Call for Submissions: BISEXUALITIES and SPIRITUALITIES

[LifeLube found this tasty item here]

Over the last decade much has been written about the spirituality of lesbian- and gay-identified persons but not as much about people drawn to more than one gender. As a corpus of work, those writings include diverse voices and experiences across ethnicities, genders, and spiritual/religious traditions. We seek to further the discourse on the relationship between sexuality and spirituality in this special issue of the "Journal of Bisexuality".

We invite the submission of proposals or completed first drafts that explore and examine bisexualities practiced within, alongside, and in response to spiritualities and vice versa. In this context, spirituality should be understood to be inclusive of religious practice or affiliation but also included in this understanding are ways of life that are rooted in wisdom traditions that are not defined by/as religion. We seek thoughtful, critical, and theoretically grounded work in any form including empirical research articles, creative non-fiction, theoretical essays, narrative inquiry, auto/ethnographies, poetry, short stories, histories, literary criticism, cultural studies, etc., particularly those which foreground intersections, borderlands, or complications.

Possible topics/questions might be:

Bisexuality and the spiritual tradition(s) one is born into and/or chooses for oneself

What are the ways in which certain philosophies and spiritual practices create liberatory/oppressive space for the expression of bisexuality?

Androgyny and bisexuality in deities, cosmologies, and cosmogonies

What does effective spiritual/pastoral counseling for bisexuals look like?

The experiences of bisexual clergy and spiritual workers, e.g., rabbis, ministers, imams, shamans, priestesses, priests, nuns, etc.

How do bisexualities make it possible for bisexual epistemologies to shape religious/spiritual practices?

Sexual fluidities and spiritual/religious fluidities

What roles have missionaries, colonialism, and modernity played in the development of bisexualities and spiritualities in the Non-Western/Global South parts of the world?

Bisexualities and Earth-based or Goddess-based spiritual systems and religions

How can bisexuality and polyamory be forms of spiritual practice?

Bisexuality and Deep Ecology/EcoTheology/Ecofeminism/Ecopsychology

SCHEDULE
• Proposals Are Due by February 15th 2009
• Acceptance of proposals will be made by March 1st 2009
• Full drafts of accepted work are due by June 1st 2009


Please send queries to the Special Issue Co-editors:

Dr. Loraine Hutchins email: lorainehutchins @ starpower. net
Adjunct Professor, LGBT Studies Towson University
Co-editor Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, Co-founder BiNet USA; et. al.

Dr. Aih Djehuti Herukhuti email: heru @ blackfunk . org
Adjunct Professor, Individualized Studies/Socially Responsible Business & Sustainable Communities Goddard College
Founder Black Funk: The Center for Culture, Sexuality and Spirituality; et. al.
Please Note: In this post for historical reasons the terms "bisexual" & "bisexuality" are used to denote all those peoples and sexualities that inhabit the space between totally straight and totally gay/lesbian somewhere (i.e., bisexual, bi-curious, omnisexual, pansexual, questioning, queer, fluid, “I don’t label myself,” heteroflexible, homoflexible, two-spirit, gatekeeper, bodeme, et. al.) and all men, women, genderqueer, transgender and not-quite-sure people, as well as people who fall on different places along the monogamous to polyamorous dimension. The Co-editors have most strongly expressed that they would welcome submissions from people who self-define in any (or several) of these ways.

Yes, please X-post this