Sinister Wisdom: Butch-Femme Renaissance
Due Date: 12-31-2025
What does butch-femme mean in lesbian and queer communities today? What does it mean to live the pandemic, the surge in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, and the start of a second Trump presidency through the lens of butch-femme? What are butch-femme communities doing locally, nationally, to shape lesbian and queer lives? What sort of butch-femme future are we building together?
Sinister Wisdom’s Butch-Femme Renaissance issue is interested in all genres and styles of writing and visual art from butch-femme-identified lesbian, dyke, queer, gender nonconforming and trans folks. If you live a butch-femme lifestyle or see yourself in butch-femme dynamics—or have something to say about why you don’t—we want to hear from you.
We are especially interested in reported work—interviews with local community groups, Q&As, grassroots organizing features, essays, sex and dating topics, photography, and other visual arts. Here are some ideas:
- Interviews and oral histories with butch-femme movers, shakers, organizers, community leaders, thinkers, and lovers
- Profiles on local organizations, grassroots movements, or justice-seeking initiatives led by and for butches, femmes, studs, stemmes, trans, and gender nonconforming people
- Intergenerational dialogue on butch-femme culture
- Writing on butch-femme sex, love and dating
- Essays (including personal essays) on gender presentation, identity, and “finding your own” (example: the butch boxing class that changed my life, how my wife and I planned our wedding as a butch-femme couple, getting top surgery as a butch, t4t butch-femme dynamics, how you organized and threw a butch-femme book club or fundraiser, etc.)
- Any work that explores power and identity in critical and unexpected ways, especially work that deals with politics, legislation, and systems of oppression explicitly. We’re especially interested in thinking about local and federal anti-LGBTQ legislation, anti-DEI and anti-education initiatives, incarceration, student protests, reproductive rights, healthcare, ID access, and more.
- Any work that questions, tests, or maps the boundaries of butch-femme culture. Where does butch-femme thrash and upend patriarchal expectations, heteronormative social scripts, boredom? Or do you see butch-femme as restricting? As exclusionary along race or class lines? Sing it! The praise and the criticism. We want to hear from you.
The above ideas are primarily for written submissions, but we want your illustrations, your photo journalism, your comics, your photography, your genre-bending and gender-bending best in all categories of art!
We are particularly interested in hearing from BIPOC butch-femme-identified folks and from those who live rurally and/or in red states. International submissions are strongly encouraged and will be prioritized.
Submissions are accepted from 1 July to 31 December 2025 through the Sinister Wisdom Submittable. Please submit one document, even if you are submitting multiple pieces, up to 15 pages. Please include a brief bio and any social media links as well.
Written submissions can be in any language but must include an English translation. You are welcome to use a pseudonym if you are concerned about privacy. Submissions are open to writers and artists of all experience levels, no previous publication required.
Please share this call widely on social media! And direct any questions to sara.gregory91@gmail.com.