Issue one

In issue one we want to answer the practical questions—printing, binding, distribution, websites, promotion—and give an exciting impression of a modern transfeminism. The pressure is not on to get everything right the first time around. We would like to have some feedback regarding our financial model and become aware of unexpected costs. We want to get a small team of editors and writers in our fil-o-fax. We want you to know what we’re about. 

Issue two

By issue two, we will have some evidence of work which we can show to awards bodies in the unlikely event they wish to fund new transfeminist writing. Grant money, if it appears, will feed into our goal of maximising author fees and attracting thorough, quality writing. 

By looking at the response to issue one and the submissions to issue two we will have an impression of what kind of transfeminist interlocution we’re promoting and how to change to help that. 

Archiving issues

There are some amazing texts by trans women which form sounding boards, touchstones, reference points, and modes of inspection which we have used in editing and writing for WBM. They also only exist online, usually on personal websites or profiles. Archiving is a big part of the mission for WBM and giving these texts posterity and print space in special issues will be a project of an established WBM. Know a gem of transfeminine/transfeminist writing online that you’d be sad to lose? Send it our way and we can contact the author. 

Photo issue

This is a textual journal for several reasons, but one day, a special edition for photography is a project on the cards. 

Critical transfeminist studies

There is plenty written about us from above. WBM, however, exists as a testament to the fact that I and a few others think that transfeminine subjectivities are fruitful points of departure for critical study. Much as considering the woman in her own right and other subjects has birthed fields of study worth their salt, we believe that the same is true for the trans woman when she is liberated from obligations to speak for others and is allowed to speak from below, from and through her position whose sincere acknowledgement is dangerous to the heterosexual project. 

Badly Writing Journal is a titular invitation to ask what transfeminist writing practices could be, an invitation to an écriture transféminine, an insistence on occupying position as literary method; is an invitation to transfeminine studies; is an invitation to a transfeminist philosophy; is a belief in the fruitfulness of trans female subjectivities; is a home, with posterity, for transfeminist texts; is the paper branch of a transfeminist movement. 

Book-length projects

One day!

Replaceability 

Ultimately, however, the main factor of success is the replaceability of the people who do the work. From day zero, one of the jobs of an editor or a writer is to find and train her replacement, and in doing so, allow WBM to exist for longer than a few years. 

Best,

Head Editor