gender studies and sexuality

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?

The rise of the superhero is one of the most significant cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 (April 18, 1938), superheroes have evolved from colorful comic-book figures into powerful global symbols that shape conversations about politics, morality, identity, technology, gender, race, mythology, trauma, and resistance. What began with the imaginative vision of Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon spanning comics, film, television, literature, gaming, digital media, and academic discourse.

I want to be accepted by society…live in a world I don’t have to hide in…make choices without being in constant fear of them destroying me or the ones I care about.” (Ada, liberated TanakX5 robot, on her hopes and dreams. Alex + Ada, Book 11)

Call for Chapters – Edited volume

The Cultural Life of Beds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Materiality, Bodies and Power

University of New England, Australia

For publication with an international publisher

Title: “Second only to Shakespeare”? Middleton 400

Dates (provisional): 28-29 October 2027

Place: University of Naples “L’Orientale” – ARGO Research Centre (Interuniversity Research Centre for the Study of Argumentation, Pragmatics and Stylistics)

Organisers: Daniela Guardamagna and Tommaso Continisio 

Deadline for abstract submission: 31 December 2026.

Send to:

guardamagna@lettere.uniroma2.it

continisio@lettere.uniroma2.it

Women's writing emerged as a critical category in response to the historical exclusion of women from literary canons and archives. The recovery of neglected texts, authors, and traditions has transformed literary studies, creating new genealogies of reading and interpretation. Yet the category itself raises important questions. Does the designation "women's writing" continue to serve as a productive framework, or does it risk reinforcing the very marginalization it seeks to address by positioning women outside the literary mainstream?