Liberating Gender and Race from Coloniality’s Prescriptive Normativity

Dear Colleagues,

“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” ---Audre Lorde

Collectively, the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and 44 trans women in one year and the disappearance of Native women have impacted the discourse on race and gender in the United States. Coloniality, and its critique of hierarchies of power spawned by White supremacy have become commonplace. Likewise, as our understanding of the multidimensionality of the gender spectrum has grown, so has our lexicon. The words non-binary, gender-queer, and transgender no longer raise eyebrows in some parts of the USA. Pronouns have become a part of introductions in many places where people gather.

Literary contributions by Kimberlé Crenshaw (2019), Isabel Wilkerson (2020), Ibram X. Kendi (2016), Nikole Hannah Jones (2021), Kenneth Hardy (2022), Roxane Ortiz-Dunbar (2014), Juan Gonzalez (2000), and others have offered well-researched histories of how greed for land and cheap labor resulted in governments commodifying people, as well as frameworks for understanding and dismantling the settler colonial ideologies that shape the lived experiences of people targeted for harm. These same ideologies have fostered a patriarchal system that dictates what women can and cannot do with their bodies, who can marry whom, and one’s gender identity, regardless of what the individual claims for themself.

Yet, as voices of resistance to these dogmas have become more prominent, more insistent, and more valued, so have those voices determined to silence them. We are bearing witness to egregious efforts by elected officials, departments of education, social media, and libraries to prevent these “counter narratives” from reaching the masses.

Too often, the “rule of law” is cited by right-leaning politicians and their supporters as justification for efforts to erase or discredit these narratives. The question that begs to be asked is “What rule of law is their point of reference”? What does rule of law even mean to those who are descendants of Indigenous people, enslaved African-descended people, of Asian people who were denied citizenship in the USA from the late 1800s until 1954, and Mexican people who were admitted to the USA under the Bracero program and then deported when the program ended in 1964? How does the rule of law further complicate lives when viewed through the lens of the intersectionality of race and gender?  The rule of law has not ensured fair and equal treatment for African-descended people and other people of color in the world’s oldest democracy. It has not done much better with women or those who do not identify within the gender binary. In fact, for much of the history of the United States’ democracy, these populations have experienced the rule of law as a tool that has consistently rendered them to second-class citizenship.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Genealogy seeks to add to the voices of resistance; to the voices committed to dismantling settler colonial ideologies of dominance; to the voices that understand that there are multiple ways of knowing and learning. We, therefore, invite contributions that tell the stories of race and gender through:

• Traditional articles;
• Poetry;
• Photo journals;
• Artwork;
• Personal narratives.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors (Email A) or to the Genealogy editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References:

Crenshaw, Kimberlè (2019). On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New York: The New Press.

Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous people’s history of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gonzalez, J. (2000). Harvest of empire: A history of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin Group.

Hardy, K.V. (2022). The enduring, invisible, and ubiquitous centrality of Whiteness. New York. W.W. Norton & Co. Inc.

Jones, N.H. (2021). The 1619 project: A new origin story. New York: One World/Random House.

Kendi, I.X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning. New York: Hatchette Book Group, Inc.

Lorde, Audre (1982). Learning from the 1960s. Retrieved from BlackPast.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20such%20thing,Martin%20Luther%20King%2C%20Jr.

Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontent. New York: Random House.

Dr. Robyn Brown-Manning
Dr. Willie Tolliver
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• race
• gender
• settler colonialism
• ideologies of dominance
• oppression
• resistance