[csaa-forum] Fw: Call for Submissions! Self Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space

[::az::]

[x-posted]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jay Sennett" <jay at jaysennett.com>
To: <jay at jaysennett.com>
Sent: Friday, June 24, 2005 2:28 AM
Subject: Call for Submissions! Self Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities 
in Time and Space


> Please send out far and wide!  Thanks.
> ______________________________________
>
> Since the mid 1990s many great books have been published addressing 
> notions of
> masculinity, maleness, gender and feminism.    From Michael S. Kimmel and
> Michael Messner's Men's Lives to R.W. Connell's Masculinities, to Mark
> Allister's Eco Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature 
> conversations
> have begun around this thing called "masculinity."
>
> This work has continued into transmen/ftm/trannsexual male communities 
> with the
> work of Morty Diamond's From the Inside Out: Radical Gender 
> Transformation, FtM
> and Beyond and Jamison Green's Becoming a Visible Man.  DJ Katastrophe, 
> poet
> and hip hop artist Tim'm West and performance artist and activist Imani 
> Henry
> also represent progressive forces investigating, interrogating and 
> reorganizing
> understandings gender, masculinity, race, class and feminism.
>
> Self-Organizing Men:  Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space seeks to
> complicate these dialogues.  Rather than masculinities existing somewhere
> outside of us, or in words or labels, I want to collaborate on what I 
> describe
> as "masculinities in motion."  In this space, we constantly reorganize our
> understanding of our masculinities (and learn how to learn about our
> masculinities) as we interact with other humans, sentinent beings and 
> physical
> spaces in the world.
>
> Our bodies move through space and time.  How we understand and practice 
> our
> masculinities shifts through various contexts.  How do we organize our
> understanding of ourselves through space and time?  Self Organizing Men
> examines how masculinity shifts, changes, works back onto itself as we 
> interact
> in different social contexts; how these new understandings change us and 
> may
> create new forms of affinity politics.
>
> Self Organzing Men seeks complications, paradox, irony, multi/poly vocals. 
> Self
> OrganizingMen seeks submissions of critical essays and cultural critiques,
> interviews, creative non-fiction and personal narratives, fiction, poetry 
> using
> words or graphic formats.  Language must be accessible.  Submitted works 
> using
> academic jargon will be returned.
>
> Considerations (or add your own.  Email me with your ideas/queries):
> How have you arrived at your various understandings of your 
> masculinities(y)?
> How have your concepts of masculinity changed?
>
> How has your impairment supported your masculinity?  How have you 
> addressed
> stereoptypes about confinement, dependency, the role of pity as these
> feelings/modes of treatment connect with masculinity?
>
> If you partner with women, how have you come to terms with liking your 
> partners
> to act sexually submissive, particularly if you identify as male/man most 
> of
> the time?
>
> What, if any, experiences do you have of "complex hybridization" with your 
> body
> and prosthetic devices (from penises, to heart valves, to limbs).
>
> How have you interrogated the language of masculinity (broadly: he his him 
> man,
> male) and remarked and rewritten it for your own good ends?
>
> How has your revolutionizing of masculinity created more opportunities for
> affinity politics and/or oppositional consciousness?
>
> How have you mourned people, places, things, behaviors, world views, 
> bodily
> artefacts you have lost, or never had, as you assume/interrogate/live in 
> your
> masculinity?
>
> How have you celebrated people, places, things, behaviors, world views, 
> bodily
> artefacts you have gained as you live in a conscious masculinity?
>
> If you have adopted hormonal strategies to address bodily concerns, how 
> have you
> addressed and reformed stereotypes about "dependency," "medicalizations" 
> and
> "masculinity"?
>
> As your understanding of your masculinity changes, have you reorganized 
> your
> understandings of men, males, women, females? People of so-called 
> "different
> races"?  People living with impairments?  Your own "race"?
>
> How has being read as a man (whether some, most or all of your time) 
> increased,
> decreased, shifted, redirected, transformed your physical movement through 
> the
