Special Editors: Ann Burlein & Jackie Orr

This issue of WSQ attempts to intervene in the present moment by conjuring

the power and seductions of enchantment. How to find and create places of

allure when things seem impossible, when the world seems impassable, when

survival becomes a question for too many? What possibilities might be needed to imagine a world in which one could flourish? And what might be the serious and playful role of enchantments in materializing that world? In

queer and feminist kinship with multiple sites of enchanted practice that

already exist both inside and outside the university, we seek to intensify

and proliferate transformative forms of enchantment that devise escape

routes that are not escapist.

Yet enchantment is a contested strategy, whose ambivalence requires

exploration and investigation. Enchantment is regularly used by the state

and various civil, disciplinary, and capitalist agencies, from cultures of

resistance to corporations to professors. In light of recent theorizations

of “occult economies,” “the magic of the state,” “queer temporalities,” and

“the enchantment of everyday life,” we invite post-disciplinary re-thinkings

that move beyond social logics and political rationalities toward the magic

allurements of power that captivate and capture. How to negotiate these

ambivalent registers so as to enchant a different series of connections, a

different scene of collective and individual possibilities?

One animating ambition of this issue is to help redefine and expand critical

notions of what 19th century Anglo European societies came to call ‘the

occult.’ Without an understanding of diverse historical sedimentations of

“occult forces,” it is difficult to trace what is happening with religion,

race, sexuality, politics, gender, militarisms, and commodity cultures at

this particular moment in time. Deeper historical and contemporary accounts

of the charmed vitality of ‘the occult’ in so many realms of imaginal

culture provide a crucial contribution to the expanded and revised

conceptions of materialism demanded by the politics of this time.

   – Collective effervescence, contagious revolutions

   – Enchanted icons (children, animals, the dark, secrets, divas, mermaids,

   saints, dungeons, hybrids, islands)

   – Haunting and ghostly matters

   – Allure of utopias and utopian thought

   – Racialization of figures and spaces of magic

   – Mysticisms–historical and contemporary, everyday and ecstatic,

   affective and political

   – Seductions of capital (speculative finance, occult ontologies of value)

   – The sacred and its popular re-purposings

   – Erotics of power; powers of the erotic

   – State ‘magic’ (disappearances, torture, terror, rendition, public

   secrets)

   – Militant politics of play

   – Pagan religiosities, new age spiritualities, new age Orientalisms

   – Contemporary psychoanalytics of fantasy and the imaginary

   – Queer practices of be/longings and bondings

   – Politics of the dead and of death

   – Science fiction, urban fantasy

   – Imperialism, colonization, cultural appropriations and ‘enchantment’

   – Politics and aesthetics of evil

   – ‘When Things Speak’ (speculative realisms, agential realisms, actor

   network theory and other animist assemblages)

   – Yoga, meditation, bodywork, alternative healing practices

   – Popular cultures of secular enchantment* *

   – Drugs and the pharmacologics of ecstasy (legal and non-legal)

   – Uncanny technologies of vision and embodiment (puppets, avatars,

   digital animation)

If submitting academic work, please send articles by October 1, 2011 to the

guest editors, Ann Burlein and Jackie Orr at WSQEnchantmentIssue@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.

“Classic Revisited” submissions: Two of Audre Lorde’s influential essays,

“Poetry is Not a Luxury” (1978), and “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as

Power” (1981) will be the classic texts we revisit for this special issue.

Please send a short commentary (1-2,000 words) on how you continue to read,

teach, re-think, and re-enchant these essays to the guest editors, Ann

Burlein and Jackie Orr, at WSQEnchantmentIssue@gmail.com by October 1, 2011.

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 October 1, 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 WSQpoetry@gmail.com by October 1, 2011.

Art submissions should be sent to *WSQ*‘s art editor, Margot Bouman, at

WSQArt@gmail.com, by October 1, 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.