gender studies and sexuality

CALL FOR CHAPTER CONTRIBUTIONS

Gender and Health in South Asia

An Edited Volume

Edited by Dr. Sakshi Srivastava & Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Assistant Professors Chandigarh University

Call for Papers

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan has expressed interest in this book project.

On June 8th of this year, FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, lost our founder and Editor-in-Chief Dr. Batya Weinbaum.  Dr. Weinbaum founded the journal in 1997 to fill a scholarly niche at the intersections of feminist theory and scholarship and literary scholarship in the realm of speculative fiction.  Since publishing the journal's first issue in 1999, Dr. Weinbaum has served as Editor-in-Chief and as the head of the volunteer collective that manages the journal.  The journal was the fruit of her creative effort, and it is thanks to her vision and leadership that the journal has published academic scholarship and creative writing for over 25 years.

The idea of home is curious concept for African Americans. Though integral to the development and sustainability of the United States, the social death and cultural trauma of slavery render this country inhospitable to Black bodies and the psyches that inhabit them. African Americans are both at home and homeless. This tenuousness places them in a liminal space in which identity is simultaneously self-asserted and assigned, multifaceted, while limited, a fount of agency and a tool for impotence. The intersectional nature of Black femininity further complicates notions of identity and American hospitality. Black men have unsuccessfully employed patriarchy as an intraracial tool to combat the aforementioned social death.

Call for Papers
NeMLA’s 58th Annual Convention – “Empowering Communities”
March 6–9, 2027 | Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island 

Panel Title: Female Grief in Literature and the Arts

Primary Area / Secondary Area: Comparative Literature / Women’s and Gender Studies 
Modality: Hybrid
Organizers: Beatrice Fiducia, Maria Irene Fiducia

This panel explores gendered expressions of grief across literatures and historical periods through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens.

Homosocial Spaces in Monastic Places
62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 13-15, 2027)Kalamazoo, MI, USAHybrid Session Medieval monks cultivated gender-segregated networks which supported their own learning, dialogues, and customs, which meant people assigned female at birth were essentially locked out of much of intellectual life.

This interdisciplinary panel aims to explore how women’s work is made manifest in material culture and literary texts. This panel defines “work” broadly. Work might include actions performed, actions in the process of being completed, or the result of labor. Panelists are invited to explore the materials women produced during the early modern period – objects we still have access to and those that would be used or discarded during the period – as well as narratives and depictions of women’s work. Of particular interest are discussions around how and why certain actions or products were gendered in response to religious doctrine or practical divisions of labor. 

Concept Note:

Storytelling, from the metamorphic narratives of the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and Ovid’s ancient transmutations to the evolving interfaces of the present, has been an act of survival through transformation. Metamorphosis is the underlying imperative of the twenty-first century; it is not just a biological inevitability but a relentless ontological pulse beating beneath the surface of our global narratives. We inhabit a world amid a grand moulting, where the traditional mediums of storytelling, like the printed page, the physical body, and the ancestral soil, are being reshaped under the pressures of a planetary crisis.

62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 13 - 15, 2027)

Kalamazoo, MI, USA

Hybrid Session (Virtual and In-person session)

Call for Chapters

ReFocus: The Films of Gaspar Noé

Edited by Florian Zappe

Edinburgh University Press ReFocus: The International Directors Series
Series Editors: Gary D. Rhodes, Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer, Nuno Barradas Jorge

This panel examines how literary and cultural texts from diverse global traditions imagine masculinity not merely as an individual identity but as a relational and communal practice. In an era marked by migration, political polarization, social fragmentation, environmental crisis, and renewed struggles for collective empowerment, narratives of masculinity have become central sites through which communities negotiate belonging, responsibility, vulnerability, and resistance.

2026 marks multiple milestones for the legacy of legendary Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler: fifty years since the publication of her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), and the twentieth anniversary of her passing, on February 24, 2006. It also marks the announcement of a film version of one of her most famous and most prophetic works, Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as the surprise republishing of her disavowed novel, Survivor (1978), for the first time since the 1980s. These anniversaries arrive at a moment when Butler’s work continues to gain public attention for its prescience and political relevance, and as she continues to amass scholarly attention across scholarly disciplines.

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 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. Essays should cover multiple genres (film, fiction, television, graphic novels, music) and a broad time period. These are overviews or research starters rather than narrow analyses.

As more and more women's stereotypical images are distributed via digital networks, active counter-activism via digital networks is an urgent need in a post-truth media environment. In the age of audio-visual curation, the cultural narrative has been traditionally controlled by state and corporate power, while today, opaque automated content moderation, algorithmic sorting and filtering, and platform capitalism of transnational streaming networks dominate the scene.