> streets and roads of your worlds whether by foot, bus, car, chair, 
> singlely or
> as part of a group?  Does this shift change depending on the context? 
> (For
> example as a white [all the time] man [some of the time] I move away from 
> all
> women moving through the world alone at night.  As a woman [some of the 
> time] I
> did not make these choices).
>
> How has your skin color impacted your movment through the world as a man?
>
> How has your sexing changed?
>
> How has your spirituality changed?
>
> What does the phrase "ironically masculine" mean for you?
>
> If you "pass" as a man or wear the guise of masculinity, how do you use 
> these
> strategies as "a decisive tool in the overthrow of heteronormativity and
> partriarchy" (Tim'm West)
>
> "I'm interested in redefining masculinity with a marker of vulnerability, 
> love,
> passion.   I'm talking about some real challenges to our need to control,
> especially our emotions, intuitions and desires." (Tim'm West)
>
> Describe how you live with paradox/irony.  For example, how I live as 
> white,
> heterosexual man in a transsexual body requires me to live with extreme
> privilege and disadvantage all in the same body.
>
> What images in the media have you romanticized and how has your 
> definition(s) of
> masculinity changed as media images have shifted and evolved over time?
>
> Contexts:
> Self Organizing Men may or may not adopt surgical and hormonal strategies 
> for
> bodily necessity; may or may not have prosthetic penises; may or may not 
> live
> as men all the time; may or may not be an xy coded organism; may or may 
> not
> find useful or descriptive terms such as transsexual, transgender, tranny 
> fag,
> gender queer, man, masculine.  Some, none or all may apply.
>
> "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, 
> even
> dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together
> because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and 
> serious
> play."  Donna Haraway
>
> Self Organizing Men moves through time and space in flesh and blood bodies
> interacting with our physical, social, psychic, communal, religious, 
> sexual
> enviornments.  Self Organizing Men creates sites of oppositional 
> consciousness
> with all sentinent beings not labels  We create survival strategies based 
> on
> affinities - like minded beings - rather than on identities - like bodied
> minds.
>
> Self Oranizing Men interrogates, reinvents, reinterprets, revolutionizes 
> "man"
> and "masculinity."  Self Organizing Men may or may not have always existed 
> in
> the margins.  Yet the interrogation of "man" and "masculinity" may shift 
> us to
> the margins, where "identity" becomes partial and conditional.
>
> Here in and from the margins, we teach about the power of the margins.
>
> Submit:
> Complex, ironic understandings of one's bodily existence will be given
> precedence over works that do not do this.  Of particular interest are 
> stories
> which critically address racialized assumptions about the supremacy of 
> gender
> which predominates in white communities or which present understandings 
> about
> living in a white, male [some of the time] body.
>
> Also of interest are pieces which discuss complex, ironic understandings 
> of
> movements in spiritual/religious communities and movements between 
> disability
> communities and TAB (temporarily able bodied) communities, up through 
> class,
> down through education, around bathrooms, political organizing and back 
> home.
>
> For other topics please submit your ideas to me at jay at jaysennett.com
>
> Word Count/Page Limits:
> Personal Narratives - 20 pages/5000 words
> Fiction - 20 pages/5000 words
> Critical Essays and Cultural Critiques - 20 pages (including bibliography) 
> 5000
> words
> Interviews - 10 pages/2500 words
> Poetry/Rhymes - No more than 3 pages per poem/rhyme and 3 poems per 
> poet/mc
> Graphic Stories - No more than three pages per submission (number of 
> panels up
> to you) Up to three pieces per artist (B and W only!)
>
> Rights:
> All rights revert to the author upon publication.
>
> Deadline: November 16, 2005
>
> Submit your stuff as either a word or pdf attachment PLUS a bio and valid 
> email
> address to
>
> jay at jaysennett.com
>
> Jay Sennett is a writer, artist, husband, activist and yoga practitioner 
> living
> in Southeast Michigan.  His understanding of his masculinity has changed 
> many,
> many times since he started his masculine journey eleven years ago.  You 
> can
> read more about him at www.jaysennett.com or www.jaysennett.typepad.com.
>
>
>
>
>