Special Issue: SAFE

Guest Editors: Alyson M. Cole & Kyoo Lee

Bubble wrap, sanitizer, helmets, knee pads, H1N1 vaccines, mammograms,
protective goggles, preemptive strikes, the Patriot Act,
car/fire/health/home/laptop/life/renters’/travel insurance, condoms,
sunscreen, car seats, airbags, pensions, life vests, organic food, safe
drinking water, safe streets… Our lives are filled with devices,
organizations, and agreements to keep our bodies, loved ones, and belongings
“safe.” These practices appease our fears, but what does it mean to be or to
feel safe? Is safety synonymous with security, stability or stasis? Is it a
condition, or the negation of threat, risk and danger? Can we ever be truly
safe? If not, why does it endure as an ideal?

For some, safety is a condition of living, as in “better safe than sorry”;
for others, safe signals the refusal of life itself, as in the Nietzschean
revision of the Socratic ideal of examined life, “an unexplored life is not
worth living.” What are the aesthetics, metaphysics and metaphorics of the
dynamic multivalency of safe? Is safe a place (“safe house,” “safe box”), a
moment (“safe and sound”), a practice/norm (“safe sex”), a feeling, a
cognitive state, a number/figure (“savings”), a status (“sauf”: “save” as in
“exception”) or a visible logos (“saved document”)? What sort of politics
does the ambition to be safe entail? In what ways is safe imbricated with
class, race, sexuality and gender? Can we feel safe without restricting
ourselves to a prophylactic existence?

This special issue of WSQ invites work that will contribute to an
exploration of safety and security, broadly conceived. We welcome academic
papers from a variety of disciplinary approaches including theory, empirical
research, literary and cultural studies, as well as creative prose, poetry,
artwork, memoir and biography. Suggested topics may include but are not
limited to:

. Bioethics, biopolitics

. Children, childhood, family and safety

. Crisis and resolution, memory

. Discipline; docility; drill; habit-formation

. Domestic space, domestic violence, haven, home, shelter, retreat,
refugees

. The politics of food safety

. Geography and mapping, enclosures/prisons, harbors and asylums

. Security state, homeland security, environmental security, job security

. Illnesses, epidemics, preventions, screenings, health risks, health care

. Otherness, ethnicized and marginalized populations, borders and
enclosures

. Risk society, theories of risk, technology, prediction

. Sex, pain, pleasure and risk

. Terror and/of terrorism, war & trauma, treaty and alliance, recovery

If submitting academic work, please send articles by March 15, 2010 to the
guest editors, Alyson M. Cole and Kyoo Lee at
WSQSafeIssue@gmail.com. Submission should
not exceed 20 double spaced, 12 point font pages.

Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ’s poetry editor, Kathleen Ossip, at
WSQpoetry@gmail.com by March 15, 2010. Please
review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions we prefer
before submitting poems. Please note that poetry submissions may be held for
six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the poetry
editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not accept
work that has been previously published. Please paste poetry submissions
into the body of the e-mail along with all contact information.

Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ’s
fiction/nonfiction editor, Jocelyn Lieu, at
WSQCreativeProse@gmail.com by March 15,
2010. Please review previous issues of WSQ to see what type of submissions
we prefer before submitting prose. Please note that prose submissions may be
held for six months or longer. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if
the prose editor is notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. We do not
accept work that has been previously published. Please provide all contact
information in the body of the e-mail.

Art submissions should be sent to the guest editors, Alyson M. Cole and Kyoo
Lee, at WSQSafeIssue@gmail.com by March 15,
2010. After art is reviewed and accepted, accepted art must be sent to the
journal’s managing editor on a CD that includes all artwork of 300 DPI or
greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger. These files should be saved as
individual JPEGS or TIFFS.

–
Zoe Meleo-Erwin
Administrative Associate
WSQ
at the Feminist Press
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212.817.7926
www.feministpress.org/wsq
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