just femme & dandy

a lit mag for & by queers+ on fashion.

just femme & dandy is a biannual literary & arts magazine for and by the LGBTQIA+ community on fashion. We offer a space in the literary & arts world that has yet to exist, and hope to celebrate the queer, trans, non-binary, and intersex community, who have long since coded ourselves with how we adorn and dress our bodies when it has been dangerous to identify solely with words. Until recently, we could only find a handful of models within popular culture and the public imagination to inform our own aesthetic choices, and so the styles (and art) we don and make operate as a patchwork quilt, collaged together with vintage and thrift store finds, our sister or mother’s lipstick and gowns, our father’s neckties and waistcoats.

We offer a space for the LGBTQIA+ community, but one that privileges underrepresented and marginalized writers and artists. Just as we transcend the lines between gender, sexuality, aesthetic, & style, just femme & dandy offers a home for works categorized by the interests of fashion and style rather than aesthetic genre, and we fully encourage and expect works that blur the lines between the written and the visual, the still and the moving. just femme & dandy embraces all the layers of hybridity that push against the tensions that pressure us to conform. Nothing is off limits. To get an idea of what we accept, think of the following, and beyond: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, illustration, drag, dance, video, film, photography, tutorials, interviews, reviews, listicles, thinkpieces, commentaries, historical investigations, and so on. When we say nothing is off limits, we mean it.

just femme & dandy is an anti-racist, pro-Black space. We prioritize submissions from artists of color. We seek work that addresses fashion and style as it relates to the lives of people who are LGBTQIA+, including but not limited to bodypositivity and fatpositivity, mental illness, neurodiversity, chronic illness, disability, non-binary, intersex, artists with intellectual & developmental disabilities (IDD), and transgender lives.

Please check out our current call for submissions! We take submissions for consideration in genderfuckery, sew what, manivestoes, fat + furious, and cancel & gretel. (Submissions open Fall 2023.) We pay 50 USD per text-based submission and *up to 150 USD per multimedia submission (video, photography, image + text, fashion spread + interview, etc.).

Please take a look at our different sections to get a better sense of what we are after. We also take pitches. Email the specific editor(s) and category you believe your submission fits. Please include a short bio of no more than 150 words, your headshot (with an image description), along with a note of how your submission fits either our mission and the particular category you are submitting to for consideration. If your submission includes images or video, please include descriptions for access. We take simultaneous submissions, but please be sure to let us know as soon as your submission has been accepted for publication elsewhere.

Please do not submit any work that engages in violence, sexual fantasies, misogyny, racism, ableism, or other forms of bigotry. We will not publish any creator with a pattern of harmful and abusive behavior, and we will immediately remove work from any creator if such a pattern is exposed after publication. If you don’t think your submission fits our categories, but still falls under the umbrella of LGBTQIA+ fashion, please send it along to addie@justfemmeanddandy.com. We only accept previously unpublished work, which includes online publications and blogs. If it’s been previously posted on a blog, that’s fine, but we would prefer it to be removed from a blog site before publication. just femme & dandy retains first publication rights. After publication, rights will revert back to the creator. Please credit just femme & dandy if the piece appears elsewhere after publication, including but not limited to journals, magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, books, YouTube, Vimeo, and other multimedia platforms. 

This project is funded in part by BIPOC Arts Network and Fund.

This project is funded and supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color cofounded by The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation.