Update: Queering the Fantastic
Edited by Robin Anne Reid and Jes Battis
New deadline for essays on specified topics (listed below)
We have received a number of excellent proposals for this volume but would now like to solicit proposals for essays to fill gaps in the collection.
We need essays on children’s/ya fantasy, fanfiction, graphic novels, horror, and cinema, as well as theoretical pieces on the fantastic itself as a queer medium.
We are seeking scholarly essays (20 pgs max) that explore the links between the fantastic and queer studies.
Email abstracts (1000 word max plus Working Bibliography) to:
Professor Robin Anne Reid (Robin_Reid_AT_tamu-commerce.edu) AND Professor Jes Battis (jbattis_AT_gmail.com). Please include a recent CV and short bio.
Deadline for abstracts is December 15, 2007.
Contributors will be notified within a week.
This volume will address all the fantastic in all media, focusing particularly on queer uses, adaptations, and reformulations. Since its definition as “a hesitation between genres” by Tzvetan Todorov in the 1970s, the fantastic has often been compared to Freud’s ‘uncanny,’ or to the marvelous realms of the picaresque, the fairy-tale, and the medieval romance. But the fantastic is not precisely any of these things, and, with this volume, we are interested in linking it to the ambivalent and charged position of ‘queer’ as a sexuality, a mode of life, a genre of literature, and even a type of impossibility.
Robin Anne Reid is currently professor of creative writing and critical theory at Texas A&M University-Commerce. She has authored two books for Greenwood’s Critical Companions Series (on Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury), and is currently editing an encyclopedia on women in science fiction and fantasy, also for Greenwood. She has published essays on feminist science fiction, queer approaches to fan studies, and Peter Jackson’s film of Tolkien’s novel. Her poetry has been published in a variety of small magazines and online.
Jes Battis is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the City University of New York in Manhattan, and teaches as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at CUNY-Hunter College. He has authored two scholarly books on fantasy and media: Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction, (Palgrave, 2007) and >am>Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (McFarland, 2005). He also has a fantasy novel, Night Child, forthcoming from Penguin USA/Ace in spring of 2008.