CFP: Queer Theoretical Essays on Revising the Victorian Family

Queer Relations:  Revising the Victorian Family (proposal deadline: 1 April. 2013)

Dr Duc Dau, University of Western Australia and Dr Shale Preston, Macquarie University

contact email: duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and shale.preston@mq.edu.au

We invite contributions for an upcoming volume of essays which examine the Victorian family through a queer lens. 

The Victorian family can be taken to mean the nineteenth-century nuclear or extended family, or the family of texts associated with the Victorian period (e.g. nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts).  We are looking for exciting interrogations into the discourse of the Victorian family.  These interrogations can focus on untraditional familial arrangements, non-normative relationships, polyamorous attachments, queer families in disparate communities/locations (e.g. circuses, theaters, brothels, homes for fallen women, monasteries, convents, hospitals, schools, ships, military units, thieving fraternities), homosexual/homosocial utopias, erotic fantasy worlds (e.g. fairy, goblin), etc. 

Alternatively, the interrogations can examine queer 20^th and 21^st century texts/domains/mediums that allude to or mash-up the Victorian family of texts (canonical or otherwise) or seek to revise traditional notions of the Victorian family.  Focus areas can include but are not limited to the novel, poetry, film, television, theater, auto/biography, periodicals, the internet, steampunk etc.

Please send 300 word proposals and a two-page CV to the editors Dr Duc Dau at duc.dau@uwa.edu.au and Dr Shale Preston at shale.preston@mq.edu.au by 1 April 2013.

Completed chapters of 6,000 - 8,000 words will be due by 1 February 2014.