gender studies and sexuality

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.

The twenty-first century is continuously defined by geopolitical shifts, armed conflict, environmental precarity, and evolving border regimes, within which migration operates as a critical locus of global transformation. This physical transgression of geopolitical boundaries inevitably instigates a profound restructuring of individual and collective subjectivities. Literature functions as a dynamic repository for these complex trajectories, articulating the psychological, political, and cultural exigencies of displacement and resettlement.

In her 1991 article “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member,” Lynda Boose describes Kate’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew as “a textual moment in which, in Althusserian terms, the play quite overtly ‘interpellates,’ or hails, its women viewers to an imaginary relationship with the ideology of the discourse being played out on stage.” This panel builds on Boose’s reading by examining texts that both assume an audience of women and interpellate the reader in a meaningful way. During a period when relatively few women were literate, texts that hail women had to find a way to reach their audience. Boose’s stage example is one way to attract women’s attention.

Inspired by Ronald Hutton’s work in “The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition” (2014), this panel explores gendered figures in early modern folklore texts. The study of early modern folklore features significant crossover: fairies may also be familiars, witches can be wise women, and fairyland could be, as Hutton explains, the “embodiment of hedonism, summed up in its characteristic activity of song and dance.” Panelists are invited to explore texts and records that capture folk traditions in early modern literature and culture. Papers are welcome to explore a wide variety of topics with questions of gender at their heart. 

Call for Proposals

Special Issue of Philosophy, Politics and Critique

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.

“From America Sent”: Reading Henry Miller Today

International Conference, Sorbonne Université, Paris, 18–21 May 2027

Call for papers

Joint sponsors: Sorbonne Université (VALE UR 4085), Université Paris Nanterre (CREA UR 370), Henry Miller Memorial Library (Big Sur, California)

Organizers: Emma Frigo (Universités Grenoble Alpes and Paris Nanterre), Clément Oudart (Sorbonne Université), Michael Paduano (Independent scholar), Benoît Tadié (Université Paris Nanterre), Magnus Torén (Henry Miller Memorial Library)

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.

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio for the panel “Yesteryear: Cultural and Literary Possibilities”. We are seeking papers that address Caro Claire Burke’s breakout debut novel Yesteryear and its implications on literature and current American culture. How does Burke address established literary conventions? How might one conceive of the evocative narrative style of this novel? How does Burke conceptualize the conscription of motherhood, suppressed queerness, and conservative Christianity? How might the work fit into literary genealogies of sanity, purity, racial prejudice, and womanhood? Proposals should include a title, abstract,  your name, and affiliation.

The 1995 film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, features characters who band together by frequenting a corner cigar store in Brooklyn. Paul Auster, who wrote the screenplay, once described the community his characters created as a “little universe for themselves that is not determined by blood or the past.”

58th NeMLA Convention
Newport, RI

Format: In Person Only

This panel builds off feminist science fiction studies’ investigation of the role of gender in speculative texts by expanding the field of inquiry to the role of nonbinary characters and even nonbinary worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. It asks how both science fiction as a genre and feminist science fiction as a field have transformed with the emergence of new gender subjectivities. How do these fictions empower trans and nonbinary communities?  How must the methodological tools for studying SF change to meet this moment?

Masculinity in Crisis: Hegemony, Marginality, and Aesthetics of Failure in the Arts

In recent decades, the paradigm of masculinity has been increasingly problematized and challenged in the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, gender and queer studies (Connell 1995). Far from being stable or universally applicable, the colossal stature of masculinity has emerged as a space traversed by tensions, counter-narratives, fractures, and processes of symbolic delegitimization.