gender studies and sexuality

TITLE: Siri Hustvedt, Gender, and the Critical Medical Humanities

Rationale and Scope

Historically, disabled people have relied on community care for kinship and survival in an unaccommodating, if not hostile, world. These communities of care allowed disabled individuals and their allies to scaffold support structures outside of social services that demanded compliance and relied on charity. Disabled communities have often coalesced at the fringes of society in asylums, freak shows, and other institutions. Even so, the stereotypical understanding of disability is that of passivity, isolation, and dependence rather than action, community, and interdependence.

The Techno-Material Rhetorics of Food and Cooking Collection Editors 

 The Carson McCullers Society proposes the following two panels for the 2027 American Literature Association conference to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 26-29, 2027. The work of graduate students and early career scholars is particularly encouraged and welcomed.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Erin Bell at bellee@udmercy.edu and Melanie A. Marotta at mmarotta@georgiasouthern.edu by January 8, 2027 and include ALA Proposal in the email subject line. These panels will be in-person only.

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)

The figure of the woman traveler has long occupied a distinctive place in the cultural imagination. At once celebrated and contested, she has been represented as explorer, observer, adventurer, ethnographer, journalist, tourist, and pilgrim—but nearly always an antidote to feminine domesticity.

We are currently seeking contributors from across the disciplines for a proposed collection of essays on “the woman traveler.” This volume will explore the enduring and evolving cultural figure across genres and media—from travel writing and photography to film, blogs, Instagram, and TikTok.

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.