Tied to spaces, places, and contexts in which queerness and divergence emerges, queer and LGBT+ scholars, activists, practitioners, and communities are at the forefront of innovative possibilities and social change. An inherent sense of queerness, and the process of queer and LGBT+ identity formation and articulation is always situated. Our unique positioning in our places, and our multiple lived experiences of marginalization, positions us at the cusp of overlapping social, cultural, political, and historical edges, questioning all that exists and is possible inside and outside our social worlds.

The Queer and LGBT+ Studies Collection draws attention to how gender-sex, sexuality, and queerness is always situated within – shapes and is shaped by – place, culture, age, race, class, gender, dis/ability, colonialism, patriarchy, history, power, aesthetics, religions, heterosexism, and other hierarchies. Contributions are encouraged to demonstrate complexity, movement, and disruption at intersections where queerness, gender-sex, and sexuality divergence encounter, entangle and become embedded within – or challenge – social, cultural, religious, and other identities, experiences, hierarchies, and frameworks.

As well as all queer and LGBT+ scholars, contributions are welcome from social change makers, activists, practitioners, and those whose work fashion social movements, policy, and legislative change in countries and regions across the globe. As a non-normative field, this collection also encourages contributions from artists, poets, creatives, and scholars positioned outside formal institutions whose practices are situated in place and whose praxis is generatively queer.

As collection editor, my role is to enable and provide confidence for authors to contribute in a way that honors the multiple communities, cultures, nations, and peoples they represent and are embedded within. I will support contributors administratively (deadline-reminder and progress checks), and on-request, provide comments on manuscripts in a way that centers contributor voices while providing sensitive and respectful editorial feedback when needed. Most importantly, my job is to work with authors to have their manuscript published.

A Deeper Dive into the Collection:

Locating Queerness in Your Lived Place and Experiences

How might queerness be understood in the context of an individual lived experience and a specific place? Collection Editor Seutaʻafili Dr Patrick Thomsen reflects on their own queer identity through personal recollection of experience and place.

Read more as this collection develops >>