CFP: Performance Matters Supplemental Issue "Dollyworlds" (Spring/Summer 2027)
Editors: Mathew Arthur, Selena Couture, and Coleman Nye
High heels, acrylic nails, and blown-out platinum wigs. Balmy nights at the Grand Ole Opry and packed rooms in karaoke joints. Working 9 to 5. Jolene’s many lives from Miley to Beyoncé to the White Stripes. Rhinestones and butterflies and straight talk. Free books for kids and a Covid vaccine. Appalachian worlds, Christian worlds, queer worlds, Black worlds—Dolly Parton helped make ‘em all. And we make them with her, too. We will always love you, Dolly.
This special supplemental issue of Performance Matters invites short submissions of 1500 words or less that stay with the sprawling material, theatrical, political, and affective worlds made by, with, and through Dolly Parton. Contributions should get close-up with an object, image, memory, gesture, attachment, performance, phrase, fantasy, or encounter. We welcome text, photos, drawings, collage, screencaps, videos, and other formats that inhabit, commemorate, or speculate Dollyworlds in a critical-theoretical, experimental, funny, grieving, or hopeful tone. We encourage submissions that let small things—trinkets, moments, impressions, earworms, feels—open into larger, boundary-blurring worlds of the materialities of Dolly.
Submissions might consider: camp, comedic timing, cosmetic surgery, contradictions, Country, Doggy Parton, Dolly the cloned sheep, Dollyisms, Dollywood, drag, emotional labour, faith, glamour, Halloween costumes, hotel gift shops, kitsch, impersonators and tribute acts, karaoke, jokes, memes, Miley's Dolly, Miss Piggy, nostalgia, office cultures, one-liners, optimisms, Playboy, radio, riffs, recording studios, regional accents, roadtrips, self-deprecation, sentimentality, sincerity, songwriting, stagecraft, scientific cultures and imaginaries, the grind, the Imagination Library, the rural, Whitney, wigs, working class dreams, feminist joy, queer futures, rethinking reproduction, political divides, citational practices, global circuits, and American roots.
Written submissions should be no more than 1500 words. Creative, multimodal, and other artistic contributions are also welcome and should include a 250-word description. Full submissions should be sent to performancemattersjournal@gmail.com by January 15, 2027 with the subject line “Dollyworlds Submission.” Authors of written pieces will be asked to serve as a peer reviewer for another text in the issue. The issue will be released in Spring/Summer 2027.
