Call for Submissions: Feminist Spaces

Feminist Spaces is an international journal of women's, gender, and sexuality studies that invites students, faculty, artists, activists, and independent scholars from institutions worldwide to submit formal essays, creative writing, and multimodal artistic pieces per our annual Call for Works. The online journal is published and designed independently by our editorial board.​

Originally established in March 2014, Feminist Spaces emerged as the brainchild of the Women's Studies Collective at the University of West Florida. The student-run organization successfully published six issues of Feminist Spaces and hosted 17 annual Women’s Studies Conferences with notable keynote speakers such as Angela Davis, Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Andrea Gibson.

Following a four-year publishing hiatus, Feminist Spaces relaunched and rebranded in January 2021 by a team of graduate students at a university in Florida. After a year of hacking passwords, meeting via Zoom, and digging through ancient editorial files, the editorial team was proud to present a revamped installment and digital facelift of Feminist Spaces.

However, in 2024, Feminist Spaces made the decision to cut ties with our original institution after conservative laws were passed in Florida. Florida regulation 9.016, nicknamed "the anti-DEI regulation," prevents "Social and Political Activism," which is defined in this regulation as "any activity organized with a purpose of effecting or preventing change to a governmental policy, action, or function." The state accused Feminist Spaces, as an openly activist journal, of violating this regulation, thus "threaten[ing] the integrity" of our prior institution. Our options, then, were two-fold: be silenced or break away. The choice was clear.

While Feminist Spaces does not fault the university with which we were previously affiliated for this censorship, we acknowledge that becoming an independent journal is in the best interest of the journal’s mission and our goals as a group of intersectional feminist activists. Independent publication not only allows our editorial board to speak, post, and publish freely, but it also allows us to advocate openly for women's rights by amplifying a larger number of voices of members of marginalized communities globally and exploring a wider range of "polarizing" topics.

We refuse to be silenced, and we refuse to silence you.

Feminist Spaces accepts submissions each year between the months of January and May during our annual Call for Works. New issues are published each summer.

To submit work to Feminist Spaces, please send us an email with your submission to:

feministspacesjournal@gmail.com 

with "Submission [Year]" in the subject line.

All submissions must be sent using an editable file such as .doc, .docx, or .rtf. Please ensure that all written submissions adhere to the guidelines and conventions set forth by the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). Standard essays should be single-spaced at a 12 pt. font. Additionally, all writers and artists should include a third-person biography of less than 150 words with their submission.

For artistic submissions, please send us high-resolution photos as a JPEG, PNG, or link to an online photo sharing platform like Google Drive. All artistic submissions must include a first-person artist statement of less than 600 words which contextualizes the artwork. All art submissions will be considered for cover art for the journal.