Karen Keifer-Boyd

1 week ago

Associate editor, Yen-Ju Lin and I are pleased to announce the 2020 publication of Visual Culture & Gender. This year, 2020, is a 15-year milestone for the Visual Culture & Gender journal. Volume 15 is published in a year like no other year any of us have experienced. The tri-fold pandemic of the coronavirus, racial injustice, and economic insecurities impacts everyone, world-wide. Flaming the pandemic fires is the ongoing impact of the climate crisis ever increasing in 2020 as evident in the devastating fires throughout the Northwest regions of the United States, Australia, Greece, and around the world; extreme heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity, and mass extinction of species. We are living in challenging times.

The five articles and visual essay in Visual Culture & Gender, volume 15, traverse potentials of feminist art and art education practices to alleviate not only the traumas of racism, sexism, and ableism but to initiate actions to change the systems that produce the social and personal traumas. Hyunji Kwon, in her article, “The Potential of Participatory Art Pedagogy for Witnessing Sexual Trauma,” advocates addressing trauma in educational settings, not by reliving the trauma but by recognizing the social systems that produce trauma along with the stigmatizations that deepen trauma. In Lauren Stetz’s article, “Transnational Artistic Responses: #MeToo and the Creative Coalition,” she uses a feminist mapping methodology for relational renderings of eight artists who address gender-based violence within their particular cultural contexts. Critical disability comics-making is the focus of G. H. Greer’s article titled, “Comics-making as Possibility-making: Resisting the Inequitable Distribution of Imagined Futures.” The autoethnographic exploration of her own sense of being an outsider to social norms arising from “queerness and disability, as well as from class and geographic locations” is viscerally expressed in the gaps and masking techniques inherent to comics-making. Mariia Spirina’s article also addresses queerness and disability in critiques of a fashion line that purports to neutralize difference. Spirina’s article “Pulling at the Threads of Fluidity: Aspirations for Non-Gendered and Race-Neutral Fashion in 69’s Non-Demographic Design” concludes from her critique that by attempts of fashion to neutralize difference the clothing restricts gender expression and marginalizes diversity. Co-authors Courtney Lee Weida and Carlee Bradbury learned from the girls in a workshop they taught on creating visual stories that unicorns symbolize “freedom, magic, and girlhood identities.” In their article, “Magical Aesthetics of Unicorns in Girlhood Culture,” they ask: “Since a great deal of unicorn imagery can be traced back to Eurocentric books and visual culture, how can contemporary and counterculture versions of the unicorn revise whiteness and heteronormativity in visions of girlhood?” Some volumes of Visual Culture and Gender (VCG) include visual essays, in which the visuals drive the narrative. In VCG, volume 15, Alexandra Allen contributes a visual essay “Self and Sculptural Transformations: Coping, Burnout, Restoration, Dis/integrated, Dis/comfort, Containment, and Surviving During the 2020 Pandemic” in which she makes tangible through documentation of stages of creative artmaking her experiences of sheltering-in-art.

Visual Culture & Gender (VCG) was born digital more than a decade ago in 2005 as the first multimedia online journal in the field of art education, and the first online journal devoted to the intersections of visual culture and gender. VCG is an annual international, peer-reviewed, freely accessed, multimedia online journal whose purpose is to encourage and promote understanding of how visual culture constructs gender in context with representations of race, age, sexuality, (dis)ability, and social class.

The 2021 VCG Call for Manuscripts invites submissions of articles and visual essays that explore issues of equity and social justice through learning and teaching practices, which expose culturally learned meanings and power relations surrounding the creation, consumption, valuing, and dissemination of images.

• Upload new manuscript submissions electronically at vcg.emitto.net/
• The deadline to submit manuscripts for volume 16 to be published September 15, 2021 is Sunday, November 15, 2020, 11:59 PM EDT
• VCG is included in the following databases: Proquest ARTbibliographies Modern, Feminist Periodicals, Wilson Database, CNKI SCHOLAR, and EBSCO. ... See MoreSee Less

Visual Culture & Gender

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[Cover images] (upper left) The final page of the comic Nest by G. H. Greer in G. H. Greer's article in Visual Culture & Gender, 15, p. 36. (lower left) His Shame on Her Series II by Mehreen Hashmi in...