Call for Papers

WSQ: Whore Theory  

Spring 2028

Deadline: February 1, 2027  

Guest Editors:

Ayanna Dozier, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Kassandra Sparks, Brown University

We all suffer the consequences of whorephobia. Following the 2018 passing of SESTA/FOSTA (the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Fight Online Sex Traffickers Act) in the U.S.—bills allegedly intended to curb sex trafficking that have instead forced all those who sell sex underground—anyone who is profiled as sexual online is surveilled, policed, and censored. As with in-person policing, this affects not only those transacting sex but also those profiled as whores, which disproportionately includes trans, queer, and racialized bodies. Increased digital surveillance has coincided with the rise of transphobia, with Project 2025 designating “transgender ideology” as a form of pornography and violence against children. Presciently, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s “Sex in Public” demonstrated how the state weaponizes the family to enforce heterosexual policy as normal, with race, queerness, and transness positioned as its enemies. And whores—who are often trans, racialized, and queer—are some of the most targeted enemies of the normal.

We recognize that neither respectability nor assimilation into work culture will protect us; thus we are mobilizing this issue around the stigmatization of the whore. As Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter historicize in Sex Wars, feminist scholarship on transactional sex has either characterized it as excessively violent and violating or has sought to destigmatize it by deploying frameworks of labor. However, the respectability of “sex work” has further marginalized the most stigmatized whores—the incarcerated, undocumented, and those who cannot or will not assimilate into normalization. As such, theorists with experience in transactional sex like Gabriela Leite and Pluma Sumaq have leveraged their insight into discursive abjection to refuse the term “sex worker.” Thus, our use of the term “whore” follows bell hooks’s theory of a “writing with a liberatory voice,” which uses the site of oppressive language as a generative space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies to emerge.

Whores create and exist upon what philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls the demonic grounds: that is, the space of abjection where lives condemned to live without the right to a life exist. Wynter’s work is essential to our study on whorephobia for it opens a pedagogical and theoretical path to explore how whore theory and cultural production function as sites of political imagination of resistance, knowledge, and utopia. This special issue casts our attention to the epistemological possibilities engendered through resisting respectability and troubling the racial–sexual orders that organize the social.

We seek contributions from authors with experience in transactional sex and those closely allied with it through their scholarship, artwork, political outreach, or activism. We especially seek contributions that engage the emerging scholarship of whore theory by theorists, artists, and activists outside the academy—such as Melissa Gira Grant, Cecilia Gentili, Carol Leigh, and the Red Canary Song collective—and those working within the academy—such as Heather Berg, Angela Jones, Kamala Kempadoo, Viviane Namaste, Juana María Rodríguez, and Elena Shih. Building on this scholarship, we are interested in contributions that focus on whore theorizing and whores’ deviant and abject practices of worldmaking.

Themes that this volume is interested in addressing include:

• Explicit sex in Black, feminist, queer, trans, and disability studies
• “Sex worker” art and creative practices 
• The relationship between transness, queerness, and transactional sex
• Marginality, criminality, stigmatization, and the profiling of racial/sexual deviance
• Racial–sexual histories of imperialism, homonationalism, and colonialism
• Surveillance culture and surveillance technologies
• Migration, borders, and citizenship
• Prison, work, and family abolitionism
• The “rescue industry,” global humanitarianism, and critical trafficking studies
• Non-Anglophone sex worker writing in translation and dialogues from the Global South

Possible questions that submissions could answer include:

• What does the cultural production by/around the whore demonstrate about how they shape political imagination?
• How are whores building coalitions across labor, housing, climate justice, and migration?  
• What are the historical, cultural, and political figurings of “the prostitute” and “the whore”? And how does this vary globally?
• How does the status of the whore illuminate classifications around otherness, disreputability, and the lumpen?
• What happens when we address how whiteness is centered in “sex work” discourse? And how might centering nonwhite histories of the whore reveal something else? 

WSQ accepts submissions in all printable media, including academic articles, memoir, manifesto, literary fiction or other prose, poetry, and visual art. Especially encouraged to submit are scholars, artists, creative writers, and activists who themselves experience various forms of marginalization within nation states in the Global North and Global South. Please note that WSQ peer-reviews are not performed by AI and WSQ will not accept AI-generated content.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Deadline: February 1, 2027 

Scholarly articles should be submitted to WSQ.submittable.com. Upload one Word document that includes the anonymized, complete article. Directly in Submittable, not as an attachment, please write a cover page that includes the article title, abstract, keywords, and a short author bio. Remove all identifying authorial information from the file uploaded to Submittable. Scholarly submissions must not exceed 6,000 words (including un-embedded notes and works cited) and must comply with formatting guidelines at feministpress.org/submission-guidelines. For questions, email the guest issue managing editors at WSQEditorial@gmail.com.

Artistic works (whose content relates clearly to the issue theme) such as creative prose (fiction, essay, memoir, and translation submissions between 2,000 and 2,500 words), poetry (3 poems maximum per submitter), and other forms of visual or documentation of performative artistry should be submitted to WSQ.submittable.com. Note that creative submissions may be held for six months or longer. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the editors are notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. For visual submissions please note that WSQ can only print in black and white. Visual artists are also asked to submit a document containing captions for all works (including title, date, and materials), an artist’s statement and a short bio, each 100 words or less. For questions, email the guest issue editors at WSQEditorial@gmail.com.

For works that are difficult to categorize, including those that fall between academic articles and personal narratives or creative essays, please choose the hybrid works option on Submittable, and explain the nature of the work in your cover page. Please especially indicate whether the work requires academic peer review.

All submitters please note that if your submission contains images (including images embedded into a larger article or essay) they must be included as separate attachments of 300dpi or more. Please also include a short bio and current email address [all submitters, directly onto the Submittable form, not as an attachment] as well as an artist’s statement and image caption [visual artists] or an abstract and keywords [academic submissions]. 

ABOUT WSQ: Since 1972, WSQ has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender, and sexuality. Its peer-reviewed interdisciplinary thematic issues focus on such topics as Black Love, Solidão, Asian Diasporas, Protest, Beauty, Precarious Work, At Sea, Solidarity, Queer Methods, Activisms, The Global and the Intimate, Trans-, The Sexual Body, and Mother, combining legal, queer, cultural, technological, and historical work to present the most exciting new scholarship, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and visual arts on ideas that engage popular and academic readers alike. WSQ is edited by Christine Choi (Hostos Community College, CUNY) and Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla (Hostos Community College, CUNY), and published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Visit feministpress.org/wsq.