Call for Submissions: Maya Magazine (Submit by Nov 30)

About Maya Magazine

Maya is an initiative of the queer community of O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. We seek to provide an avenue for discussions on issues of gender and sexuality. Maya hopes to be a platform for creativity and critique, a place within the academe that rejects the claustrophobia of academic form and style.

We are here to represent you, at the same time be represented by your voices, writings, art and photography. We hope to reflect upon the past, challenge the present and drive the future. We are into the stories of activism, the exhilaration of coming out, the struggle of closeted living, the complications of self-identity, or even the mundane experiences of ordinary life, and beyond.

What are we looking for?

We seek new and original writing (fiction or nonfiction), articles, poetry, book/film reviews, opinion pieces, campus reports, research studies, art, memes, and photography.

You can also visit our website (http://mayamagazine.in/) to get an idea of the kind of content that we have published.

Your submissions must broadly revolve around the following themes:

1. Compulsory/obligatory heterosexuality within the queer community

2. Trans exclusion within the community (and the pitfalls of a biologically essentialist feminism)

3. Queerness inherently as rebellion (against capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, the family, etc). You can also explore how queerness is continually mainstreamed by defanging it of its radical potential against capitalism, nationalism, casteism, racism, and so on

4. Pinkwashing (of capitalism, imperialism, and other related oppressive forces)

5. Standpoint epistemology and writing of and about queerness (do queer people speak more objectively about queerness? The problems of ‘epistemic deference’ - Link: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo)

6. Language and queerness (think: performative speech acts, pronouns, free/hate speech, how we can queer language, and so on)

7. Queerness and representation—who represents the queer community, can one or a set of individuals even purport to represent the community, and so on. You can also explore the politics of representation (the caste/class/gender/regional dynamics)

8. Queerness and literature (the depiction (and sterilization) of queerness in mainstream literature)

9. The possibilities (and limitations) of a queer politics

We encourage you to interpret these themes as creatively as possible and express them in original, diverse, and interesting forms. Instead of merely explaining these concepts, we urge you to look at how they play out in the real world. This can be through personal narratives, essays, poetry, art, and much more.

For instance, rather than solely describing what pinkwashing is, you can explore how the Israeli government employs queer-friendly rhetoric to mask its oppression of Palestinians.

Who Can Submit?

Students, academics, research scholars, and activists are welcome to contribute to the magazine. We especially encourage submissions by DBA people, both within and without the queer community.

The deadline for submission is 30th November 2021. We will be publishing our forthcoming issue tentatively by the end of the year.

Submission guidelines along with the submission link are given in the PDF below.

Contact Us

If any contributor has any queries or would like to discuss a proposal, please feel free to email us at maya.queer.jgu@gmail.com.

If you would like your event to be published on Bar & Bench, please fill in the form available here.