Call for Papers — MARCH 14, 2025

CHRONIC: living with chronic illness

WSQ, spring 2026

Issue Editors
NANCY K. MILLER, The Graduate Center, CUNY
TAHNEER OKSMAN, Marymount Manhattan College

In late December 2023, Giorgia Lupi, an information designer, published a long illustrated essay in the New York Times Opinion section titled “1, 380 Days: My Life With Long COVID.” “Long COVID,” she writes, “is a physical affliction, but chronic illness, stretching over months and years, has a way of picking apart your mind and breaking your heart. It is a constant deluge of pain that slowly strips you of everything you used to be by taking away everything you used to do . . . and, eventually . . . the ability to imagine a future without harsh physical limits.” The reported suffering of those like Giorgia Lupi who live with long COVID has brought into the spotlight the many chronic illnesses Americans endure—notably ME, myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), from which primarily women suffer. Thanks to innovative treatments, especially over the last decade, some cancers have also become manageable chronic illnesses.

In contrast to acute or terminal disease, chronic illness—which includes mental illness—takes many forms over a lifetime: chronic with pain, chronic without pain, chronic with a medical diagnosis or without one (conditions that resist clinical documentation), chronic that is life-limiting or life-threatening, with progression, progression free, or stable, visible or invisible. There is not one chronic experience.  

This special issue of WSQ takes this contemporary phenomenon as our point of departure to consider the social, affective, and political consequences of living with chronic illness. We are soliciting essays, personal and researched, that reflect this variety and that map the critical and scholarly intersections of chronic illness with disability and critical race studies, notably in relation to lupus, but also related to health and healthcare issues. These might include, for example, issues primarily affecting Black women, including access to diagnosis and treatment of various cancers, notably gynecological ones. Though we will consider all approaches, we welcome work theorizing from the first person, whether in poetry, essay, comic, or hybrid form. Questions about chronic illness align as well with care, affect, and feminist eco-theory, which help illuminate the literary, social, and philosophical implications of what it means to be living one’s life in an ill body. To document the surprising variety of expressions of the lived experiences of chronic illness, we hope to include pieces that in some way grapple or experiment with the visual, whether through data visualizations, graphic representations, photography, or other media. (See guidelines below for more details.)

We see this project, in the spirit of the journal’s history, as transdisciplinary in conception, accessible and experimental at a variety of levels, and committed to the public good.

At the same time, we want specifically to explore new ways to live with and understand the challenges of chronic illness, and in the process, following activism and scholarship in the fields of health humanities and graphic medicine, we also hope to propose new paradigms of health and healthcare.

Submissions might attend to some of the following:

• definitions and themes of the chronic in the twenty-first century: diagnosis, disability, medical infrastructure, autoimmune disease, comorbidity, chronic and crisis (as in the case with COVID-19)

• discussions and/or representations of/discourse around chronic illnesses such as COVID/long COVID, HIV/AIDS, Lupus, ME (CFS), Lyme, diabetes, stroke, arthritis, heart disease, and cancer

• advocacy and community: What are the challenges of living in relation to what philosopher Havi Carel calls “social architecture”? What different/alternative communities/illness mentorships exist? How do different illness communities advocate for their specific needs? What role(s) are played by factors like gender, race, religion, sexuality, etc.?

Other topics may include but are not limited to:

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Priority Deadline: March 14, 2025

Scholarly articles should be submitted to WSQ.submittable.com. Upload one Word document that includes the anonymized, complete article. Directly in Submittable, not as an attachment, please write a cover page that includes the article title, abstract, keywords, and a short author bio. Remove all identifying authorial information from the file uploaded to Submittable. Scholarly submissions must not exceed 6,000 words (including un-embedded notes and works cited) and must comply with formatting guidelines at feministpress.org/submission-guidelines. For questions, email the guest issue editors at WSQEditorial@gmail.com.

Artistic works (whose content relates clearly to the issue theme) such as creative prose (fiction, essay, memoir, and translation submissions between 2,000 and 2,500 words), poetry (3 poems maximum per submitter), and other forms of visual art or documentation of performative artistry should be submitted to WSQ.submittable.com. Note that creative submissions may be held for six months or longer. We do not accept work that has been previously published. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if the editors are notified immediately of acceptance elsewhere. Visual artists are also asked to submit a document containing captions for all works (including title, date, and materials), an artist’s statement and a short bio, each 100 words or less. For questions, email the guest issue editors at WSQEditorial@gmail.com.

For works that are difficult to categorize, including those that fall between academic articles and personal narratives or creative essays, please choose the hybrid works option on Submittable, and explain the nature of the work in your cover page. Please especially indicate whether the work requires academic peer review.

All submitters please note that if your submission contains images (including images embedded into a larger article or essay) please include them as separate attachments of 300dpi or more. Please also include a short bio and current email address [all submitters, directly onto the Submittable form, not as an attachment] as well as an artist’s statement and image caption [visual artists] or an abstract and keywords [academic submissions].

About WSQ

Since 1972, WSQ has been an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of emerging perspectives on women, gender, and sexuality. Its peer-reviewed interdisciplinary thematic issues focus on such topics as Unbearable Being(s), Pandemonium, Nonbinary, State/Power, Black Love, Solidão, Asian Diasporas, Protest, Beauty, Precarious Work, At Sea, Solidarity, Queer Methods, Activisms, The Global and the Intimate, and Trans-, combining legal, queer, cultural, technological, and historical work to present the most exciting new scholarship, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, and visual arts on ideas that engage popular and academic readers alike. WSQ is edited by Shereen Inayatulla (York College, CUNY) and Andie Silva (York College and the Graduate Center, CUNY), and published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Visit feministpress.org/wsq.