Feminist Review seeks submissions for a Special Issue on Dystopias and Utopias. In choosing to speak to, and about, utopias and dystopias the Collective welcomes contributions that analyse radical re-imagining within the divergent accounts of feminist theories. This may be drawn from narratives of alternative worlds and articulated via human and non-human subjectivity found in: feminist science fiction, cultural studies, international relations, literary, legal, postcolonial, trans*, queer, critical race theories or beyond.

   Inspired by feminist science fiction – from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy – feminist fantasy and feminist utopian fiction, as well as speculative fantasy and science fiction more broadly, we encourage submissions that are playful, creative and that seek to dismantle known worlds, be they material or imagined. Feminist scholarship from Haraway to Braidotti re-imagines the metaphors and representations of humanity that contemporary political and philosophical approaches are often ground within and, in response, this call specifically invites scholarship engaging an analysis of power and inequalities in complexly rendered worlds and embodied subjectivities. The call seeks scholarship that reworks the boundaries of feminist thinking and explores the complex creativity of feminist methodologies. If speculative fiction is not about the future per se, but rather a significant distortion of the present, and thus offers both a critique of the status quo and radical alternatives, a study of feminist science fiction offers a unique means of contemplating and responding to contemporary and situated realities, subjectivities, material effects and political arrangements. In bringing feminist science fiction and the utopias/dystopias we imagine into our academic and (inter)disciplinary conversations/landscapes/worlds the editors actively seek to explore spaces beyond the human, beyond global / transnationalism /universalisms and beyond the physical and/or metaphysical.

Submissions might explore, but would not be limited to:

• International politics and speculative fiction
• Feminist Science Fiction
• Post-humanisms, agendered and de-gendered subjectivities
• Alternative approaches to global law and governance
• Representations of disruptive masculinities and femininities
• Feminine and female power
• Cyberfiction and virtual dystopias
• Narrative critique
• Gendered violence, conflict and post-conflict, including Lethal Automated Weapon Systems

If you would like to discuss your ideas for this issue please contact Feminist Review at feminist-review@londonmet.ac.uk or the editors gh21@soas.ac.uk / hkinsella@wisc.edu

   Full articles or Open Space pieces in Feminist Review format to be submitted by May 15th 2016.

   Manuscripts should be submitted through Feminist Review’s online submission system and in FR house style.

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