Below, please find our special calls for themed issues. To find out more information about our standard issues, please click here.
The Pleasure Issue
Opens for work: May 15th, 2026.
Deadline: June 13th, 2026, Deadline for BIPOC writers: June 20th.
To be published August 20th, 2026.
Please direct work to Christian M. Ivey at christianmivey@gmail.com.
The Pleasure Issue will be an issue interrogating the varying politics of pleasure via the difference between the erotic and the pornographic through flash fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and art. Pleasure does not exist in a vacuum. It could be argued that satisfaction and suffering are happening simultaneously, and both can elicit pleasure. There is the fact that someone’s satisfaction or suffering can be pleasurable as well, and that there isn’t an amount of education or effort that will eradicate racism, homophobia, transphobia, and such. Which leads to what are the relationships between what we fear and desire, and how does how we engage signify these importances? Complicating Queer folks’ relationship to pleasure under white, cis hetero, patriarchal sexual hegemony provides an analysis for the possibility of a radical act, which is not merely having sex or writing about sex, but to add to the clarity of sex and sexuality that is forbidden because of the Law and moral ethic of civil society. Pornography started as text and then adapted to images and then video, as it is commonly associated with today, and has shaped how we determine what kind of sexualities are acceptable and not. With these interrogations of the mundane, this issue will play a part in a long line of Queer folks’ expression and understanding of self-determined states within civil society’s libidinal economies. The works would range from erotica to erotica literature, with bonus points for a strong speculative element.
This issue off beestung will be in conversation with the T4T issue of TSQ edited by Cameron Awkward-Rich and Hil Malatino, Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye & Gomorrah” and Phallos, Darieck Scott’s Best Black Gay Erotica, Audre’s Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, Jennifer Nash’s “Black Anality,” Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony, Tim Dean’s “Lacan and Queer Theory” and Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, Blanche Richardson’s Best Black Women’s Erotica, Tristan Taormino’s Take Me There, Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild and Lilith’s Brood, Eric A. Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence, mayfield brooks’ “Improvising While Black,” Jeffery M. Elliot’s Kindred Spirits, e.e. cummings, Leonard Cohen, Wanda Coleman, Melvin Dixion, Essex Hemphill, HBO’s Real Sex, MTV’s Undressed, and many more explorations of sex and sexuality via text, audio, image, and video of the past, current and future.
Please send written work as a .docx file and art and multimedia work as .png. Flash fiction may be up to 1500 words, and creative nonfiction no more than 3500 words. No more than 3 poems per packet, single spaced.
Please send work for The Pleasure Issue to Christian M. Ivey at christianmivey@gmail.com.
Christian M. Ivey (he/they) is a black non-binary writer, editor, and art director from the eastside of Pontiac, Michigan, who works to interrogate the mundane to illuminate how blackness is overdetermined by social death through a triangulation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, and Afro-pessimism. They are the Digital Communications Specialist for the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and Co-Fiction & Art Editor for Anathema Magazine: Spec from the Margins. He has also guest-edited issue No. 28 of FIYAH Literary Magazine, themed on Belonging; HEXAGON SF MYRIAD Zine on kinship; and The Pleasure Issue of beestung. Christian’s work has been supported by Hurtson/Wright Foundation for Black Writers, Voodoonauts, The Watering Hole, Obsidian Foundation, Tin House, Sundress Academy for the Arts, PREE Studio, Under the Volcano, and more. You can read their work in or forthcoming: Baffling Magazine, beestung , Black Youth Project, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. They are on all socials @ageedubb.