July 15, 2015
The fifth issue of GUTS magazine will take on the topics of food and land. Please send us a short pitch by August 15.
The editorial note to the first issue of GUTS featured an image of a woman gutting a fish. We chose the image not only because it visualized our new magazine’s name, but also because it captured an overarching goal of the GUTS project: to open up the structures that rely on and reproduce social injustice, and see the messy insides that shape and sustain us. We didn’t know it at the time, but that image of the gutted fish points to many of the questions we’d like to raise in our upcoming issue. What does it mean to eat the flesh of another animal? What does a sustainable diet look like in a colonized territory? Whose job is it to gut the fish, and why? With our fifth issue we want to consider how land ownership, health, labour, patriarchy, colonialism, and economics come together at an intimate point of intersection: our mouths.
We invite you to submit essays about your relationship to food and how politics might fit (or not fit) into that. We want to hear about diets, bodies, and recipes with stories. We want to know how the idea of healthy and ethical foods are constructed and deconstructed.
We’re welcoming pieces on property, ownership, competing claims to land, and how access to nutrient-rich food and clean water depends on geographical location, class, income, and race. We’d like to think more about farming and politics around growing food, as well as the realities of privilege and exclusion in the sustainable food movement. We’re seeking interviews with activists who are trying to counter a looming food crisis; with members from communities that are forming coalitions against industries that pollute and exploit the land; and with those who are fighting for better labour practices in both large and small scale farming, food production, and restaurants.
We’re also accepting art, comics, new media, infographics, and photo essays visualizing some of the specific issues related to the issue’s theme.
Possible topics might include:
- Intersecting relationships to food, including those that are racialized, classed, politicized, (dis)ordered, sexualized, non-secular, traditional, (fat)shamed, or otherwise disciplined
- Farming and women’s work
- Access to organic locally grown foods
- Food deserts and urban nutritional politics
- Hunger strikes and politicized fasting
- How celebrities eat
- Restaurant culture
- Indigenous feminisms, land rights, and decolonization
- Food guides, welfare diets, corporate interest, and biopolitics
- Sustainable farming and unsustainable labour practices
- Farming and agricultural strategies outside of structures of land ownership
- Green economies and job security
- Meat and gender
- Misogyny and eating
- Return to domesticity, sustainable farming, and (post)feminism
- Food/water justice in northern & remote communities
- Climate change and access to food/water
- Coalitions against resource extraction, transportation, and refinement
- Competing claims to urban and rural land
- Bacteria in your food and in your body (aka talk about your guts!)
- Growing and preparing food as care work
GUTS accepts literary essays and reviews, long form journalism, interviews, letters, and fiction. GUTS also encourages the submission of images, videos and new media relevant to our theme. Please look over our past issues to get a sense of the kind of work we’re looking for.
Submit a short pitch (max 300 words) describing your proposed project no later than August 15, 2015 to submit@gutsmagazine.ca. We are happy to consider quickly written and casual proposals, but please include a link to or copy of a writing sample that you feel adequately represents your work.
Final submissions (500-4,000 words) will be due on September 23, 2015.
Compensation will be provided for contributors selected for the issue.
For further information about the submission guidelines, please email us at submit@gutsmagazine.ca
