Submissions

Call for Work:

AAB issue 5 / Summer 2015 / Can’t Live With Em, Can’t Kill Em!

abaab: a key, to open with something, unlock,
release, loosen
aabaabika’ige: s/he unlocks

and we never get to

aabawe wendomoowin: to forgive, to warm up to or to
loosen one’s mind, to loosen or unlock one’s feelings

– Leanne Simpson, from Islands of Decolonial Love

What does it mean to be against the couple-form? We understand the couple-form to mean something modelled after a compulsory heterosexual unit, mediated by property relations, untempered by the concerns of friends, and always used to subl(im)ate our relationships with our mothers. In “Against the Couple-Form” Clémence X. Clementine and Associates from the Infinite Venom Girl Gang’s manifesto calls for us to take our hemorrhaging vaginas to our wedding dresses and, then, after the stain sets, start a feminist reading group. Pardon the sarcastic tone (is it possible to read tone anymore?), but a feminist reading group is not enough. And a blood-stained dress is irrelevant. Relationships are complicated. Non/fucking is political. Abstain from or fuck politics.

Our initial project description for “The Couple-Form: Against Shared Email Accounts” posed such questions as:  How do we develop our own way of thinking about the couple-form, without reverting to those tried and true ways of critique and discourse? How can we draw on our personal experiences as a grounding of our critique, without reverting to a discussion of lifestyle choices? Is there a way to abolish the “basic” couple-form without oversimplifying the messiness of relationships? How can we assert our agency and subjectivity when we “prefer not to,” to be prudish killjoys of compulsory sexuality? Is there a way to be a sexually free subject without reasserting second wave feminist sexual politics? Is there a way to pervert the couple-form, a form that is already perverted? How does participating/not participating in a couple formation actually respond to the larger societal structures of capitalism, racism, and, of course, patriarchy? And, finally, as we are bound up in the culture that patterns daily life, how can we consider the couple-form that isn’t just deeply personal, but really political?

Now, we are looking for work that seeks to engage with these aforementioned questions, the readings we co-curated for this summer’s project, discussions and disputes that were had and not forgotten, the write-ups we post online, and, of course, with About a Bicycle at large.

Submission Guidelines:

AAB publications are an extension of the cumulative experience of our sessions together.  The journal is another way to participate and play. Please submit something you would like to include, which could be on any of the topics discussed during the sessions, either explicitly or peripherally.

A submission may include: poetry, experimental prose, images (drawing, photography, painting, etc.), an interview, a graph, an essay, a story, a map, or anything that can be represented on paper.

We ask all submissions be 7 pages or less.

All submissions must include the author name and title of the work, along with any additional information you would like incorporated into its representation, i.e., orientation, presentation.

Text: send all text as a .rtf or .doc file format. If there are typographical concerns or embedded text/images also send a .pdf alongside the recommended format. If your submission consists of text and images, please ensure the images are embedded at 600 dpi or are high resolution.

Images: Send images at 600 dpi as a .jpeg or .psd file format or high resolution.

Send submissions to Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad at: aboutabicycle@gmail.com by August 31, 2015.