Women, Gender, and Families of Color

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Submission Policy and Process of Review

The journal has a rolling submission policy and welcomes manuscripts, proposals for guest-edited special issues, and book reviews at any time. Editors strive for a fair and timely review process with appropriate peer-review scholarly expertise that fosters a supportive intellectual scholarly community. Editors are especially attentive to new scholars and those in the process of university appointment reviews and promotions. 

more information on manuscript guidelines, submissions, and guest-edited issues

Rolling Submissions

Women, Gender, and Families of Color is a multidisciplinary journal that centers the study of African American/Вlack, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, and other women of color, genders, and families. Within this framework, the journal encourages theoretical and empirical research from the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. It welcomes a range of comparative and transnational research as well as analyses of domestic social, cultural, political, and economic policies and practices from new and established authors. 

Topics and subject areas of interest include but are not limited to: 

  • intersectionality and identities
  • gender and sexuality
  • family dynamics and structures
  • health and well-being
  • education access and outcomes
  • socioeconomic disparities
  • incarceration and justice
  • activism, social change, and social movements
  • media representations and film studies
  • historical studies
  • literary and cultural studies
  • childhood, adolescence, and aging 

Submission Deadline

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and are peer-reviewed by experts in the field. Every effort is made to provide rapid peer review and prompt editorial decisions. 

General information and manuscript submission

Upcoming Special Issues

Haunting, as Avery Gordon writes, “is an encounter in which you touch the ghost or the ghostly matter of things: the ambiguities, the complexities of power and personhood… the shadows of our selves and our society” (Ghostly Matters, 134). The past, history, collective and personal memory are all ghosts that haunt the present. Furthermore, the memory of the gendered, sexual, and racialized is almost always associated with the spectral, the silenced, or the submerged. Accordingly, Women, Gender, and Families of Color invites submissions that explore how memory and archival formations become haunted and haunting spaces as repositories of presence and absence, power and resistance, erasure and emergence. We welcome interdisciplinary scholarship that examines how memory and remembering—whether individual, extant, collective, historical, intergenerational, or embodied—serve as political and cultural recordings for communities of color. We are particularly interested in how archives, both formal and fugitive, function as mechanisms of institutional control and political possibility. This issue aims to gather works that address the epistemologies, methodologies, and creative practices that reclaim memory and reimagine the archive as a living, contested, and generative space. We seek scholarly work that asks: What or who is excluded from the mainstream or collective voice of the past? How do hauntings influence familial, cultural, or national memory? How does remembering or archiving reflect grief, trauma, nostalgia, rage, or desire on communal, collective, and personal levels? What counter-archival and remembering practices do communities of color establish and sustain? How are memory and remembering shaped by gendered, racialized, diasporic, and intergenerational experiences and connections?

Contributors may explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

  • Haunted Histories and Ghosted Narratives
  • The Affective Life of the Archive
  • Haunting of the history
  • Counter-Archives and Fugitive Memory
  • Forms of Remembering
  • Embodied Memory and Generational Knowledge
  • Archival Violence and Epistemic Justice
  • Creative Interventions and Speculative Archiving

We invite theoretical and empirical work from the social and behavioral sciences, the humanities, and transdisciplinary formations. Submissions from established and emerging scholars, community-based researchers, and activists are encouraged. Comparative and transnational approaches are welcome, as are analyses of cultural production, public policy, and institutional practices.

Women, Gender, and Families of Color invites contributions for a forthcoming special issue, tentatively titled “Queer and Trans of Color Critique: Colonial Legacies, Decolonial Futures.” What do we unearth when we center queer and trans people of color’s lives, knowledge, and struggle as the analytic and political ground for understanding gender and sexuality? Marquis Bey says, “A secret of cisgender is that it is not only about gender. Gender is always a racial arrangement” (Bey 22). Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) and Trans of Color Critique (TOCC) have demonstrated how colonial and settler-colonial regimes have employed Eurocentric norms of race, body, gender, and sexuality to produce and enforce notions of normativity as mechanisms of power, discipline, regulation, and exclusion. Engaging in decolonial methodologies, QOCC and TOCC interrogate how the colonial legacy, colonial histories, and power relations remain embedded in the formation of bodies, identities, and subjectivities.

In this special issue, we invite submissions that offer a conceptual bridge between bodily creation, gender deviance, and race-making, examining how normativity is enforced and contested on and through bodies. Challenging Eurocentric norms of racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, embodiments, and practices, this issue seeks to advance the existing scholarship of QOCC and TOCC, emphasizing how normative ideas about bodies and identities are colonial projects—producing and policing boundaries of the human, the deviant, and the abject. Rooted in the legacies of women of color feminism, Black feminist thought, and intersectionality, we are looking forward to submissions that explore how colonialism, racism, capitalism, and (cis)heteronormativity mutually constitute the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and other communities of color.

