The Social and Health Sciences (SaHS) journal invites proposals for a special issue entitled Gender, Sexualities and Place: (Re)imagining and (Re)making Urban Spaces with guest editors Tamara Shefer and Alan Mabin. This special issue of SaHS will focus on ways in which cities may, or may not, be realising the promise of inclusion, safety, health and flourishing for all across multiple and fluid genders and sexualities and in pursuit of local and global intersectional sexual and gender justice.  This includes a focus on ways in which existing gender and sexual inequalities and violence against women, non-binary people, non-heteronormative sexual performance and other marginal subjectivities and practices may be reproduced or challenged through particular architectural and space arrangements in diverse urban settings.

The special issue is particularly interested to interrogate the complex intersections between contemporary urban spaces and gender and sexual practices and desires and shifts in city lives and forms arising from gendered and sexual practices, and vice versa. How particular cityscapes and urban geographies may be implicated in challenging sexual and gender marginality and injustice as intersecting with other subjugated positions, and/or reinstating such injustices is particularly significant for the larger project of flourishing cities.

We will further examine how shifting global ideas and global and local practices in relation to gender and sexuality and LGBTQI+ resistances and activism may be contributing to global urban justice. Notably, much of the current feminist and queer scholarship on cities is located in global Northern locations with less global emphasis on more marginal geopolitical spaces. This special issue particularly foregrounds issues of inclusion, belonging, safety and wellbeing and how cities are spaces that may undermine or bolster these within the particular situatedness of South Africa, Africa, and other global Southern contexts.

Submissions may take any of the following forms:

• Short Communications: These are short commentaries on work that speaks to the special issue theme. Short communications should not exceed 2500 words, excluding references.
• Original Contributions: Full scientific manuscripts based on empirical work in the field. These should not exceed 6 000 words in length, excluding the title, abstract, references, figures and tables.
• Critical Literature Reviews: Critical literature reviews should provide an overview and analysis of an existing field. Submissions in this category should not exceed 6 000 words in total.
• Creative Pieces: These can range in medium and format, however they must speak to the special issue theme in some way. If written, they should not exceed 2500 words.

We invite articles sharing global Southern, African, and international-based empirical research and/or theorising of issues such as:

• Sexuality and global citizenship and mobilities and migration
• Practices of gendered and sexual care in transnational city contexts
• Global commercial sexualities and sex tourism
• How rural and cyber geographies are imbricated in widened concepts of the urban in relation to sexual and gender justice
• Sexed and gendered transactional relationships across global and local urban spaces
• Cities as spaces for (un)safety, (un)belonging and (non)well-being for women, non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities and practices, and other marginalities
• Cities as spaces for activism, resistance and transgression in the struggles against intersectional gender and sexual inequality and injustice

Proposals should be addressed to the Guest Editors and sent to sahs@unisa.ac.za by 30 June 2022.

Upon acceptance, complete manuscripts will be submitted to the editors by 30 September 2022.

Format for proposals

Proposals should be no more than two pages. Each proposal should include:

• The title of the submission
• The author(s) name(s) and their institutional affiliation(s)
• The corresponding author
• A brief summary of the proposed article
• An outline of the data/methods of the article (if necessary)
• A rationale for how the proposed article speaks to the Special Issue theme
• The contribution that the article will make

Click here for the PDF version of the Call for Proposals.