Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Demeter Press is seeking submissions for the edited collection
Chasing Rainbows:  Exploring Gender Fluid Parenting Practices
Editors: Fiona Green, May Friedman

Deadline for Abstracts:         March 15, 2012
Deadline for acceptances:       May 15, 2012
Deadline for completed papers:  February 15, 2013
Publication Date:               Early 2014

Feminist parenting creates unique challenges.  Mothers may struggle with
shifts in their own subjectivity and the peculiar conjoinment of parenthood.
As women experience the unique powerlessness of motherhood, they also hold
the uncomfortable power of acting as agents of socialization and social
control over their children.  Fathers may feel the desire for feminist
parenting while experiencing a backlash and a lack of support, while some
parents may attempt to resist the binaries of mothering and fathering in
their feminist parenting journey.

Feminist parents may attempt to resist gender binaries; they may submit to
them while attempting to foster critical dialogue; they may struggle with
the display of their own femininity and masculinity or, for some, its
perceived lack. For some parents a dialogue about gender normativity may be
inspired by gender-diverse behavior on the part of their own children, while
others may parent children who happily submit to the mainstream and query
the need for gender questioning. Chasing Rainbows:  Exploring Gender Fluid
Parenting Practices attempts to cast a lens on the messy and convoluted ways
that feminist parents approach parenting their children in gender aware and
gender fluid ways.  The collection aims to draw together scholars, activists
and community members to open a conversation about the challenges of
exploring and maintaining an awareness of gender while parenting in a highly
gender normative world.

Because gender is expressed and performed differently in various places and
spaces, and across different ages, this collection welcomes submissions from
feminist parents and from the widest range of experiences.
Possible approaches may include (but are not limited to):
●   Cross-cultural, historical, transnational, comparative and
interdisciplinary modes of inquiry and analysis
●   Gender fluid parenting within and beyond cisgendered mother and father
parenting roles
●   The challenges and gifts of affective/psychic/embodied transformations
of gender fluid parenting
●   Media representations and spectacles of gender fluid/diverse/variant
families
●   Alternative visual and artistic depictions of gender variant
socialization in/of family life
●   Racialization of gender variant parenting/family discourses
●   Gender diverse self-help parenting texts
●   Community based gender variant/diverse/fluid family activism and organizing
●   Commodification of gender fluid and gender variant families
●   Practical and theoretical ways of complicating and shaping fluid gender
expression
●   Broad social and historical forces that impact what can be done and said
in the name of gender diverse families

Please send a 250 word abstract and a 50 word bio noting citizenship to
Fiona Green (f.green@uwinnipeg.ca) University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Ave.,
Winnipeg, MB. R3B 2E9 AND May Friedman (may.friendman@ryerson.ca) Ryerson
University, 350 Victoria St. Toronto, ON M5B 2K3.
Deadline for abstracts is March 15, 2012.

Deadline for acceptances is May 15, 2012. Accepted papers not exceeding 15
pages (3750 words) will be due February, 15, 2013 and should be formatted
according to MLA guidelines. The book is to have 50% Canadian content, so
Canadian contributors are especially encouraged to submit. Publication date
early 2014.

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