of community activist organizations, decipher medical processes and produce new forms and processes to help the public access services, and even draw attention to community concerns via public art works. Again, writing and rhetoric does work in the material world.

Additionally, we point toward scholars in rhetoric and writing who have called to embrace queer, feminist, and trans approaches as transformational and interventional practices for communities and institutions given our embrace of materially consequential multimodal composition. Royster and Kirsch (2012), for instance, have called for “tectonic shifts” in feminist rhetorical studies that recast paradigms around critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalizing the point of view. In this vein, Waite (2015), drawing on Enoch (2010), has challenged the field to reconsider its critical direction toward queer activist communities as intervention points in methodology and pedagogy.

However, as Patterson and Spencer (2020) point out, the lumping together of these identity categories flattens experience and enables institutional sites to “co-opt the language of justice in order to preserve an oppressive status quo”. They critique that scholarship engaging trans experiences often reinforce either the “inclusion as visibility” trope in corporatized DEI initiatives or insist upon harmful and appropriative ideas about trans people. Similarly, we see these performative gestures illustrated in what Sara Ahmed (2012) calls “non-performatives”, where the act of naming is guised as action, but is actually inaction. From this vantage point, claiming something as queer, or feminist, or trans, ascribes the notion that institutional logics need not change. Instead, they can change as little as possible. This idea of non-performatives harkens back to Johnson (2001), who takes “quare” as an opportunity to identify “a critical gap in queer studies between theory and practice, performance and performativity”. He insists that by focusing on the intersections of queerness, we can move “beyond simply theorizing subjectivity and agency as discursively mediated to theorizing how that mediation may propose material bodies into action.” Accordingly, we believe queer and transgender research should critique institutional cistematic oppression through decolonization as a social justice primer to amplify and liberate communities–again, in material, consequential, real ways. As Mendoza (2024) establishes, recent proposed legislation policies directly impacts queer and transgender bodies, and attempts to control and govern through cistematic oppression. Meaning, actionable multimodal rhetoric and writing is necessary to achieve civic change through community led practices by and for queer and transgender people across identity markers and at their intersections

Given this historic and contemporary backdrop, we invite contributors to engage intersectional multimodal composing as actionable and disruptive practices to the material and ideological structures of heterosexist, white supremecist systems and also as community-accountability (Gumbs, 2012) for those impacted by these systems. Because we see multimodal rhetoric and writing far beyond the auspices of post-secondary writing instruction, we call for others who are doing similar work in the field to help draw attention to the utility of our work. For example, Angela Haas (2007) speaks to this in her work around wampum/beading as indigenous multimodal practices, emphasizing the importance of writing and rhetorical theories that push back against colonial erasure and make space for the preservation of particular histories, lineages, and stories. Furthermore, queer artists’ use of collage post-Stonewall and through the AIDS epidemic as meditations on identity and survival (Small, 2017). Our work is consequential and we want to highlight that in this special issue.

Accordingly, we wanted to mention glimpses of queer, feminist, and trans multimodal composing in our lives. When discussing this special issue, Nick spoke of participating in Chalk Walk, a public composing project that promoted awareness of sexual violence literally at the center of a university campus. This project forced the reader to shift their orientation to the presence of writing in the physical world. Floyd mentioned facilitating the creation of a publicly-sourced cookbook that invited community members to tacitly and implicitly support Black employees/staff/community members in association with ongoing monthly meetings that drew Black community members and their allies together at a local community college–serving as a beacon for intersectional coalition building among folks in the area. Ruby touched on the Digital Transgender Archive as an online resource that houses transgender histories and is accessible to all. Similarly, Constance’s research engagesaround queer and BIPOC-led social media content/space(s) that advocate for pleasure and rest within multiple-marginalized communities so that they might reimagine and/or further develop their relationships with said practices.

Overall, our vision for this special issue includes multimodal compositions, articles, manifestos, examples, and/or book reviews that represent the work being done in multimodal rhetoric and composition. This issue will serve to converge the work being done across disciplinary landscapes and illuminate the how of queer intersectional multimodal rhetorics. In particular, we seek contributions that mobilize intersectional contributions that specifically challenge and change the publics, institutions, and communities to labor toward concrete transformation and liberation. We believe by contributing to this collection we forward the necessary ongoing engagement with multimodal composing as forms of materially consequential scholarship and conversation.

We are excited to welcome a variety of genres and submission types for this special issue, including, but not limited to:

  • Digital Multimodal Compositions: Compose, arrange, and/or curate a digital composition, such as collages, hashtags, public arts, activist pamphlets etc., that addresses intersectional multimodal rhetorics as concrete change making.

  • Counterstories: Critically story an experience with intersectional multimodal composing as actionable and disruptive practices.

  • Artifacts & Reflections: Share an example of an intersectional multimodal composition that impacted community, coalition, or institutional change. Compose and audio record a short reflection providing context, impact, and/or lessons learned.

  • Dialogues: Reflect on intersectional multimodal composition that impacted community, coalition, or institutional change as a script or audio recording.

  • Mini-Inquiries: Select a historical artifact and examine how it engages intersectional multimodal composing as actionable and disruptive practices to the material and ideological structures of hetrosexist, white supremecist systems

Proposal Submissions

Please submit your 400 word proposals here by December 1st 2024: multimodalcomposingFall2024 if you have any questions now or throughout the process. Additionally, for anything submitted, authors should hold the rights to the work.

We are excited to receive your contributions and will be in touch soon!

Editors: Ruby Mendoza, Constance M. Haywood, Floyd Pouncil, and Nick Sanders

References:

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. In On being included. Duke University Press.

Combahee River Collective. (1977). Combahee river collective statement. In Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (pp. 304-316). The New Press.

Digital Transgender Archive. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/.

Enoch, J. (2010). Composing a rhetorical education for the twenty-first century: TakingITGlobal as pedagogical heuristic. Rhetoric Review, 29(2), 165-185.

Gumbs, A. P. (2012). We have always known: Embodying community accountability. FeministWire. https://thefeministwire.com/2012/09/we-have-always-known-embodying-community-accountability/

Haas, A. M. (2007). Wampum as hypertext: An American Indian intellectual tradition of multimedia theory and practice. Studies in American Indian Literatures, 19(4), 77-100.

Johnson, E. P. (2001). " Quare" studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly, 21(1), 1-25.

Mendoza, R. (2024). Toward a queer and (trans)formative methodology for rhetoric of health and medicine: Institutional critique. Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 7(1).

Patterson, G., & Spencer, L. G. (2020). Toward trans rhetorical agency: A critical analysis of trans topics in rhetoric and composition and communication scholarship. Peitho, 22(4).

Royster, J. J., & Kirsch, G. E. (2012). Feminist rhetorical practices: New horizons for rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. SIU Press.

Small, Z. (2016). The quintessentially queer art of collage. Hypoallergenic. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/341239/the-quintessentially-queer-art-of-collage/

Waite, S. (2015). Cultivating the scavenger: A queerer feminist future for composition and rhetoric. Peitho Journal, 18(1), 51-71.

Walton, R., Moore, K., & Jones, N. (2019). Technical communication after the social justice turn: Building coalitions for action. Routledge.

Timeline:

December 1, 2024:

Abstracts Due

December 15, 2024:

Notice of Decisions

February 15, 2025:

Drafts Due

April 15, 2025:

Feedback to Authors

June 15, 2025:

Revisions Due

August 1, 2025:

Copy edits & proofing

September 31, 2025:

Publication

Nick Sanders, Ph.D. (he/him)
Assistant Professor
Department of Writing and Rhetoric
O’Dowd Hall, Room 316

Oakland University