The seventh issue of Errant Journal aims to interrogate the role of the body in strategies of resistance from below. Taking Palestine as a starting point, the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and other colonial powers and the people’s continued struggle for liberation inform our thinking and praxis. From this political standpoint, we understand that resistance from below will never be considered legitimate by the system in place, specifically because it fights said system.1 In a world where the only forms of accepted and acceptable violence (army, police…) are state-led and state-condoned, any form of opposition to this order is automatically vilified and criminalised. In this issue, we want to explore the ways in which bodies – that are sexualised, criminalised, racialised, crip – have been able to divert and subvert in order to fight back.
For this issue, Errant Journal has invited Ghiwa Sayegh, founding editor of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research based in Beirut and Paris, as guest editor to lead the conceptual framework and relocate Errant’s editorial centre.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The role of the body in struggles for liberation, from all geographies and histories, including but not limited to Palestine
- Theorising the muscle as the vital force of resistance (in the Fanonian sense) from a decolonial, anti-capitalist standpoint2
- Sick or crip strategies of resistance3
- How the individual body in resistance becomes part of a collective body
- (Feminist and/or anarchist) organised self-defence groups and movements
- Liberating tools that are used by the system to modify play with one’s body against the normative order
- Performances and rituals as forms of alternative embodied opposition
- Intimate spaces of resistance
Your proposal:
Because it is our aim to give form to the idea of a pluriversal world, we resolutely reject the idea of a universal way of knowing emanating from a neutral, general and/or anonymous perspective. Instead, we look for contributions that are concretely situated, personal, fragmented, specific, etc. and from all possible backgrounds, disciplines and/or embodied knowledges. We also look for and welcome contributions that come from a different epistemological knowledge or language that the editors of Errant do not understand. Additionally, we welcome all possible forms that can be conveyed in the format of a publication: academic writing, fiction, poetry, images and experimental forms we have not thought of ourselves yet.
Submission:
Proposals should not exceed 300 words, accompanied by one piece of previously published material and a short bio. You may also propose an existing text, artwork or other material, if so please specify. The deadline for proposals is 1 April 2024.
After selection, the deadline for contributions is 7 July 2024. We aim to publish this issue in October 2024.
Proposals or questions about this open call can be sent to: info@errantjournal.org.
We aim for max. 3-4,000 words for an essay or short story, max. 2 or 3 pages for a poem, and max. 10 pages for a visual contribution. Amount of words/pages is open for discussion and depends on the contribution.
Contributors publishing new material especially created for this issue of Errant receive a fee of € 400,- incl. VAT per contribution upon acceptance and publication.
References:
- Dorlin, Elsa. Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, translated from the French by Kieran Aarons. Verso Books, 2022. ↩︎
- As inspired by: Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated from the French by Constance Farrington. Penguin Books, 1961 ↩︎
- See for instance: Hedva, Johanna. ‘Sick Woman Theory,’ 2022 <https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/>. Originally published in Mask Magazine (Jan. 2016). ↩︎