CfP: Bodies in Process

Face-to-face with the idea of process, we might think of praxis, or artistic process, as a practice of continuation and development, of adapting to a constant present. We might think of writers and artists adopting a specific process, or how their bodies accrue the residues of their practice. Process also gestures to layers and strata, and the act of building upon something solid in order to speculate something new. We might think of what is ‘unfinished’ or ‘incomplete’, but how this mediates how we read it. Process is dynamic and agile; process can afford mishaps in the pursuit of something that holds depth. We might think of annotations and strikethroughs, of birth and death and how something persists beyond its intended trajectory. We might think of pace and tempo; we might think of the present moment and how it is inextricable from the processes that led to it. Bodies both stage and are staged by various processes, governed by intra-actions and activities beneath what is immediately visible. In the mutable space of art/writing, we might contemplate such bodies in transition, their affects and effects and how these lead us back to making work that troubles closure.

For Volume 11.1, JAWS: Journal of Art and Writing invites work that contemplates bodies in process, whether that means material bodies doing the work of processing – absorption, digestion, excretion – or bodies of work between starting and finishing and everything in between. We welcome practice-based research, visual essays, book reviews and interviews by emergent practitioners and researchers, and we're particularly interested to receive academic submissions that respond to the theme (up to 6000 words). For academic submissions please submit a 300-word abstract by 31 March 2025. Please submit any completed submissions by 25 April 2025.

Submissions may relate in some way, but are not limited to:
  • Queer bodies
  • Metabolising
  • Digestion
  • Excretion
  • Collage
  • Death studies
  • Procedural writing/procedural poetry
  • Feminism
  • Autotheory
  • Crip Theory
  • Migrations
  • Motherhood
  • Queer theory
  • Memoir
  • Drafts and revisions
  • Preliminary drawings
  • Sketchbooks
  • Gestures
  • Movement
  • Intersectionality
  • Sovereignty