KINK

C157—Spring 2024

Accepted until: November 7, 2023

As “a bend in something straight,” kink gives us an opportunity to question the very conventions of desire. Many of us also recognize our desires, including but not limited to sexuality, and the ways we engage with each other (and non-human matter), as political acts. Kink, after all, is a shape-shifter; a negotiation of desire as it meets with another’s. As desires can also be dehumanizing, kink communities offer other realms in which to unfurl power, as embodied by terms like consent, fetish, and aftercare. In wider contexts, for example, how might representation be fetishized as a stand-in for equity? What consequences do our desires have? Riffing on kink and its cultures, this issue embraces desire in personal, relational, corporeal, and complicated senses. How might we enact kink through art and its practices?

For this issue, pitch us your queerness, indulgences, disobedience, deviance, intimacy, kin in kink, power x desire, and horny aesthetics. Could you fall in love (or lust) again, with your creative practice, or with this shivering world, in all its confrontations? What’s your kink?

Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until November 7, 2023. Review pitches, not required to be on theme, are accepted on a rolling basis.

Send pitches to pitch@cmagazine.com, with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and indicates the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example).

Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones in a style similar to your pitched piece). We do not publish reprints or previously written pieces. Please see our writer’s guidelines for more information.

Thank you for understanding that due to capacity, we are unable to reply to all pitches.

Note about conflicts of interest: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.