Isolation and silence are among the most common conditions for the [cultural] politics of sexual shame...Autonomy requires more than civil liberty: it requires the circulation and accessibility of sexual knowledge along with the public elaboration of a social world that can make less alienated relations possible.

                                                                                                 Michael Warner

BACKGROUND

The SEXTURES idea began at the Homophobia, Transphobia and Hate Crimes Conference jointly organized by the Macedonian Association for Free Sexual Orientation (MASSO) and the Centre for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution (CHRCR) and held at the Macedonian Police Academy in Skopje on 13 and 14 May 2008. For many lesbian, gay and transgender academics and activists gathered at the conference it was a completely surreal experience to be invited to speak at a police academy given their still fresh and painful memories of police harassment, intimidation and humiliation. For queer activists and academics this was a rare opportunity to elaborate their social worlds on their own terms, challenge prejudice, ignorance and hatred, and claim the right to publicly speak about their own sexualities without shame. Under the polite disguise or amused indifference, the hostility among some of the police cadets was still very palpable. Despite this, this was still rare a moment of truth and hope for both police cadets, and queer activists and academics present at the conference. While this was a watershed moment in the history of the gay, lesbian and transgender movement in Macedonia as one of the conference presenters, Zarko Trajanovski, correctly noted, sadly there is/was no regular publishing, institutional, media or an ongoing networking outlet, academic or otherwise, where any of the great stories, issues, debates and ideas generated in the discussions during the conference could be further followed up and developed with love, care, tears and fury into theoretical (scholarly), applied research, activist, training, cultural, art, legal reform or policy projects, and thus keep the fire burning both in the country's lesbian, gay and transgender movement and the intelligentsia that support it theoretically and practically.

The conference only further highlighted the institutional, academic and publishing homelessness and precarity of the queer movement and sexuality (and gay and lesbian) studies in Macedonia, which we also believe to be the case in most countries of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. While MASSO, and many other LGBTQ activist organization in these regions, have made some insanely brave steps in claiming the right of gays, lesbians and transgender people to speak for themselves in the public arena, queer academics and their allies, due to a lack of a regular forum to practice new types of non-homophobic thinking and writing, struggle to develop their own theoretical and discursive resources to effectively intervene in the sexuality debate still dominated by homophobic academic discourses and sexual shame. In discussions between Zarko Trajanovski, Slavčo Dimitrov, Suzana Milevska, and Alexander Lambevski the idea for SEXTURES was hatched as a response to this situation.

WHY SEXTURES?

The lack of dedicated publishing spaces for academic work in sexualities studies in Central-Eastern Europe is perhaps one of the main contrubuting factors for the scarcity of resarch in this area. Although there has been some room for publishing queer and feminist works in the area of sexuality in feminist journals in the region, the subject still plays a predominantly side role in the debates dominating the more established, although still fledgling, gender or women studies in the more conservative countries of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. In many respects, publishing writings in the area of sexuality, whether from a queer, feminist or some other perspective has largely depended on the good will of regional feminist journal editors for whom sexuality is not a priority. Some of these editors have also expressed open or disguised reticence to publish more honest or "confronting" accounts of queer sexualities, perhaps for reasons I mention below.

Sex and sexuality are far too important part of social life in these regions to be treated as an episodic intrusion into "more important, pressing or respectable" academic, cultural, artistic and political agendas. The study of sexuality in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent in Central Europe, is still firmly enveloped in the shroud of what Warner calls the cultural "politics of sexual shame." The aim of SEXTURES is to help fill the abovementioned gap in sexualities studies by making a decisive incision in this shroud using the inherently democratic nature of the internet, and its ability for instant viral spread of knowledge and information, to break the isolation and silence of many exciting new students of sexuality in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Sexuality studies here need their own impetus coming from the right balance of creative chaos and organized structuring of its own multiple research agendas, and SEXTURES aims to provide a hypertextual forum for this.   

Also, there are good theoretical and political/practical reasons for separating the study of sexuality from the study of gender, although gender will always remain as an important component in studying sexuality. As Eve Kossofsky Sedgwick reminds us, "[t]he study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender, correspondingly antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminist inquiry. Sexuality extends along so many dimensions that aren't well described in terms of the gender of object-choice at all."

The World Health Organization defines sexuality as a "central aspect of life at all ages and encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction. Sexuality is...experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, bahaviors, practices, roles, and relationships. Although sexuality can include all of these dimensions, not all of them are always experienced or expressed. Sexuality is influenced by the interaction of biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural, ethical, legal, historical, and religious and spiritual factors."

It is for these reasons that sexuality is such a monstrous object of study from the point of current, dominant and well-disciplined forms of knowledge, since it is, as Robert Hodge lucidly points about other monsters of knowledge, "so huge, so amorphous and with such potent effects." Homosexual panics, fears of female sexuality, and AIDS panics are just some of the more recent virulent effects produced by dominant heterosexist epistemologies.

