Call for Papers — JULY 30, 2025
PORTALS

WSQ, fall 2026

Issue Editors
DESIREÉ R. MELONAS, University of California, Riverside
ZAHRA AHMED, St. Mary’s College of California
TIFFANY WILLOUGHBY-HERARD, University of California, Irvine, and University of South Africa

“And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?” —Arundhati Roy (2020)

“But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore . . . reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics . . . bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt . . . at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.” —Arundhati Roy (2020)

“This is America!” —Arundhati Roy (2020) and Childish Gambino (2018) harmonizing

In the 2020 essay “The Pandemic is a Portal,” novelist and activist Arundhati Roy invites her readers to consider how the COVID-19 global pandemic, in all of its devastation—both immediate and lingering in impact—has operated as a portal through which we may discover and enter into new and different modes of relationality, for good and ill. Pandemics, Roy reflects, force “humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.” 

Responding to Roy’s appeal, this special issue represents a continued and collaborative effort—a portal in itself—to think, dream, agitate, and “con-spire” (we are interested in the practices of  “breathing together” and gathering that are often misconstrued as malicious planning instead of defending our literal ability to breathe) to name the kinds of worlds we wish, and indeed need, to see come into being. We refuse to cede the future to those whose vision of it consists of ruin and annihilation, which is essentially no future at all. Like Arundhati Roy, we believe “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. . . . On a quiet day, if [we] listen very carefully, [we] can hear her breathing.”

We welcome submissions by, among others, political theorists, creatives, scholars of feminist studies, queer and transgender, and Black studies, creative writers, artists, and activists engaging the question of what it means to participate in constructing portals to elsewhere, bridges from this world to the next (along temporal, geographic, epistemic, institutional, political, and spiritual lines), and how portals can be throughways to either more or less habitable worlds. Future visioning, as we are thinking about it, does not mean ignoring the present or reneging on the healing work needed to repair the violence of the past and present. Instead, future work enables us to understand precisely how and why we must fight for the past and the present. 

Arundhati Roy’s theorizations about portals have been borne out in myriad ways. For instance, workers across an array of sectors became more acutely aware of their perceived fungibility as the capitalist profit motive underwriting their workplaces placed them in closer proximity to dangerous spheres of risk. Workplace risk, danger, and death in Roy’s India looked like forty-six million people pushed out of multiple urban cores, walking toward rural family, starvation, and joblessness while bearing and collecting more sickness. During the pandemic’s portal time, the sick, the suffering, and the dying could not simply be abandoned and placed beyond the fortress of safety. 

Roy’s descriptions of pandemic-era anti-Muslim lynchings and fugitives taking refuge in graveyards while heads of state worried over elections, state visits, and their public image as be trustworthy fathers of the nation are deliberately horrifying. Roy curated the linkage between personal protective equipment manufactured in India and sold to medical workers in the US by a government whose alleged nationalism prioritized their citizens. Portal time, explains Roy, exposed how the virus brought the world’s people closer together through shared viral vulnerabilities, while also yanking us farther apart because the response to the virus still followed some of the rules about global racial hierarchies.

The widespread exposure to vulnerability—the degree of which was further calibrated by one’s social location along lines of race, gender, and migrant status—engendered a collective consciousness that prompted a mass multiethnic, multigenerational labor exodus termed by researchers the “Great Resignation.” The pandemic also created an opening for societies and communities across the globe to generate and imagine novel ways of practicing collective responsibility, which in some sense represents a renewed commitment to care for one another. In both of these instances, the portals wedged open by both individuals and societies were about creating a path toward, perhaps, a more human-oriented world. 

Conversely, some saw the pandemic as an opening to drawing deeper and more dangerous lines of differentiation between one’s own group or ideological commitments and others whose existence they deemed both contaminating and threatening. The discursive expressions of this form of portal-opening work are on display in a plethora of white/ethnic nationalist–inflected propaganda where entire groups of people are foully marked as “enemies,” “foreigners,” “interlopers,” “invaders,” or inferior subjects having stepped out of their place. The call in such statements is to construct a gateway to the future where any divergence from the norm of whiteness is equal to deficiency and deviance. Within this paradigm, “different” serves as a proxy for “dangerous,” and therefore as an element in need of expunging. This value-claim, of course, bears grave implications for the future, as well as for how we construct visions of and make sense of the past. 

Submissions might reflect on the following questions: How do you conceptualize the notion of portal-work? What initiates a break from the present and the past? What pedagogical practices create possibilities for movement into the futures we want to live in? What do portals make perceivable? How might groups engage in collective acts of portal-work? In what ways can protest and movement building serve as portals? What must we take with us into the future? What must we leave behind as we envision new, more human-workable worlds / worlds worthy of us? What portals need to be sealed off, and who must we become in order to initiate such foreclosures? Is the project of opening up portals an insurgent act? How do individuals engage in portal work in quotidian ways?
Other topics may include but are not limited to: 

● Physical conduits to elsewhere
● Feminist notions of futurity and future-making
● Trans futurities
● The portals engendered through world-making practices of collectivities
● Radical dreaming as constituting a portal
● Afro-futurist constructions of portals
● Disaster/catastrophe as a portal
● Spatial conduits to elsewhere
● Pedagogical practices that transport
● Borders and crossings as portals
● Water/flows as a conduit
● Protest as a portal
● Feminist ecological practices
● Authoritarianism as a dangerous throughway
● The body as a portal
● Sonic transportations to elsewhere
● The role of Spirit and ritual in portal work
● Eschatological elsewheres
● Literature as a gateway to the beyond
● Art as a portal
● Environmental justice work and climate change activism
● Fugitive modes of portal-work
● Poetics of portal time
● Pandemic poetry
● Indigenous theories, cultural practices, or imaginaries
● Engagements with physics

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Deadline: July 30, 2025

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 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 art 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. 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) please include them 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 Open Call, Unbearable Being(s), Pandemonium, Nonbinary, State/Power, Black Love, Solidão, Asian Diasporas, Protest, Beauty, Precarious Work, At Sea, Solidarity, Queer Methods, Activisms, The Global and the Intimate, and Trans-, 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 Shereen Inayatulla (York College, CUNY) and Andie Silva (York College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), and published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Visit feministpress.org/wsq.