gender studies and sexuality

We invite proposals for an anthology about drag in Appalachia. The collection aims to explore drag’s artistry, history, and cultural power. We welcome scholars, performers, and community storytellers whose work illuminates the region’s queer lineages, traditions, politics, creativity, and beyond. We especially invite pieces that examine drag as labor, community care, spiritual practice, historical reclamation, or engagement with Appalachia’s diverse cultural landscapes.

“Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets”
- ANDY WARHOL

SAVE THE DATE

Alternative Endings:
A Symposium Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman

October 17, 2026

Northwestern University--Downtown Campus
Chicago, Illinois

Join scholars, filmmakers, artists for a one-day symposium commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking film The Watermelon Woman.

The symposium will feature:

• A special panel showcasing previously unreleased alternative endings from the film, with commentary from invited scholars.

• A luncheon bringing together contributors to the film, panelists, and local Black women filmmakers.

Illness is rarely a purely private experience, yet for women it has historically been rendered invisible: sequestered within domestic walls, dismissed by medical institutions, and silenced in the cultural record. This session examines how film and literature in Spanish and Portuguese bring female sickness out of the shadows, transforming what is often hidden and isolated into a site of testimony, intimacy, and meaning.

Proposals for edited book on 21st cent. Women Poets and Resistance

We –a group of scholars and poets– are assembling a collective book on 21st century Women's Poetries, which will be submitted as an edited collection for one of the series at Palgrave Macmillan. Two of our contributors fell down and we are trying to find a couple of good proposals which can be a good fit and complete our collection.

Fantasy has long explored lifeworlds and paradigms outside of societal norms. Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist, declares, ‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ World myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales are early promoters of gender-fluidity, populated by the likes of Inanna/Ishtar; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite; androgynous Dionysus; Ardhanarishvara; Ometeotl; Guanyin; cross-dressing thunder and trickster gods; heartsick seafaring maidens disguised as sailors; and the mercurial ontologies of the Fae. In this issue we will explore how gender is portrayed and explored in Fantasy.

Call for Papers and Artworks

Queer Ecology and the Supernatural 

A Two-day Symposium and Exhibition at Loughborough University 18th-19th September 2026

I seek proposals for brief scholarly essays (3500-5000 words) that provide an overview of a chosen aspect of motherhood in the American imagination for a volume under contract with a new Bloomsbury series called Exploring the American Imagination: Ideals, Values, and Myths in Popular Culture. 

These overview essays should cite a number of popular culture texts to provide an overview of the tensions and contradictions as well as the foundational beliefs inherent in various aspects of American motherhood. If there is an aspect of motherhood that you are interested in discussing, please propose it! Potential topics include: 

2026 Meeting of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

October 29-31, 2026
Embassy Suites Austin Central
Austin, TX

“Justice”

Keynote Speaker: TBA

grounding

recent conversations illustrating the gap between the notion of “living life” and the realities of our day-to-day functioning (often framed as “being in survival mode” or “the difference between surviving and thriving”) have served to underscore the importance of our rituals of pleasure and joymaking. the essentiality of these rituals, as reclamations of agency, methods of healing, and ways of maintaining community, is especially relevant for those throughout the African Diaspora and the broader Third World* global community who identify as femme-of-center. 

Climate change is often discussed as an environmental emergency, but its most profound consequences are social, political, economic, and deeply gendered. The climate crisis does not operate in isolation from existing systems of inequality; rather, it intensifies historically entrenched hierarchies of gender, caste, class, race, labour, sexuality, and power. Women and gender minorities, frequently experience climate change not as a distant ecological abstraction but as everyday reality lived through food insecurity, water scarcity, displacement, unpaid labour, agrarian distress, and precarious working conditions.

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio by June 17, 2026, to participate in a Modern Language Association (MLA) 2027 seminar, "Queer Literary Studies NOW." Seminar participants will precirculate 1500-word papers on the theme, and we will discuss the papers and the larger theme during the seminar on the first day of the MLA 2027 conference. MLA 2027 will take place in Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. Participants must be MLA members and register for the conference.

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature publishes articles, creative fiction and poetry, book reviews, and notes in the spirit of or regarding the life and work of Rawlings, her circle, and other authors who have used the state of Florida as a source of creativity. Submissions of articles that focus not only on Rawlings but also on issues that fit within broader contexts are welcome, including these topics: Florida writing & culture; Gender studies; Literature of place; Regionalism; Race; Eco-criticism and environmental studies.

In addition, the journal seeks submissions of short fiction and poetry, particularly works inspired by Rawlings’s own deep affection for Florida.

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.