Call for Submissions: Journal of Gender Studies For a Special Issue on Intimate Cities: Body, Gender, and the Politics of Intimacy in Urban Spaces, Abstract deadline- 28 September 2026
Manuscript deadline
Special Issue Editor(s)
Debadrita Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Other Languages and Faculty Fellow, Centre for Asian Studies Fellow, GITAM University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India
chakrabortydebadrita19@gmail.com
Sanjana Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Other Languages and Faculty Fellow, Centre for Asian Studies Fellow, GITAM University, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India
s.chakraborty090296@gmail.com
Aritra Saha, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Other Languages and Faculty Fellow, Centre for Asian Studies Fellow, GITAM University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
asaha2@gitam.edu
Intimate Cities: Body, Gender, and the Politics of Intimacy in Urban Spaces
Cities are often imagined as spaces of anonymity, freedom, and mobility. Yet for gendered, queer, migrant, and marginalised bodies, urban spaces are also sites of intense regulation, surveillance, negotiation, and vulnerability. The fabric of everyday urban existence is woven through the perpetual negotiation of corporeal proximity, manifesting across a diverse topography of social frames, ranging from the hyper-visibility of public transit and the workplace to the regulated domesticity of the home and the mediated intimacies of digital platforms.
This call for papers proposes to explore body intimacy and gender in urban contexts, asking how everyday urban spaces shape intimate bodily experiences and how, in turn, gendered intimacies redefine the meaning of the city. Here, intimacy is understood broadly and inclusively, not confined to sexuality, but encompassing emotional closeness, bodily vulnerability, care, fear, pleasure, self-regulation, and the everyday work of surviving in urban spaces. Streets, public transport, workplaces, homes, clinics, parks, hostels, nightlife zones, and digital-urban interfaces all become arenas where bodies encounter others, negotiate proximity, and manage risk, desire, and selfhood.
The call for papers conceptualises intimacy as both relational and spatial, shaped by power relations embedded in urban design, governance, social norms, and economic structures. Moving beyond understandings of intimacy as confined to private spaces or romantic relationships, the panel foregrounds its manifestation in everyday urban encounters such as negotiating bodily proximity, navigating unwanted touch, seeking care, and carving out moments of solitude or pleasure within densely populated environments.
Gender is approached as an embodied and intersectional category, shaped by caste, class, race, sexuality, disability, age, migration status, and religion. The call is particularly attentive to how processes of urbanisation simultaneously expand possibilities for autonomy while intensifying conditions of vulnerability and precarity, especially for women, men, queer, and trans bodies. Conceived at the Centre for Asian Studies, GITAM (Deemed to be University), this Special Issue seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholarship that critically examines the intersections of intimacy, gender, labour, and urban life across diverse Asian and global contexts.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Negotiating bodily proximity and boundaries in urban public spaces such as transport, parks, workplaces, and clinics
- Gender and surveillance in the city
- Public/private intimacy divide in the city
- Unwanted touch and everyday negotiations of safety
- Queer and trans intimacies
- Dating apps, social media, and digital-urban intimacies
- Migrant bodies and displacement in the city
- Domesticity and intimacy within private spaces
- Pleasure, desire, and the body in urban spaces
- Intersectional experiences of caste, class, race, and sexuality in the city
- Domestic Workers, Care Economies, and Intimate Labour
- Ageing, Care, and Intergenerational Intimacies
- Public Housing, Domestic Space, and Family Intimacies
We are looking forward to contributions from interdisciplinary research fields with a focus on critical understanding of intimacy, labour, urban landscapes, and vulnerability within these spaces. The Special Issue welcomes dialogue between scholars working in fields of literature, sociology, gender studies, urban studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and related fields. The contributions of this Special Issue will aid in shaping and understanding the complex intersectionality between intimacy, gender narratives, and urban spaces and how it impacts the narratives of migrant bodies within an ever-changing social space.
Submission Instructions
Interested authors are requested to submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short biographical note (up to 100 words) for this Special Issue. Abstracts should clearly demonstrate how the proposed paper contributes to the understanding of intimacy and urban spaces in relation to gender studies, cultural studies, and related fields.
Authors should send abstracts (within the deadline) to three of the guest editors at: chakrabortydebadrita19@gmail.com, s.chakraborty090296@gmail.com, and asaha2@gitam.edu.
Following the notification of accepted abstracts, authors will be invited to submit their full-length manuscripts in accordance with the Instructions for Authors available on the journal’s website. When submitting through the online submission portal, please select the Special Issue titled Intimate Cities: Body, Gender, and the Politics of Intimacy in Urban Spaces. Please note that Taylor & Francis supports the responsible use of Generative AI tools that respect high standards of data security, confidentiality, and copyright protection. More information on the Taylor & Francis AI policies, including the uses of AI allowed by the Publisher, can be found here: https://taylorandfrancis.com/our-policies/ai-policy/
