About Us
Carved Voices is an annual queer/feminist international digital magazine celebrating and curating creative resistance in solidarity with feminist/queer stories and movements around the world. Curated, designed, edited and hosted by an unlikely twosome: a physicist-feminist-poet and a judge-writer with a criminal law background, it hosts avant-garde and new age wordsmiths, poets, artists, doodlers, music makers, letter writers, authors and creative writers. It believes in art without boundaries and undaunted expression which can be carved into the memories of the masses.
Our first issue was titled ‘Challenging Sensibilities and Deeply Emotional Shit’ and introduced our readers (including ourselves) to the notions of feminist/queer/creative resistance(s). With our second issue, ‘Contours of Identity’, we resisted some more by agonising over our multiple, fluid, ever-changing and contingent identities whilst bringing all those multiple forms of expressions together.
Our third issue titled ‘The Love and Desire Issue’ is currently open for submissions. We are inviting poetry (loads and loads of poetry), art, photography, short stories, letters and essays as contributions. We think it’s time to (un)veil to the world our forms of creative resistance by exploring the notions of love and desire.
The Love and Desire Issue
Our theme for this issue is ‘Love is/as Resistance’. We invite contributors to creatively engage with as well as resist this theme and share with us the multiple uses, meanings, and mobilisations of Love, Desire and Resistance.
As a feminist/queer collaboration, we are looking to undo the (hetero)normative understanding(s) of Love, Desire and Resistance and incorporate the multiplicities, fluidities, tensions, absences and silences which we think are associated with these concepts. We are interested in the intersections of love, desire, resistance with gender, ethnicity, caste, class, religion, nationality and the like. We are all the more interested in post-colonial and de-colonial takes on our theme which decentre and destabilise the dominant and the normative.
We will include personal stories of love which might seem not- gender-normal and explore the thin line between love and desire. We are looking to raise, rather than answer, the following questions:
- What is love?
- Is love resistance?
- What is the fear of love?
- Is there a time and place to love?
- Is there a “way = accepted way” to love?
- How is freedom of expression of genders/sex/castes inherently related to freedom of the manner of their loves in their private vs their publicly curated lives?
- How do we curate our own love stories, or censor the manner we love?
Submissions/Contributions
More specifically, we are inviting contributions dealing with, but not limited to, the below themes:
- (Un)Learning how and who you love and desire
- Love, desire and freedom
- Love, desire and anarchy
- Love, desire and bondage
- Love and desire as social constructions
- Space, Love and Gender (Public, Private and ‘in-between’ love)
- Normal/not-normal/poly/bi/queer/fem/trans love and desire
- (In)Visible Love and Desire
- Love and Desire: ‘Personal’ and ‘Political’
- Digital love and desire
- Godly/divine love and desire
- Familial love and desire
- Jealousy/affection/compersion
Polyamory would be featured as a special feature of this issue, including but not limited to poly poetry, poly love stories, poly erotica, poly abstract art as well as essays expanding on how the very act of a heteronormative love narrative is not inherently “feminist”.
Of course, we will explore all of this using poetry, personal stories, photography, essays, articles and letters people might wish to write to past lovers or future ones, love towards role models, and fiction. We are keen on intersectionality as a cross-cutting theme. This issue will explore the many facets of Love, Desire and Resistance and how these are entangled, highlighting the differences and similarities across the world.
So, please send us your poetry, haikus, landays, essays, stories, projects, artwork, photography and more. Join us in this age-old resistance. Write letters to us, write letters to your lovers through us. Tell us how you love, what you have missed out on, your heartbreaks, your first dates and the hundredth ones, how you have loved more than one person at a time, how you still haven’t fallen out of love from someone, and tell us about your dreams of how love should be.
Join us to love, desire and resist, in this ‘Love and Desire’ issue of Carved Voices. Send us your entries at carvedvoices@gmail.com with the title “submission: The Love and Desire Issue”.
Please send any queries to carvedvoices@gmail.com.
Loving, desiring and resisting,
Team Carved Voices
carvedvoicesmagazine.wordpress.com 