Submissions may engage in the following (but not limited to) topics:

  • Decolonial and anti-colonial genealogies in queer and trans of color critique
  • Black feminist and women of color foundations of QOCC and TOCC
  • The coloniality of gender and the production of racialized bodies
  • Trans of color epistemologies and methodologies
  • The making and unmaking of race, gender, and sexuality
  • Queer/trans critique of racial capitalism
  • Queer and trans of color migration, borders, and displacement
  • Diaspora, transnationalism, and global circulations of QOCC/TOCC
  • Indigenous, Two-Spirit, and decolonial trans/queer knowledge
  • Health, medicalization, and biopolitics of queer and trans of color embodiment
  • The normativity of bodies and bodily autonomy
  • Family, kinship, and chosen community beyond Eurocentric models
  • Solidarity, survival, and resistance
  • Artistic, literary, and cultural production as sites of critique
  • Histories and practices of mutual aid, care, and survival
  • Sex work, labor, and economic justice in queer/trans of color communities

We invite scholarly articles, theoretical essays, creative work, interviews, reviews, inter-disciplinary, transnational, and community-engaged approaches.

Writing is to create spaces for memory, survival, and transformation—to give shape to memories and experiences that might otherwise be lost. Authors and writers tell stories to make sense of the world, reconnect, and understand. Sandra Cisneros concludes her famous The House on Mango Street with, “…I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (Cisneros 110). For communities of color, literature is thus the reclamation of the collective memory and a responsibility to return to the community. Women, Gender, and Families of Color invites submissions for a special issue on the “Literature of Color.”

In this special issue, we invite contributions on topics related to race, gender, and sexuality, informed by intersectional, decolonial, and transnational approaches. We invite submissions that focus on the lived realities of communities of color, histories of displacement, dispossession, diaspora, and colonialism, with special attention to questions of gender, sexuality, family, and community. This special issue aims to demonstrate the intellectual, political, and aesthetic interventions of literature produced by and about communities of color. We ask: how does literature of color mobilize memory, language, and form to negotiate histories of loss, identity, solidarity, and repair? How does the literature of color become an archive of those who have been silenced, excluded, and made invisible? How does literature respond to censorship, forced forgetting, social and political violence, communal and personal traumas?

Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):

  • Diaspora, migration, and home in literatures of color
  • Memory and literature
  • Literature as activism, testimony, or witnessing
  • Gendered and queer archives, silences, and erasures
  • Racialization and the politics of form and genre
  • Intersectionality in narrative strategies and character formation
  • Decolonial and anti-colonial literary interventions
  • Speculative, Afrofuturist, Indigenous futurist, and utopian imaginings
  • Black feminist, womanist, queer of color, trans of color, Indigenous, and
  • decolonial/anticolonial criticism.
  • The role of language, memory, translation, and diaspora in shaping literary
  • production and reception.
  • Questions of community, intergenerationality, and the responsibilities of writing
  • Poetics and politics of memory

We invite theoretical and empirical work from the social and behavioral sciences, the humanities, and transdisciplinary formations. Submissions from established and emerging scholars, community-based researchers, and activists are encouraged. Comparative and transnational approaches are welcome, as are analyses of cultural production, public policy, and institutional practices.

New and Old Challenges for Communities of Color in Higher Education

Academic communities are not immune from national politics, global economies, cultural shifts or social issues. In this past year in the US, members of diverse learning and work environments have been challenged by ruptures confronting the broader society—legal assaults on affirmative action, DEI, women’s reproductive health and voting rights, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent curtailment of the power of federal agencies to maintain health and safety regulations, and international conflicts, to name a few. While these issues present problems for the US and global landscape, they are yet another wave of the persistent social and economic inequities that historical racial/ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ populations, and people with disabilities have long experienced relative to majority groups.
 
The current social, cultural, political and economic landscape demands greater “care and well-being” among new and established scholars, staff, administrators, and graduate students of color across academic communities. This moment demands a fostering of community among and between the various groups. It is highly imperative that we establish practices of generosity for issues such as negotiation of work and life balance, isolation and aloneness, distrust of policies and practices, and uncertainty about the future demand that we recognize and cherish our shared experiences. This call is an invitation to submit reflective essays that offer experience and guidance to peers and colleagues as they navigate these and other circumstances of academic life.
 

