JOURNAL OF BISEXUALITY
Special Issue
BISEXUALITIES and SPIRITUALITIES
Call for Submissions
1/19/09

Over the last decade much has been written about the spirituality of lesbian- and gay-identified persons but not as much about people drawn to more than one gender. As a corpus of work, those writings include diverse voices and experiences across ethnicities, genders, and spiritual/religious traditions. We seek to further the discourse on the relationship between sexuality and spirituality in this special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality.

We invite the submission of proposals or completed first drafts that explore and examine bisexualities practiced within, alongside, and in response to spiritualities and vice versa. In this context, spirituality should be understood to be inclusive of religious practice or affiliation but also included in this understanding are ways of life that are rooted in wisdom traditions that are not defined by/as religion. We seek thoughtful, critical, and theoretically grounded work in any form including empirical research articles, creative non-fiction, theoretical essays, narrative inquiry, auto/ethnographies, poetry, short stories, histories, literary criticism, cultural studies, etc., particularly those which foreground intersections, borderlands, or complications.

Possible topics/questions might be:

• Bisexuality and the spiritual tradition(s) one is born into and/or chooses for oneself
• What are the ways in which certain philosophies and spiritual practices create liberatory/oppressive space for the expression of bisexuality?
• Androgyny and bisexuality in deities, cosmologies, and cosmogonies
• What does effective spiritual/pastoral counseling for bisexuals look like?
• The experiences of bisexual clergy and spiritual workers, e.g., rabbis, ministers, imams, shamans, priestesses, priests, nuns, etc.
• How do bisexualities make it possible for bisexual epistemologies to shape religious/spiritual practices?
• Sexual fluidities and spiritual/religious fluidities
• What roles have missionaries, colonialism, and modernity played in the development of bisexualities and spiritualities in the Non-Western/Global South parts of the world?
• Bisexualities and Earth-based or Goddess-based spiritual systems and religions How can bisexuality and polyamory be forms of spiritual practice?
• Bisexuality and Deep Ecology/EcoTheology/Ecofeminism/Ecopsychology

Dr. Loraine Hutchins at lorainehutchins [at] starpower [dot] net
Adjunct Professor, LGBT Studies
Towson University
Co-editor, Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out
Co-founder, BiNet USA

Dr. Herukhuti at heru [at] blackfunk [dot] org
Adjunct Professor, Individualized Studies/Socially Responsible Business & Sustainable Communities
Goddard College
Founder, Black Funk: The Center for Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality

Proposals are due February 15, 2009.
Acceptance of proposals will be made by March 1, 2009.
Full drafts of accepted work are due June 1, 2009.