Call for papers - Gender and sexual non-normativity in the era of the new moral panic
The editorial team of Przegląd Socjologiczny invites authors to submit original articles for the thematic issue:
Gender and sexual non-normativity in the era of the new moral panic
The social situation of gender and/or sexually non-normative persons is becoming increasingly complicated. The far-right political movement, known as populism or (post)fascism, which is spreading across larger and larger areas of the world, has cast such people as the “universal enemy”. For fascism and nazism in the first half of the 20th century Jews were such an enemy. Today, it seems that so-called “gender” and “queer” persons are becoming the “main threat to the world order”, to the “national good” and to the “moral order” in the propaganda of these movements. The fundamental tenet of the new fascists is to incorporate into the constitution, or at least mandate by law, the recognition that “there are only two sexes” and to abolish marriage equality for LGBTQ+ people.
Sociology (and more broadly: social sciences and humanities) has been dealing with the phenomenon of non-heterosexuality and transgender experience for many decades. Numerous studies on this topic are being conducted around the world, including Poland, and queer studies research are becoming the basis for awarding academic degrees. Unfortunately, the conclusions from these studies, as well as sexological findings, may not be adequately disseminated in the society, since parties proclaiming hostility towards homosexual or transgender people continue to enjoy such strong support.
At the same time, queer people themselves are signalling growing fear and uncertainty in the world of the new moral panic. The stricter anti-LGBT laws in Russia and Hungary, but also in several African countries (for example in Ghana, Uganda and Mali, and a decade earlier in Chad, Gambia and Nigeria) result in prison sentences or even death not only for sexual intercourse with a person of the same sex, but also for identifying as a queer person (as in Uganda), or for belonging to LGBTQ+ organizations (Uganda, Nigeria, Russia). Homophobia and transphobia of female and male politicians translate into an increased atmosphere of discrimination, the emergence of hate speech and hate crimes.
Therefore, three areas become crucial for sociological research reflection. Firstly: the state of and lessons from social research on gender and sexual non-normativity; secondly, the role that LGBTQ+ people and the problem of gender and sexual identification itself play in contemporary public discourses; thirdly, the experiences of queer people themselves in the face of normative backlash, their histories and practices of resistance.
We therefore invite you to submit scientific articles in the following (example) thematic areas:
- new empirical social research on the situation of LGBTQ+ people, their history and their identity;
- common knowledge about gender and sexuality and scientific knowledge (from the social sciences, humanities or medicine) on this topic;
- political strategies of far-right parties towards queer people - dimensions of the fight against “gender”, “queer” and “woke”;
- resistance strategies adopted by non-governmental queer organizations, informal “collectives” or individual queer people;
- the function of sex education in the transmission of scientific knowledge about gender and sexuality - identification of problem areas, examples of good and bad practices in this area;
- stories of queer people from different parts of the world who experience social exclusion or simply hide for fear of imprisonment;
- queer people among migrants and refugees: socio-economic situation and experiences;
- social contexts of transgender transition;
- threats to the mental health of transgender and non-binary people in the face of transgender hate speech;
- social situation of adult and older transgender and non binary people;
- clinical sexology and social sexology in relation to transgender and non binary people;
- phenomenology of transgender;
- sociology of knowledge/science about queer and transgender people.
Please send submissions in English or in Polish until September 30, 2025 to the following email addresses:
przegladsocjologiczny@gmail.com
Information for authors:
https://journals.ltn.lodz.pl/Przeglad-Socjologiczny/information/authors
Editors of the volume:
Jacek Kochanowski, Piotr Laskowski, Grażyna Woroniecka, Marek Czyżewski
