gender studies and sexuality

How do female characters employ their bodies to navigate, process, and challenge the cultural and socioeconomic structures of their times? Under the antagonistic system where the pursuit of “good life” is no longer plausible, how do women across different cultures, historical periods, and geopolitical contexts respond by utilizing their bodily autonomy and agency? This panel invites papers that critically investigate female bodily representation in the context of empowerment and change. In particular, this panel is interested in literary analyses that focus on the subtle yet tangible (dis)orientation of female bodies in and out of public spaces.

How does lyric address create forms of relation across difference? This panel invites papers examining the intersections of poetry, lyric address, and peacebuilding, with particular attention to coexistence, care, responsibility, witness, repair, and collective life.

Northeast Modern Language Association 58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI, March 6-9, 2027 (Salve Regina University)

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30, 2026 

Please submit abstracts via the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22533

This virtual seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also furnishes a paradigm for thinking—to play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion—Black (non)being singular plural. In Wayward Lives, Hartman suggests that any of the minor figures can stand in for the others, not as a claim of homogeneity, but rather as a contention that their singularity can be read as paradigmatic of waywardness—in its queer heterogeneity—in general. The chorus of black femme and queer youth is thus at once a singular plurality and a plural singularity as they make beautifully riotous lives within the enclosure of social death.

Due to the rhetorical challenges of sharing the unmentionable, infertility is often underdiscussed in both Early Modern society and today. It has discomforted and continues to discomfort theologians, medical practitioners, politicians, scholars, and everyday people trying to build identities through societies deeply founded on the structure of the family. The very concept of family is built around parents and children–what happens when a couple is childless, what happens when the children aren’t materially seen, only known to the parents that lost them before birth? It has historically forced thinkers to grapple with their understanding of life and death, grace and agency, reality and the supernatural.

I would like to invite you to submit an abstract to the TG07 Senses and Society session, “Outside the Climatic Environmental Bubble: Sensing Climate Change at the Margins”, within the XXI International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, which will be held in Gwangju, Korea, from July 4th - July 10th 2027.

Session Description

OVERTONES EGE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

Annual deadline: September 15

NeMLA annual conference: March 6-9, 2027, Newport Rhode Island. Panel is IN-PERSON

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html

The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.

American Conference for Irish Studies Mid-Atlantic and New England Regional Conference 

November 6th and 7th 2026

Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 

Please send abstracts of 250 words to Elizabeth.Redwine@shu.edu by August 28th, 2026. 

“Not a Monoculture”: Ideas of Irishness 


“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.

The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.

Call For Papers for Italian Ecofeminism and Literature

Deadline for Submissions: September 1, 2026

Notification date: October 1, 2026

Full name / Name of organization: Nicole C. (Civitano) Dittmer, PhD

Contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.com

Digital Social Sciences (ISSN: 3078-4980 (Online), 3078-4972 (Print) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research on the transformative impact of digital technologies on society. The journal provides a global platform for scholars, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to examine the opportunities, challenges, and implications of digital transformation across the social sciences.

The Editorial Board invites original, unpublished, and high-quality manuscripts for Volume 3, Issue 2 (2026).

Themes of Interest

Call for Papers and Creative Submissions

Deadline: November 27, 2026

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature publishes articles, book reviews, notes, fiction, poetry, and other creative work in the spirit of or regarding the life and work of Rawlings, her circle, and other authors and artists inspired by Florida.

The journal welcomes submissions from various approaches focusing on Rawlings and Florida in broader contexts, including these topics: