Call for pitches: MEAT

Pitch us by December 3, 2023

We’re calling for pitches for our forthcoming MEAT issue. Please read or pass on the brief below if you’re interested in pitching or know someone who might be. We are accepting story ideas at pitch@feministfoodjournal.com until midnight CET, December 3, 2023.

Learn more about how to pitch by reading our full guidelines here. 

Meat. The word evokes identity, taste, dominion. Meat speaks of flesh, of consumption, of commodities, of tender rearing and violent butchery. Our MEAT issue aims to explore meat in its myriad forms — animal product, innovation, metaphor, symbol, ideology — from intersectional feminist perspectives. 

We’re fascinated by analyses of the (contested) role of meat in sustainable food transitions, the links between meat production, capitalism, and the subjugation of female and femme bodies, and the gendered brutality of industrial livestock production. We’re also in a moment where many of us are paying attention to meat and its unsustainable consumption as a symptom of other oppressive systems, a relationship that feminist thinkers like Mary Shelley, Carol J. Adams, and Angela Y. Davis have made clear to us throughout the ages. 

Much has been said lately about the forthcoming “protein transition” from animal to alternative sources, as a means of reducing livestock’s giant share of global greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. What does that mean for food cultures and the women who traditionally carry them forth? How do socially prescribed versions of masculinity prevent these transitions from taking place, or actively fight against them? How do meat production and consumption intersect with the forces of historical empire and present-day neocolonialism and nationalism? Just like queering milk, what does, or could, it look like to queer meat? How does our current hyper-digital age influence how we think about all of this? Centrally, what becomes meat, how, and why?

In light of these questions, we’re looking for fresh feminist takes on:

• The dynamics between meat consumption and patriarchy, racism, speciesism, and ableism

• Defining and consuming meat according to ideologies, political agendas, community identity, or religious beliefs

• Farming, rearing, killing, transporting, and eating

• Deities and animal sacrifice

• The (historical and/or changing) role of meat in food cultures and cooking practices

• Meat as fashion

• Meat, climate change, and food systems transformation

• Sexualization, feminization, and the rendering of bodies into meat 

• Animal liberation activism and animal welfare policy

• Hunting

• Pets and what we feed them

• Cannibalism and fetish (in literature, life, or pop culture, i.e., Armie Hammer)

• Pornography

• Alternative protein futures and their intersections with race, gender, and class

• Critical histories of meat production and meaning-making

• Social media representations of and influence on meat (non)consumption

These topics could be tackled through personal essays, narrative or reported pieces, literature or film reviews, cultural commentary, poetry, creative writing, video, audio — we’re interested in it all!

Please send your ideas to pitch@feministfoodjournal.com by midnight CET, December 3, 2023. Get in touch with us if you have any questions in the meantime, or check out our full pitch guidelines here. We currently pay a flat rate of US$130 per piece. 

If you know of someone else who might want to write for us, please pass this on!

We’re looking forward to hearing from you.