For its twenty-ninth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the complex and multiple meanings of love.
According to Freud, “it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” Is love beyond us? Whether it connotes a delusion, state, obsession, rupture, failure, family, intimacy, or self, love eludes and mystifies. Mutable, primordial, and accumulable, it persists as a permanent horizon, accessible to everyone. In recent events the demand for love has emerged again and again, echoing the the failed and cyclical nature of past desires. Even as past desires are fulfilled–either by the state, the family, physically, spiritually–the hope for love remains, its forms and conceptions ever changing.
For IVC 29, we invite contributors to explore visual representations and contestations of the concept of love. What does love look like? How is it displayed? What are the conditions and/or/of possibilities for love? Where do we locate love’s value? Can love bear witness to violence? Are love, erotics and abjection mutually exclusive? What distinguishes love as either ideal or rational? Who or what dictates this categorical distinction and how do these types of love appear? We welcome papers that interrogate/excavate/trace love as concept and/or practice in visual culture.
Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by January 15, 2018. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.
Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact the same address.
Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review proposal, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.
Dialogues
The journal also invites submissions to its blog feature, which will accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please contact us at invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu with the subject heading “dialogues submission.”
* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.
