Popular Culture Studies Journal Special Issue: Queering Blackness: Non-Binary Black Representations in Post-Obama Popular Cultures

Call For Additional Papers

Following the symposium on November 17, 2022 in Paris 8 University, this special issue welcomes papers about the representations of black identities that have challenged binaries and their intersectional expansions within African American popular cultures since 2008 in music, images, words, graphics, and games, as well as interviews of black non-binary culture makers in direct connection with submitted articles. 

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The so-called post-racial era supposedly heralded by the election of the first black U.S. president quickly became marked by the Black Lives Matter movement launched in 2013, only to roll into the Trump era and through a highly unequal pandemic. What does it mean that a non-white body, falsely accused of being born abroad, who shares his middle name with the 1990s foreign public enemy, rules from the whitest of houses? What influence has Obama’s position had when, along with his African American heteronormative family, he had to hand the keys over to his greatest critic? Flanked by his Slovenian-born third wife, Trump was a defender of America’s nostalgia for the “good old times,” and the proud patriarch of multiple families. Are the cards of WASP cisgender heteronormativity now randomly positioned in a house whose legitimacy no more depends on mandatory normative criteria? Or, on the contrary, do they retain their power as trump cards of a game on constant replay? While rejecting binaries is not new to the 21^st century, and although people of African descent have always queered culture, this issue wishes to explore how popular cultures reflect black non-binary paradigms and offer new models without necessarily countering well-established stereotypes, sometimes underlined by their very disavowal.

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To submit an article, please send an abstract of no more than 300 words (+Title, corpus, sources & possible interviews and degree of contact) and short bio (100 words) to the guest editor, Yannick BLEC and Anne CREMIEUX, at the following address: queerblackness@sciencesconf.org  

Timeline For Publication

Proposals: February 1, 2023

A response will follow by February 15 (early proposals will receive early responses)

First draft of articles due: June 10.

All authors of accepted papers are then welcome to present it, either in person or online, on June 16 in Montpellier, France.

The Popular Culture Studies Journal is an open-access academic, peer-reviewed, refereed journal for scholars, academics, and students from the many disciplines that study popular culture, as well as the fans and general public with an interest in popular culture texts, practices, and industries.  The journal serves the MPCA/ACA membership, as well as scholars globally who recognize and support its mission based on expanding the way we view popular culture as a fundamental component within the contemporary world.