Queer Intersections: Revisiting online media -calls for chapters

Call for Chapters (edited book)

Queer Intersections: Revisiting online media and queer sexualities
Edited by Kate O'Riordan and David J Philips

Introduction
This edited collection will bring together crucial examinations of the
intersecting fields of sexuality and the internet, and will provide an
overarching contextualisation and consolidation of cyber/queer practices and
theories.

In the early to mid-1990s, the repercussions of queer theory were being engaged
across academic feminism and lesbian and gay studies. At the same time, the
internet was emerging as a key structuring device for academic networks, and as
an important area of study. With the advent of the commercial web in 1994 the
internet intersected with popular culture, and key questions of modernity -
identity, community, governance, time and space - intersected with the web as
it unfolded across multiple social domains. Whilst the mid-1990s wasn't the
beginning of internet research, cybercultural studies, or queer, it was a
period of sustained attention and excitement in relation to identity and the
web. Since then, there has been intense collision and collaboration between
queer theory and cyberculture, as the imagined ideal queer subject and the
imagined ideal cybersubject came to occupy the same ground.

Moving on from and challenging this formulation, the book aims both to document
queer internet practices and to limn their theoretical implications at the
intersection of the fields of queer, technology, and communication studies.
Drawing on interviews with central actors, analyses of internet activity,
syntheses of critical debates, and both new and historical research, the
collection will provide both an overview and an in depth analysis of these
engagements.

We invite papers for consideration that complement either of the proposed
sections of the book:

Section 1 will provide theoretical contextualisations, histories and political
economies of queer/communication technology intersections.

Section 2 will showcase new and innovative work on queer sexuality and the
internet that offers new insight, whilst also showing evidence of a rigorous
connection to historical and theoretical context.

Suggested topics and themes include (but are not limited to):