Call For Submissions: February 2021

The Gender Exploration Carnival is one of several blogging carnivals – an event where a host blog puts out a theme for the month, participants create content and share the links with the host, and the host posts a round-up at the end of the month. For more information, you can check out the FAQ page.

For February 2021, the theme I have chosen to self-host here on the Gender Exploration Carnival WordPress is “Questioning.” If you’ve looked at the post for the Prior COTB Themes, you may recognize some of the prompts under ‘Questioning and Exploration.’ I’d like to remind participants that the following prompts are suggestions, and you are not required to answer one question (or all of them) in order to participate as long as your submission is connected to the theme (Questioning).

Suggested prompts:

• Have you questioned an aspect of your gender (presentation, expression, or gender identity itself) at some point in the past, or are you currently questioning? Is answering this complicated by not understanding gender, being indifferent, being closeted, not having a stable or static gender, or have more than one gender?
• How did you hear about non-cis identities? How did you hear about non-binary identities? Did that start your questioning, or did questioning come later?
• How did (or do) you explore your gender? Did (or do) you find any particular subcultures, communities, or spaces helpful for questioning and exploring your gender?
• What is your goal towards your relationship with your gender? Does it vary between a means of presentation, expression, or finding a label that feels most accurate to you? Does it vary between in-person and online spaces? (For example, you would like to explore presentation without having to pick a certain label, or you don’t particularly care about in-person presentation while wanting online expression and labels to be accurate.)
• Do you have self-doubts or external pressure that makes gender exploration a difficult topic? Is it more around one area over another – presentation, expression, or using a particular label?
• Have you found that the Covid-19 lockdown measures have had an impact on questioning an aspect of your gender? This question has been inspired by this particular tweet:

{Image description: A tweet from user “roro (my mistake oh my mistake)” (@/fuglibetty) dated 22 Aug 2020: the amount of ppl coming 2 terms w gender identity over lockdown really proves how social interaction is inseparable from gender performance like… the moment ur isolated from constant promotion of gendered behaviour u have the space to question what it even means for u. /End description.}

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The deadline for submissions is midnight EST [UTC-5] on 1 March 2021. (This would be 11 pm CST, 10 pm MST, or 9 pm PST on 28 Feb 2021; going forward, this would be 5 am UTC on 1 March 2021.) I will post the round-up around 2:30 am EST on 1 March 2021 and will accept late submissions until then. You can submit an anonymous entry for this month by emailing genderexplorationcarnival@pm.me (the post will be self-hosted here on WordPress), or you can leave a link to your submission in a comment on this post. There is a corresponding Call for Submissions on Tumblr [here], and when Pillowfort is available, a link to its Call for Submissions will be added to this post.