Special Editors: Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar The viral most often is invoked in contemporary parlance to point to the intensified speed and reach of information transit, especially in relation to the internet. It also refers to indiscriminate exchanges, often linked with notions of bodily contamination, uncontainability, unwelcome transgression of border and boundaries. More positively it points to the porosity, indeed the conviviality, of what has been treated as opposed: information and matter, digital and biological, body and mind, organic and non-organic life. The concept of the viral raises questions about the assumptions informing our thinking about life on the one hand and the transmission of knowledge or circulation of data on the other -- broadly speaking, relations between epistemology and ontology. Or to put it another way, viral processes pressure our assumptions about the actual and the virtual. Fast becoming the figure and form of movement, of its speeds and trajectories, viral transmission is eliciting responses that open up pathways or free up access but also edit, stifle, gag, or repress. The event of the viral, therefore, informs discussions about biopolitical governance, securitization of hetero and homo-nationalism, policed racial, sexual and gender bodily formations, surveilled communication and social media, and censored or concentrated knowledge formations in politics, new media, art, performance, architecture, design, medicine, journalism, literature, music. In this special issue of WSQ titled Viral, we invite a rethinking of institutions of education, family, religion, health, military, media, law, welfare, insurance, financialization, with effects that are differently distributed over various populations, bodies, nations, regions, territories, and temporalities. We seek, in Viral, to inaugurate an inventive cultural criticism from scholars from a wide range of disciplines engaged with a wide range of topics. Patricia Ticiento Clough and Jasbir K. Puar, the guest editors of this special issue of WSQ on Viral, welcome academic papers from a variety of disciplinary approaches including theory, empirical research, literary and cultural studies, biology, physics, geography, design as well as creative prose, poetry, artwork, memoir and biography. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to: Biosphere Digital Environments Hacking Social networking Parasitic architecture Clouding Dirt Aesthetic Capitalism Twitter Politics Contagion Transmissions and exchanges Porous matter Flux and Flow Pollution Communication Leaks Biomedia Genetics Infectious ideas Quantum Computing Social movements Migration and Immigration Financial markets Electronic Literature Robotics Technical Evolution Nanotechnologies Memes Interspeciality If submitting academic work, please send articles by March 15, 2011 to the guest editors, Patricia Ticiento Clough and Jasbir K. Puar at WSQViralIssue@gmail.com . Submission should not exceed 20 double spaced, 12 point font pages. Full submission guidelines may be found at: http://www.feministpress.org/wsq/submission-guidelines. Articles must conform to WSQ guidelines in order to be considered for submission. Poetry submissions: Please review previous issues of *WSQ* to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting poems. Please note that poetry submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the poetry editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please paste poetry submissions into the body of the e-mail along with all contact information. Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor, Kathleen Ossip, at WSQpoetry@gmail.com by March 15, 2011. Prose submissions: Please review previous issues of *WSQ* to see what type of submissions we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose submissions may be held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact information in the body of the e-mail. Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to *WSQ*'s fiction/nonfiction editor, Jocelyn Lieu, at WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com by March 15, 2011. Art submissions should be sent to the guest editors, Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar at WSQViralIssue@gmail.com by March 15, 2011. After art is reviewed and accepted, accepted art must be sent to the journal's managing editor on a CD that includes all artwork of 300 DPI or greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger. These files should be saved as individual JPEGS or TIFFS. **** Zo� Meleo-Erwin, MA, PhD Candidate Editorial Assistant WSQ at the Feminist Press 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 212.817.7926 www.feministpress.org/wsq
