Feral Intelligence (FI): New Queer Approaches to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) // Abstract Deadline: March 15, 2026


Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is not neutral; neither is it generative, nor intelligent. It is a colonial technology of extraction and replication, built on stolen data, racialized labor, and computational enclosures of language and image. It materializes what Ruha Benjamin (2019) calls “the New Jim Code” and what Safiya Noble (2018) has shown as the algorithmic reproduction of white heteropatriarchal order. Queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous critiques of technology have named the body as a site of algorithmic violence and speculative reconstruction (i.e., Chen 2012; Lewis et al. 2021; McGlotten 2013; TallBear 2011). This issue therefore begins not from tacit consent qua fascination with GAI’s creative potential but from its feral undoing—its breakdowns, hallucinations, leaks, and refusals that reveal the violence of its making.

Rather than imagining how queer or feminist approaches might “humanize” AI, this issue recognizes the settler colonial violence intrinsic to techno-solutionism (i.e., Reyes-Cruz et al. 2025, Schwartz et al. 2023) and what Zhasmina Tacheva and Srividya Ramasubramanian (2023) name “AI Empire”—a global formation of hegemony, extractivism, surveillance, and subjugation that reproduces the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism through algorithmic and material infrastructures. The harms of AI, in other words, are structural necessities of empire in that they are violences that render certain lives exploitable, governable, and disposable. Yet communities long cast as vulnerable (Indigenous, Black, queer, trans, and disabled people) also demonstrate ingenuity, alterity, and sustained refusal. Their epistemologies of relationality, sovereignty, and liberatory praxis already articulate what justice in the wake of AI could be. Ferality thus becomes a critical posture of a “data resurgence” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 2023). This resistant epistemic stance tears at the ontological foundations of AI Empire.

We invite pieces for this issue that might ask:
— How do the analytics of queer, crip, and decolonial feminisms expose GAI’s ontological violence?
— What is the AI “black box” problem to QTBIPOC (Hassija et al. 2024; Thalpage 2023)?
— What would it mean to turn “feral theory” toward generative AI (Montford and Taylor 2016)?
— How might we use ferality as a critical disposition to gnaw at, distort, and unmake the epistemic logics of the latest trillion-dollar infrastructure of annihilation?
— How might we ferals refuse GAI’s seductions of optimization and control and reimagine an insurgent “feral intelligence” (FI)?
— How can artists and dreamers remix, corrupt, and/or mourn the machinic?

Data infrastructures feed—have always fed—on the very bodies they invisibilize (Birhane 2020, 2021; Browne 2015; Hanna et al. 2020). Ferality thus becomes both method and ethics. It unsettles the fantasy of detached observation, demanding instead a radical attunement to harm, complicity, and opacity. Ferality names the will to remain unassimilable to the algorithmic order, to let the wildness of relation interrupt the minimalist, sleek contours that mark computational modernity as preordained. GAI does not care for or produce art for anyone without exploitation, and feral queers refuse to be domesticated by the neoliberal fantasies underwriting GAI’s promise to see or represent us. The issue will offer a feral queer critique of GAI to reveal opacity, glitch, and refusal as strategies of endurance and “worlding” beyond the algorithmic horizon (Haraway 2008; 2016).

This issue invites contributions across media (inclusive of scholarship, literature, poetry, visual art, film, and hybrid forms) that:
— disrupt narratives of AI “ethics” and inclusion through queer, transnational, anti-colonial critique
— expose the fascist infrastructures of data extraction and/or surveillance capitalism that use AI to police and annihilate
— theorize (and/or perform) failure, glitch, opacity, or other forms of feral resistance to AI culture
— reimagine knowledge/intelligence, creativity, or digitality unmoored from algorithmic capture and policing
— explore the erotic, affective, or abject dimensions of entanglements with technology
— artistically respond to the violence, seductions, and/or hauntings of (G)AI
— dream speculative, insurgent, and/or decolonial futures into being in which relation, creativity, and care beyond extraction refocus contemporary culture’s techno-solutionism

