Calling all First Gen California Community College, Cal State, and UC students and staff!

Lucid 5 Call for Submissions:Bodies”

In its fifth year, Lucid is now ready to receive submissions from first gen students and staff at all California community colleges, Cal States, and UCs. Our theme for this issue invites us to think about the many ways our bodies occupy space, fill time, confront oppression, navigate disability, create life, and find joy.

Some (not ALL!) ideas for art or writing you might explore include:

  • Shame around disability disclosure; masking; disability justice
  • Living with illness/trying to get around with a cumbersome body
  • Neurodiversity/neurodivergence
  • Covid-19, long Covid, chronic pain
  • The body as site of contagion, fear, avoidance
  • Bodily safety
  • Memory, forgetting, disorientation
  • Conventional systems and policies that determine where bodies go and how they live (education, transportation, voting, medicine, housing, prison)
  • Food and nutrition access  
  • Bodies trapped, limited, imprisoned, detained, forced, exiled (by natural and unnatural disasters, including wars, earthquakes, pandemics, etc)
  • Bodies in motion; mutation, evolution, change, assemblage
  • Bodily matter, decay, death, dying
  • Grief and loss
  • Work/employment and the body
  • Care work (caregiving to children, aging or disabled populations, nurses, EMTs, school aides, ABA therapy, body work–yoga, physical therapy, massage)
  • Organizing bodies (protests, strikes, etc.); bodies politic
  • Addiction
  • Self-medicating
  • Women’s health/reproductive rights
  • Men’s health/negative impacts of patriarchy on the body
  • Race and the body
  • Embodied queerness, gendered/trans/non-binary bodies, and sex/sexuality
  • Birth, giving birth, giving/sustaining life from the body
  • Body adornment (piercings, tattoos, hair, makeup, clothing, etc.)
  • Missing/absent bodies (from the workplace, from homes/buildings)
  • Working from home
  • Relationship between mind and body
  • Impact(s) of technology and cyberspace on the body (virtual reality, avatars, online personas)
  • Body image
  • Body and media representation (in advertisements, social media, film & television)

Email me: To discuss ideas/ask for guidance or if you have any other questions about submissions, reach out to Rachael: collins2@uci.edu.

We will take up to 3 submissions from each contributor in whatever form of creative expression they like (see below for some ideas).

CREATIVE NONFICTION/LITERARY JOURNALISM/PERSONAL ESSAYS: We encourage the use of multiple modes of expression: illustration, recording, photographs, etc.

ETHNOGRAPHY/AUTOETHNOGRAPHY/FIELD NOTES: Note: to be considered, all work involving other subjects must include consent forms.

POEMS, PLAYS, SHORT STORIES, MIXED-GENRE WRITING

RECORDING (AUDIO OR VIDEO): Can be an interview, oral history, a podcast, a monologue, sound art. Feel free to include a written description of the context for the piece. Note: to be considered, all work involving other subjects must include consent forms.

DRAWING, PAINTING, COLLAGE/MIXED MEDIA, PHOTOGRAPHY: Please include titles and any relevant captioning or other description you would like to include

WEIRD STUFF: what does or can function as artistic expression is bigger than the above list.

DEADLINE: JUNE 21, 2024

SUBMIT HERE