Call for Papers
Experiments in Love and Liberation

What We’re Looking For

We want to read your reflections on life and love on the front lines. The editors of Experiments in Love and Liberation are seeking writing on topics such as the roots of radical/revolutionary relationships/hidden histories, gender, power, family/community, neuroqueer identity/mental health/mental wellness, dis/ability, abuse/healing, dating, monogamy/non-monogamy/polyamory. We want to hear about how love and loss and the living of and through them have shaped the worlds you are building. 

Tell us stories of historical lineages of radical sexual and romantic relating through investigation of the lives of instigators and visionaries such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Audre Lorde, Diane DiPrima, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, Emma Goldman, and other foremothers of experiments in love and liberation. Tell us stories of the innovative communes and collectives created over the years. The ways that the AIDS/HIV epidemic shaped our relationships and communities. The intersections of activism and romantic relationships.

Tell us about the ways that power, power plays and BDSM intersect with love and sex. Tell us how disability and physicality impact the shape of relationships and our inner worlds. Talk to us about race and ethnicity, culture and family lineages. About aesthetics and poverty, about socio-economic status. How access to time, material resources, work and emotional labor shape your experiences of love. About parenting, kinship, queerness, and nontraditional/alternative family structures. 

Talk to us about friendships, dating, loneliness, and friends with benefits. About living in the worlds of the down-low and don’t ask don’t tell. About pretty privilege and uglification in radical queer communities. About the spaces and relationships in which you attempted to build new ways of relating and the ways that you succeeded and failed.  

Tell us about the spaces in which abuse is infused within our scenes/movements/communities. Tell us how polyamory can be toxic and how it can be healthy. Tell us how monogamy can also be the same. Tell us about your experiments in love and liberation. 

Tell us about pleasure and heartbreak, about what you’ve learned over the years about love. Talk to us about care work, about sex — casual and profound, about the roles of spirituality and religion. Write to us like you are kicking it with your friends as you realize your own boundaries, the joys and humor and grossness of dating apps and 21st century dating culture, about your fantasies and your fears. Tell us about opening up your relationships and closing them down. Be messy, be clear, be luminous and contradictory, show us how you play with categories and how you play with each other. 

Tell us about love and relationship in all of its complex, romantic, radical, sexy, paradoxical power. 

Tell us what it means to create love and relationality in the midst of the apocalypse.

We seek diverse writing styles from a diversity of authors:

• First person narrative
• Creative essay format
• Poetry
• Memoir
• Historical nonfiction
• Academic and research-based writing, from analytical to relational autoethnography/collaborative and community based writing
• Hybrids and experimental writing styles welcome

We will accept for consideration your completed pieces/drafts, or well-crafted concept pitches.

Who We Are

Mai’a Williams (she/they) is a writer, multimedia artist and dreamer. She is the author of This is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century and the co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. 

Lasara Firefox Allen (they/them/theirs) is a writer, Witch, and gritty academic/MSW candidate. They are the author of Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality, Sexy Witch, and The Pussy Poems, and a contributor to many other works both academic and creative.

In Experiments in Love and Liberation, Mai’a and Lasara hope to weave a communal quilt of love and liberation.

TO SUBMIT: To engage with our call for papers for Experiments in Love and Liberation, email revolutionaryrelationshipsbook@gmail.com. Put “Experiments in Love and Liberation – Name Of Piece” in the subject line. 

DEADLINE: May 1, 2021