Call For Submissions: January 2022

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 January 2022, the theme I have chosen to self-host on the Gender Exploration Carnival WordPress is “Old & New.” The following prompts are merely 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.

Suggested questions:

• How do you approach your past self, which might have been cis-assumed or a different gender? Do you think of them as a separate or different person in some situations? How do you handle ‘talk to your younger self’ exercises?
• How do you approach your future self?
• What do you do with memories, favourite objects, your ‘old’ name, and other things that are aimed at an old version of you? Examples: A formative childhood organisation that only admitted one gender, old diplomas, or a gift with a personalised name.
• Is there anything in particular that you find cultivates your current or future-slash-new self? (Using an example from above, was it meaningful to get a gift with your new name on it?)
• Do you find that thinking of yourself as having ‘old’ and ‘new’ selves is unhelpful?
• This theme was inspired by the New Year, so feel free to go in the direction of resolutions, how lukewarm you are to resolutions, your favourite tradition, your ambivalence to this New Year when you celebrate others at other times of the year, etc.

–

The deadline for submissions is 2 am EST [UTC-5] on 1 February 2022. I will post the round-up around 2 pm on 2 February 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 on Pillowfort [here]. If you have an idea for a theme and would like to host, please leave a comment on Volunteer As Host.