Metrotextuality Journal: The Oral Sex Issue

The Metrotextuality journal is now soliciting submissions for our debut issue on the subject of Oral Sex. Metrotextuality is a quarterly online journal examining scientific and cultural issues in the field of human sexuality. Our goal is to provide a place where academics, artists, and activists can come together in meaningful discussion around one of the most stimulating topics there is - sex. Read more about the journal and view our upcoming issues online at http://metrotextuality.com/journal.

We are seeking artwork, essays, and creative non-fiction on scientific, political, and cultural issues dealing with oral sex. We are not looking for fiction, memoir, or erotica, although we may consider non-fiction that contains some erotic content.

Guidelines:

Art – Individual pieces are welcome, and space is available to be the featured artist of the issue, showcasing a series of pieces along a single theme or style. We seek primarily original images, photographs, etc, but also welcome video and audio submissions. As the journal will be published online, we will also consider interactive digital media, provided that any text content meets the requirements outlined above. We are open to explicit content but seek work which pushes beyond the exploration of arousal into more complex cultural issues.

Essays & Creative Non-fiction – We are looking for both scholarly essays and opinion pieces. Some ideas to consider, although this topic list is by no mean inclusive:

• Is Oral Sex Sex? – We’d love to have a series of essays on this from different perspectives – scientific, political, religious...Surprise us.
• The Blue Dress – Oral sex in the political arena.
• Oral Sex in Cinema
• Oral Sex and Gender - cultural complexities, power exchange, etc.

Ideally written work will be in the 800-1600 word range, but we are open to longer and shorter pieces as well. We prefer work that is previously unpublished. If your piece has been published already, please include a bibliography and, if possible, link to the piece/publication.

Please feel free to query editor@metrotextuality.com with topic ideas before beginning your submission. All pieces should be submitted as attachments – .rtf , .txt., or .doc files for textual work and web-friendly image formats for visual work. Submissions of video or audio work may be sent via email, or you may host your piece online and link us to it for review.

Deadline for consideration of work for the Winter 2010 Oral Sex issue is Sept 1. We welcome early submissions.

Because our debut issue is going to be released for free, online, we are not going to be able to pay for content. If, in the future, we negotiate to reprint your content in a print anthology, there would be compensation.

In addition, we are exploring the possibility of developing featured columns for individuals as ongoing contributors, i.e. "Political section," "Historical Section," "Staff illustrator/artist/photographer" etc. These positions may have future possibility for payment, depending upon the development of the journal.

We look forward to reading!

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When The Black Sheep Meets The Wolf

We'd like to invite you to submit an essay of between 2,000-3,000 words to the anthology we are developing, titled When The Black Sheep Meets the Wolf. With this anthology we will be launching our new publishing venture, Metrotextuality Press. Metrotextuality aims to publish creative and academic voices dealing with difficult questions of identity and culture across a range of literary genres.

Our vision of this anthology is to collect essays that specifically represent the vision of the press - exploring the intersection of outlaw culture and everyday life. Essays will deal with a range of identity issues, including: how people with non traditional identities integrate with the everyday world, the deliberate development and manipulation of controversial identities, dealing with conflicting identities, and living in the spaces between traditional norms. We hope to gather a wide range of voices speaking on gender, sexuality, race, traditionalism, and other controversial topics.

Our goal is for these essays to span the genres of academic publication and personal memoir. We are looking for authors who can tell interesting stories in new and exciting ways, while simultaneously speaking intelligently upon slippery issues. We hope that individual pieces will contain both cited academic research and creative non-fiction narrative; although we recognize that some writers will be more drawn to one type of writing than the other. We encourage you to play creatively with combining voices. We hope the anthology will not only be engaging to a popular audience but also useful to people exploring identity and culture in an academic setting. Finally, although we have a strong appreciation for research and would like to see references and citations included, we do not
want you to get caught up in formal structure at the expense of your personal voice.

We hope that you'll choose to contribute to this anthology and we look forward to seeing your work. We would like to have essays submitted by Oct 31st, with the goal of having the anthology out by BEA 2010.

If we choose to publish your essay, we will pay you for your work. If your essay is published, you can expect a contract detailing the rights we wish to purchase and the amount we intend to pay. It will not be less than $25 and hopefully will be closer to $100, but we don't have a definitive amount as we are still working out funding for the press. Understand that this will be a professional venture, printed and distributed in a professional manner. We believe that paying our authors is the only way to achieve this level of professionalism.

Thank you so much, and we can't wait to read what you have to say. If you intend to submit something, please drop us an e-mail at editor@metrotextuality.com to let us know for planning purposes. The e-mail should describe your ideas for essay topic as well as your background.