gender studies and sexuality

This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.

In the Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan redefines the domestic space and the feminine laborassociated with it as a dynamic space where Chinese-American women reshape their identities, preserve their cultures, and share their stories of traumas. bell hooks’ assertion that “homeplace" was the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization” provides a productive framework for understanding how kitchens and acts of cooking become spaces of healing, survival, and female agency in women’s writing. By doing these, they try to assert a form of power, and agency that subverts the traditional notion of the domestic space(as an inferior space that is away from history), and the feminine labor associated with it.

Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation.

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.

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?

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks a new member to join our volunteer collective to fill the role of Website Editor and Social Media Manager

Duties include:

Updating FEMSPEC's website at the collective's request - this could include updating biographies of collective members, altering the website's layout, adding or removing content from various pages in the website, and updating the website with information about the current issue of the journal

Managing the journal's Facebook page and X account

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

Panel Title: Tracing Female Body, Art & Economy in the Global South

Primary Area / Secondary Area: Women’s and Gender Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities
Modality: Hybrid
Chair: Maryam Raza (University of Auckland, New Zealand)