Reflective Essays: What We Are Looking For

We are soliciting contributions to a special issue that can expand a “Care and Well-Being Toolkit” for communities of color in higher education. We seek essays from scholars, professional staff, and administrators across academic disciplinary lines, types of colleges and universities, and the range of university actor categories. This special issue is a departure from the peer-reviewed manuscripts that generally represent the content of WGFC.  We encourage contributions that reflect on the identities and personal experiences of authors as well as essays that offer guidance on topics related to elements of learning, work, and engagement in higher education.
 

Our Goal as Editors

We want to build an academic environment where our students, peers, and colleagues can be their best selves. In addition to our roles as editors, our academic trajectories have included varying appointments across multiple universities. Regardless of our respective positions, we want to highlight the experiences of those marginalized within hegemonic academic spaces. These demographic groups remain underrepresented, contribute disproportionately to service, and are less likely to be present at the highest ranks of faculty and university administration. The navigation of various “isms” within institutional bureaucracies, transparency and information sharing, and community building are central to our advocacy, mentoring, coaching, and support activities. These practices make up our own “care and well-being toolkit” for communities of color on the campuses we inhabit. Academia is a layered and complex “institution” with participants from multiple backgrounds and experiences, which demand particular attention. Our ultimate goal is to strengthen the presence and productivity of individuals within our communities and beyond by emphasizing their value, forging critical connections and professional networks among them, and facilitating collaborative scholarship, retention of students, initiatives and transformative equity strategies, and retention and career advancement opportunities for students, faculty, staff, and administrators of color with attention to their multiple intersecting identities (gender, sexuality, 1st gen, disabilities, age, etc.).  
 
In community,


Essay submission foci include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Mentoring, coaching, sponsorship
  • Leadership meaning, forms, and pathways
  • Management up/management down
  • Community building, purpose, meaning
  • Understanding university bureaucracy
  • Building a program, center, or institute
  • Where to go/to whom to turn for help
  • Teaching/classroom experience
  • Dissertation completion (tips and tools)
  • Career advancement (tips and tools)
  • Writing groups, coaching, and other resources
  • Balance of teaching, service, research
  • Transition to new appointment and campus
  • Leadership roles (e.g., committee chair, department Chair/head, etc.)
  • Career trajectory, academic or alt-ac
  • Navigation of problems
  • Managing isolation/aloneness
  • Rank of assistant/associate/full professor
  • Non tenure track/line faculty 
  • Balance of teaching, research, service
  • Managing relationships w/ colleagues, heads/chairs,
  • Conference attendance, including meaning, purpose, goals
  • Peer review processes
  • Scholarly production (tips and tools)
  • Journal publishing
  • Book publishing
  • Professional staff
  • Raising children in the academy
  • Managing K-12 education
  • Managing care of kin
  • Transition to graduate studies/from graduate studies
  • Retention decisions
  • Housing decisions
  • Social life/leisure/health
  • Living as part of a university town, commuter campus, etc.
  • Commuting, remote work, or hybrid appointments
  • After tenure and promotion
  • Preparation for legacy and retirement
  • Professional associations
We are soliciting a diversity of perspectives –especially from those who identify as part of marginalized and minoritized populations.

Manuscript Submissions

Length/word count: 1,250–2,500 words (5–10 double-spaced pages), Word document only.

Deadline for Submission: October 29, 2024

Submit manuscript to: jenniferhamer@psu.edu, and include the following text in the email subject line: “[YOUR NAME]–Special Issue on Care Work”. (Example: Hamer–Special Issue on Care Work)

Past Special Issues

Volume 2.2: “Race, Gender, and Disability,” guest edited by Liat Ben-Moshe and Sandra Magaña (2014)

Volume 4.2: “Women, Gender Politics, and Pan-Africanism,” guest edited by Keisha N. Blain, Asia Leeds, and Ula Y. Taylor (2016)

Volume 6.1: “Trump’s America? Disquiet Campus? Marginalized College Students, Faculty, and Staff Reflect on Learning, Working, Living, and Engaging” (2018)

Volume 7.1: “Black Girlhood and Kinship,” guest edited by Corinne Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons (2019)

Volume 7.2: “Black Love after E. Franklin Frazier,” guest edited by Randal Maurice Jelks and Ayesha K. Hardison (2019)

Volume 8.2: “Crosstalk: Graduate Students of Color Reflect on Lessons Lived and Learned in the Academy” (2020)

Volume 9.1 and 9.2: “The Unexpected Caribbean,” guest edited by Cécile Accilien and Giselle Anatol