gender studies and sexuality

With the arrival of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century also came the modernist novel. The beginning of the twentieth century constitutes a period when women struggled with social expectations but decided to leave their own drawing rooms and discover the world; to be power brokers, instead of passive observers; and to gradually move from their interiority to making history. By comparing novels of women writers, both in the US and abroad, this panel attempts to find, in their similarities and differences, the real issues that women faced at the turn of the century, in novels that transitioned from realism and naturalism to modernism.

Reading, Writing and Translating Early Modern Women’s Fiction: Imagined Communities

Guest editors: Line Cottegnies (Sorbonne Université) and Sonia Villegas-López (University of Huelva)

Gender and Fragmentation in the Fin de Siècle 

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Summer 2027

Guest Edited by Emily Waller Singeisen and Ryan Carroll

European Comic Art invites proposals for a special issue on ‘Francophone Graphic Narratives/Bande dessinée: Authority and Resistance’. This issue will examine how francophone graphic narratives engage with, challenge, and reimagine authority in its many forms – political, cultural, institutional, and aesthetic – and how they forge practices of resistance and dissent.

This panel will explore Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and related texts at MLA 2027 Convention in Los Angeles. Please send your 250 word abstract on relevant themes like homecoming and the oceanic by August 30, to Ennuri Jo (she/her) at ennurijo@upenn.edu. 

Christopher Nolan’s much-awaited film The Odyssey was released in IMAX on July 17, 2027.

Call for Papers (CFP)18th SAAS Conference: Negotiating Identity and Power: Resistance, Rebellion, and Resilience in U.S. Literature and CultureUniversidad de Oviedo, Spain | March 15–17, 2027Panel Title:Speculative Ontologies: The Posthuman, the Eerie, and Cultural Memory in US Media and NarrativesPanel Chairs:

LAST CALL! EXTENDED DEADLINE! This panel examines how writers challenge dominant structures of authority in/through narratives of sexual violence. Legal and cultural frameworks often dictate how sexual violence is recognized, narrated, and believed, shaping whose stories are legible and whose are dismissed. This session explores how survivors and writers resist these constraints through alternative narrative strategies, fragmentation, silence, poetic form, visual storytelling and more. It attends to how narrative operates as a site of power, shaping not only representation but the conditions under which sexual violence is acknowledged, legitimized, or denied.

Jordan Peele’s Us is a critically acclaimed horror original about government-manufactured clones that are forced to mimic the lives of the people who live on the surface like stringless puppets. While Peele focuses more on a physical tethering, there is a psychological tethering that can be gleamed from this piece, specifically as it relates to the idea of double consciousness. In his work “The Striving of the Negro People,” W.E.B. Du Bois describes this idea as “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt or pity.

This session invites 15-20-minute papers that attend to the partial and resistant ways queerness and transness emerge in medieval archives. Torn pages, smudged images, misplaced marginalia, and fragmentary traces all signal forms of queer archival participation. In reimagining archival potential how might medievalists access, interpret, or refuse archival legibility? Contributions may address explicitly socio-political queer identities and communities, as well as approaching the archive itself as a site structured by both queer and trans abundance and absence.

Human machine interfacing can be as simple as pressing a button or as complex and entangled (also entangling) as inserting a brain chip into the skull. science fiction. Humans with implants, prosthetic and hybrid humans with electronic and mechanical extensions are yet another level are no longer science fiction.  Yet, human-machine interfacing has started long before the invention of these technologies. Machines did communicate with us and tell us about themselves even before chatbots were invented. The clanking of a hammer on the anvil tells us that it is old and dull. The whistle of a microwave tells us that dinner is ready. The process of interfacing is not a one-way process. Through it, humans also communicate with the machine.

The "White World," as defined by Walter Rodney, determines who is white and who is black. To this, we add that the White World also dictates which women are enslaved and which may be free. It is difficult to envision the possibility of women’s liberation in the Global South without the complete dismantling of colonialism and Western imperialism. While women in many post-colonial patriarchal nations are exploited in myriad ways, it is a mistake to imagine that this exploitation—and the patriarchal mentality of the post-colonial world—is not profoundly shaped by Western influence. Many African and South American nations continue to funnel their resources to the West while their own populations suffer from hunger.

Project Overview and Rationale

“To be or not to be”—Hamlet’s timeless question of existence—resonates with a gendered undertone that continues to echo through literature and culture. This panel asks a related question: what does it mean to be (or not to be) a man, and how do literary texts help illuminate that question across genres, periods, and geographies?

In bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), she posits that “many folks feel no sense of place” (1). She continues by explaining her personal experience with this spatiality, noting that, “Like many of my contemporaries I have yearned to find my place in this world, to have a sense of homecoming, a sense of being wedded to a place” (2). To that end, a commonality shared between all humans is a searching for a place in which we belong, and this is particularly evident in literature that is produced during times of major societal events.