rhizomes.forthcoming
Call for Essays
Special Issue: Becoming-Girl
Deleuze articulates the notion of becoming as existing through multiplicity and alliances, a process that does not have a beginning or end, but is always in-progress; becoming is, much like girlhood, intermezzo. Deleuze claims that "Girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes." Girls' identities, interactions and relationships, particularly in cyber-contexts, are rhizomatic, complex, bordering the virtual and reality in their multiple becomings. The purpose of this special issue is to explore how girls negotiate identity and practice resistance rhizomatically. We are particularly interested in how identity negotiations operate in digital cultures, such as social networks (Facebook, MySpace), virtual realities (Second Life), and activist cultural productions by girls, such as 'zines, blogs, instant message communication, and mobile phone texting. We are interested in multiple approaches, genres, and media that consider these issues, including mediums that resist categorization. Proposals might address the following questions:
- How can girls resist fixed identity constructs through digital mediums?
- How do girls engage digital spaces to negotiate identity and the process of becoming?
- How do such spaces foster connectedness rather than isolated action(s) for girls who resist dominant cultural messages about girlhood?
- What are the everyday embodied conditions of girls' lives as constructed/experienced through new technologies and communication networks?
- How is gender and femininity experienced in the virtual medium?
- What are the possibilities of the so-called networked body or the body online?
- How might girls' rhizomatic online identity constructions and alliances challenge or disrupt (or reinforce) traditional social interactions?
Please direct submissions and inquiries to Leandra Preston at goleandra [at] gmail.com. Research involving girls directly (rather than only theoretically) must have IRB approval. Inquiries or abstracts welcomed any time; deadline for completed essays or multimodal works, August 1, 2010.
Call for Essays: Special Issue
Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities
In introducing A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari famously quipped: "The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd." And matters only get more congested as their mental geography unfolds among landscapes traversed by herds, swarms, bands, gangs, hoards, flocks, packs, masses and multiple other collective becomings. This special issue of Rhizomes invites essays and multimodal works that consider new manifestations of and approaches to collectively, community or other multiplicities—whether inspired by D & G or not.
Topics might include: intentional (or unintentional) communities; queer convergences; revolutionary congregations; posthuman aggregations; cross-species collaborations; symbiogeneses; collective intelligence; fan groups and other bolos of shared enthusiasms; flash mobs; clown armies; temporary activist assemblies; sleeper cells; conspiracies and other collective panic attacks; lodges; covens; communes; clubs; colonies; coalitions; digital swarms; tribalisms; hive minds; distributed contagions; panarchies; new ecological assemblages.
We especially encourage innovative modes of approaching these or other areas suggested by the general topic.
Inquiries and abstracts any time; completed essays by September 1, 2010 to Ellen Berry eberry@bgsu.edu or Carol Siegel siegel@agora.rdrop.com