Proposal Submissions Instructions
— Submit full names, emails, author bios, and abstracts (200–350 words) using this Google form.
— Contributions may include full-length academic essays (≤7000 words); creative pieces (poetry, visual art, short film, zine); or some combination of these.
— For detailed submission guidelines, visit http://www.feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please prepare your submissions using Chicago author date, following the style carefully so as to show respect and cut back on labor for the volunteer editorial staff. Please note that references are not needed at the abstract phase, unless the author wants to include them. Feral Feminisms only considers submissions that are not previously published or under review at other journals. Contributors retain the copyright of their pieces under Creative Commons licensing.
Anticipated Timeline*

CFP for abstract closes: March 15, 2026
Editorial responses: April 15, 2026
Full pieces due: September 30, 2026
Peer reviewer feedback: Winter 2026
Edited pieces due back with guest editor: April 15, 2027
Copyediting: Fall 2027
Anticipated launch: Fall 2027

About the Guest Editor

Dr. Preston Taylor Stone (he/they) is a queer-crip scholar of transnational American studies, comparative ethnic studies, and queer studies. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in American Fiction and the Journal of Modern Literature. They are the Helaine B. Allen and Cynthia L. Berenson Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from University of Miami, after which he has taught at Stanford University, UC Davis, and Santa Clara University. Their current empirical and theoretical work intersects Critical AI and Queer AI to demonstrate how queer theory and ethnic studies offer imperative correctives to the hegemony of extractive white, Western epistemologies that dominate both the infrastructural and economic development of GAI.

References

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity.

Birhane, Abeba. 2020. “Algorithmic Colonization of Africa.” SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law, Technology & Society 18 (2): 389–409.

Birhane, Abeba. 2021. “Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach.” Patterns 2 (2).

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.

Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press.

Hanna, Alex, Remi Denton, Andrew Smart, and Jamila Smith-Loud. 2020. “Towards a Critical Race Methodology in Algorithmic Fairness.” FAT* ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 501-512.

Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Duke University Press.

Hassija, Vikas, Vinay Chamola, Atmesh Mahapatra, et al. 2024. “Interpreting Black-Box Models: A review on Explainable Artificial Intelligence.” Cognitive Computation 16: 45–74.

Lewis, Jason Edward, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite. 2021. “Making Kin with the Machines.” In Against Reduction: Designing a Human Future with Machines, ed. by Noelani Arista et al. http://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2235131/book_9780262367318.pdf.

McGlotten, Shaka. 2014 Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality. SUNY Press.

Montford, Kelly Struthers, and Chloë Taylor. 2016. “Feral Theory: Editors’ Introduction.” Feral Feminisms 6: 5–17. https://feralfeminisms.com/feralintroduction/.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.

Reyes-Cruz, Gisela, Velvet Spors, Michael Muller, et al. 2025. “Resisting AI Solutionism: Where Do We Go From Here?” CHI EA ’25: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Yokohama, Japan.

Schwartz, Reva, Apostol Vassilev, Kristen Greene, Lori Perine, Andrew Burt, and Patrick Hall. 2022. “Towards a Standard for Identifying and Managing Bias in Artificial Intelligence.” National Institute of Standards and Technology. Special Publication 1270. U.S. Department of Commerce.

Tacheva, Zhasmina, and Srividya Ramasubramanian. March 02, 2023. “Challenging AI Empire: Toward a Decolonial and Queer Framework of Data Resurgence.” Advance. https://doi.org/10.31124/advance.22012724.v1.

TallBear, Kim. Nov 18, 2011. “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints.

Thalpage, Nipuna Sankalpa. 2023. “Unlocking the Black Box: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for Trust and Transparency in AI Systems.” Journal of Digital Art & Humanities 4 (1): 31–36.