January 21, 2016
The sixth issue of GUTS magazine will take on the topic: FUTURES. Please send us a short pitch by February 19.
Feminism makes soothsayers of us all. As an assemblage of movements dedicated to actualizing change, feminism is always imagining, reevaluating, and grappling with potential futures. The future is where dreams become realities, a possibility that inspires action and begs important questions. What conditions do we want to live in, what realities do we want to leave behind? What tools will help us get there, and how will we develop and use them?
We guess at the future and its limits: will robots learn to raise our babies? Will that change our social relations? Are gender, race, and class identities we can (or should) transcend, and what would that even look like? Once we dismantle patriarchy, what are our next steps?
We aren’t interested in definite conclusions about what the future will look like: everyone imagines it differently. To look forward to the future with confidence is a privilege predicated on the structural conditions of the present, conditions that not everyone shares. Race, class, ability, sexuality, physical and mental health, gender, and other factors are intimately bound up with our relationship to time, how it passes, and what we imagine fate will bring to us. What do you see when you imagine the future?
For this issue we want to think about how we, collectively and individually, orient ourselves toward the future: how we plan for education, work, partnerships, celebrations, children, retirement, death. This involves interrogating the presumption that we are makers of our own futures, a myth that can be both demoralizing and anxiety inducing. We welcome pieces about practising self care while thinking about the big picture, as well as strategies for living in the moment and whether it’s possible to find politics in doing so.
We also want to think about different movements’ visions for the future, and what’s being done to amplify and dismantle different voices and ideas; we want to hear about how the systems that shape our lives are changing and what they might end up looking like. We want to hear about the imaginings you relish, the possibilities that fill you with cackles and glee, the mantras that get you through the day.
Possible topics might include:
- Indigenous futurism
- Land rematriation
- Afrofuturism
- Undoing cis-sexist healthcare
- Family planning / polyamory / raising feminist children / communal living strategies / beyond the couple and nuclear family form
- Towards anti-oppressive languages
- Ethical allyship
- Fortune telling / astrology / witches
- Naturopathy
- Aging
- Death and existentialism / anti-futures
- Addiction
- Living with debt
- Access to digital archives / privatization of the internet
- Practising self care + facing grim futures
- Imagining sustainable economies / ecological futures / next steps after COP21
- Future food(s)
- Environmental and labour movements; are they oppositional?
- Feminist conceptions of utopic or dystopic futures (limitations and/or possibilities)
- Post gender futures / patriarchy after capitalism
- The future of work / postwork societies / sharing economies
- Reproductive technologies / automation of productive and /or reproductive labour
GUTS accepts literary essays and reviews, long form journalism, interviews, letters, and fiction. We also encourage the submission of images, videos, comics, infographics, photo essays 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 February 19, 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 (500-3,000 words) will be due on March 24, 2016.
Compensation will be provided for contributors selected for the issue.
For further information about the submission guidelines, please email us at submit @ gutsmagazine.ca.
Image inspired by this photo