Human trafficking, enslaving women into forced prostitution, widespread sexual violence against women, the spread of the HIV and HEP C virus in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the grinding transitional poverty and lack of life opportunities that pushes people into dependent alcohol and drug use habits supported by sex work, organized and exploited by various criminal networks, are just some of the monumental challenges to dominant forms of social and political knowledge in these regions. There are so many different disciplinary or transdciplinary points of entry into something as complex as these phenomena. Their complexity is so vast, as Robert Hodge notes, "creating a pressure to follow up other lines, find other connections with other sources of data, other methods of inquiry, other disciplinary areas." Resisting these pressures often leads to "disciplined" work that does not have a grip on the problems it attempts to grasp. Often this "disciplined" view systematically denies or glosses over whole classes of factors, producing work that is both highly partial and irrelevant.

Apart from the epistemological unpreparedness of the established academia in the Balkans and Eastern Europe to tackle these issues, the callous failure (and indifference) of many governments in these regions to address the linkages between violence against women and girls, violence against and intense stigma attached to gays, lesbians and transgender persons, poverty, lack of life opportunities, injecting drug use, sex work, and the spread of HIV and HEP C means that they also fail to formulate and implement a research, policy and legislative agenda that gives priority to securing basic human rights for these people like the rights to life and health.

To take seriously these problems, beliefs and experiences that are annulled by dominant epistemologies, government indifference, outright social hostility and ignorance of the majority and the privileged, means practicing (transdisciplinary) scholarship that can feel dangerous, troubling and very lonely. We hope that with the establishment of this virtual forum the practicing of transdisciplinary research on sexualities would feel a bit less lonely and scary. The transdisciplinarity of SEXTURES is inspired by the best of the liberal and Enlightenment tradition, even though at the same time it questions its claims, limits and history. Our aim here is to provide a free, independent, democratic, easily accessible and open space for debate in the area of human sexualities in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and to speak in terms of ethics, justice and freedom for the women and (sexually) marginalized people of these regions.

SEXTURES - CALLING WRITERS, EDITORS AND READERS

So against the fortress of hetorosexist epistemological biases of the established academic institutions in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, limited spaces for written expression, research, dialogue and debate, and hostile disciplinary police, SEXTURES offers a seedling of hope. We hope that the global reach of the World Wide Web will attract intellectual migrants not supported by the traditional infrastructure of established national academic institutions. This is an especially welcoming forum for readers and writers who are carving out a precarious existence as artists, intellectuals, critics, activists, and writers at the margins of national and global(ized) cultures.

As we mentioned earlier, SEXTURES is intended to be a rhizomatic and perpetually unfinished. How SEXTURES develops will depend on the creative energies of the people who get involved in it. Part of the website will be organized like a virtual, perpetually unfinished series of conferences or workshops on various topics related to research into regional (and global) sexualities. Work-in-progress, previously published, discussion and concept papers will be very welcome here. If you think you have an interesting idea for a thematic strand that you will like to edit, please let us know. You will have the freedom to edit your thematic strand as you see it fit.

So, with a few intellectual references to the humble beginnings of this project, we invite academics, artists, writers, and activists from all over Europe and the world to join us in our struggle to carve out a new transdisciplinary and multimedia home for works in the area of sexuality in the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe.

PUBLISHING IN SEXTURES

Previously unpublished papers that have gone successfully through a peer review process will be published in the SEXTURES e-journal. All publications published on the website will be free to access, and free from the delays and costs associated with hard-copy publishing. Everything that will be published, whether in a thematic strand or issue of the e-journal, will not be closed or complete, more things can be added, or linked together at any time. Being true to the hypertextual nature of the World Wide Web, our aim is to encourage the constant reconfiguring of the author, allowing readers to post their thoughtful, helpful, lucid and constructive feedback, comments and questions alongside published essays in the e-journal or any of the thematic strands of the virtual forum. Writers, if they wish so, can decide to comment on readers' comments, thus continuing the weaving of the textual web of knowledge and deeper understanding. As Lyotard reminds us, the very relationship between the author and the reader is a hypertext, since "no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of [decentered] relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before."

We need your ideas, thoughts, writings and artwork. Please remember that we have very limited administrative resources, so please read our guidelines for contributors first. The guidelines will tell you about what sort of materials and ideas we want to pursue here. However, the guide is just that - a guide. If you have a great idea which is not covered in the guide, please let us know.

SEXTURES is entirely run by volunteers and receives financial support form Mandrake.ATM. SEXTURES is published in English, although authors can submit versions of their contributions in other languages, which will be published alongside the English language version of their contribution. Please remember that SEXTURES has no resources to check that content submitted in languages other than English is up to publishable standard.

Now, please come along and join us on this adventure. Enjoy SEXTURES, read it, write for it, criticize it, debate in it, and spread the word about it. May it be the resource to think the Impossible.