#relevant cfps

“a/b: Auto/Biography Studies seeks original articles for a special issue on “Embodiment” to be published as volume 33.2. Embodied lives, in all their corporeal, social, sensory, affective, political, economic, and technological dimensions, are the primary grounds for auto/biographical production. Building on the groundbreaking feminist work of the 1980s and 90s that brought embodied subjectivity to the fore, research in the field of life writing continues to generate powerful insights into the constitution, inscription, chronicling, narrativization, and performance of multiple embodiments, including an expansive and nuanced engagement with illness, disability, gender, grief, and trauma. Open to a wide variety of critical work on embodiment and auto/biography from a range of humanities and social science inter/disciplines, this special issue highlights two emergent areas demanding attention: 1) the biopolitics and necropolitics of race and disability, considered dialectically together with resistant acts, practices, and movements; and 2) the intensified, shifting relationships among auto/biography, embodiment, and mediation in the era of digital communication. Accordingly, essays could consider:

Why and how have certain auto/biographical modes that pertain to or index embodiment emerged as especially pervasive and popular at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What are the genealogies of these evolving forms, and what are their innovations, affordances, and dilemmas? Examples might include: medical micronarratives; photojournalism; profiles; ecological memoirs; graphic non-fiction; wearable technology; data tracking and the “quantified self”; social media; selfies and self-portraiture; collective biography; performance and/or installation art; digital design and play.

How does auto/biographical cultural production critique the ways that bodies are inscribed, produced, circulated, de/valued, targeted, exploited, and/or exalted under capitalist and settler-colonialist structures? Under what conditions do bodies come to testify or to stand in opposition to occupation, war, displacement, austerity, eugenics, hunger, thirst, pain, incarceration, and/or surveillance? What are the material, infrastructural, generic, and discursive conditions of, and obstacles to, such testimony? In what ways might auto/biography challenge presumptions of limitation or damage regarding particular subjects and/or communities?

How and why are auto/biographical modes deployed to think through “transmission” and “intercorporeality,” including, for instance, relations of toxicity, injury, contagion, communicability, inheritance, and/or futurity?

What kinds of embodied relationalities, or kinships, are being imagined and mobilized in auto/biographical projects, and according to what impetuses?

What is the role of the “lived” everyday—the mundane, the chronic, the atmospheric, the textured, the interior, and/or the surface—in life narratives, images, practices, and/or archives of embodiment?

Why and how might auto/biography scholarship engage, recontextualize, and/or revise influential theoretical concepts of “the body,” i.e. from phenomenology, assemblage theory, feminist intersectionality, new materialism, affect studies, visual culture studies, digital studies, post-structuralism, posthumanism, biopolitics, and/or trauma theory?

What critical framings, methods, and pedagogies are necessitated by bodies on the move, by bodies in conflict zones and under occupation, by bodies crossing or inhabiting borders, or by bodies in revolt or refusal?

What is the salience of theorizing embodied narratives and self-inscriptions in terms of im/material labour or precarious labour?

If embodiment is constituted (perhaps now more than ever) through mediation and remediation, then what critical methods and questions do repeated, iconic embodied images, tropes, and narratives require?