**Please note: we are currently only accepting submissions from BIPOC contributors, and we’re particularly interested in those focused on non-Western subjects; that engage time-based media such as film, theater, dance, and performance art; and/or center acts of perception beyond the visual (sound, smell, taste, touch, sixth sense ways of knowing).**
trans * fixt: verb (used with object), trans·fixed or trans·fixt, trans·fix·ing.
to make or hold motionless with amazement, awe, terror, etc.
to pierce through with or as if with a pointed weapon; impale.
to hold or fasten with or on something that pierces.
This new edited collection, Transfixt: Transgender Aesthetics at the Tipping Point, asks what
kind of interventions cultural production can make in the exigencies of the present—when
violence against Black, Indigenous, trans, women, disabled, immigrant and/or otherwise
marginalized subjects have reached their collective “tipping point.” To this end, each essay in
this collection situates the writer as “transfixt,” which we define as an affective state in which an
individual is both moved and held motionless by something confounding about a work. The
individual is confounded because the work under consideration also exists at a tipping point,
thwarting our ability to maintain a multiplicity of binaries seemingly essential to the
interpretation of culture: male/female, black/white, foreign/native, alive/dead, artist/subject,
past/future, still/moving, fiction/reality, touching/touched, captive/free, etc. As such, these
liminal works—and the critics who write about them—produce new possibilities for otherwise
impossible identities, politics, and affective states to emerge.
We seek heterogenous contributions—which may take unconventional forms—from academics,
artists, writers, and independent scholars investigating contemporary art work(s) and related
phenomena which escape reductive taxonomies. We are interested in essays that advance
theories of trans reception and aesthetic practice across diverse media—including but not limited
to theatre, dance, performance art, film, video, photography, installation, painting, poetry, prose,
and more elusive objects and experiences. We invite writings that bring trans* into dialogue with
other disciplines and ways of knowing, including but not limited to: phenomenology, reception
theory, performance studies, visual culture studies, de- and postcolonial theory, queer theory,
afrofuturism, crip studies, border studies, feminist science studies, and posthumanism, to name
but a few.
We are particularly interested in acts of perception and production that do not reproduce the
violence of the state; are predicated on an ethics of care; and are practiced by those who—like
the art(ists) they engage—live and work on the margins of intelligibility. We encourage
submissions from those that take a nonwestern, global, and/or transnational approach to the
topic; center the embodied realities of QTBIPOC artists and art works; and those that do not
privilege the act of looking above, or to the exclusion of, the other senses.
We invite proposals or abstracts from interested contributors (max. 500 words) to
transfixtbook@gmail.com no later than January 31, 2022. In your proposal, please provide a
brief description of your intended contribution, including the form your writing will take, the
artist/work(s) that you intend to engage, and how your contribution relates to this call. For those
who are academically or institutionally unaffiliated, we are able to offer $500 for accepted final
works. Please note that we are working to raise additional funds for unaffiliated artists and scholars,
but for now we can guarantee $500.
In lieu of a proposal, we also invite artists who would like their work considered as a subject of
study to email us, and we will work to pair you with an interested author. Please include a link to
your portfolio/work samples. Additionally, if you’re a writer interested in contributing to this
edited collection but don’t have a specific artist or artwork in mind, we invite you to email us
and we will work to pair you with an interested artist. In your email, please include at least one
previously published work.
Contributors will be notified by March 28, 2022 if their proposal has been selected for inclusion.
Completed works will be due by May 30, 2022 and should be less than 10,000 words. We are
currently in conversation with multiple presses and anticipate that the book will be under contract in
2022.
Feel welcome to email co-editors Jules Rosskam and Jac Pryor with questions at
transfixtbook@gmail.com.
Jac Pryor is an artist, educator, and scholar who is deeply committed to these practices as
sites of research and experiment. They make and write about work that pushes the limits of the
physical body in performance, plays with the materiality of time and space, reimagines the
audience-event relationship, and expands our understanding of what is possible in live art and in
our everyday lives. They are an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Pennsylvania State University,
a Faculty Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the
author of the critically acclaimed Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance,
and the Hole of History. Pryor received their PhD in Theatre from the University of Texas with
an emphasis in Performance as Public Practice. jaclynissacpryor.com.
Jules Rosskam is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and interdisciplinary artist interested
in liminal spaces: the space between male and female, between documentary and fiction,
between moving image and still. He is the director of transparent (2005), against a trans
narrative (2009), Thick Relations (2012), Something to Cry About (2018), Paternal Rites (2018),
and Dance, Dance, Evolution (2019). Rosskam is a 2021 Creative Capital awardee, supporting
the development of his new feature film, Desire Lines. He has published work in Feminist Media
Histories, Somatechnics, TSQ, and Women and Performance. He is an Assistant Professor of
Cinematic Arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Rosskam received his MFA in
Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. julesrosskam.com.