gender studies and sexuality

“Not Determined by Blood or the Past”: The “Little Universe” Community (2027 NeMLA panel, Newport, RI)

updated: 
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 - 9:42pm
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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.”

Southern Humanities Conference, Knoxville TN, January 28-31

updated: 
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 - 1:31pm
Southern Humanities Council
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, December 1, 2026

The Southern Humanities Conference, 2027

Call for Papers

 

Conference Theme: Divergence, Convergence, Emergence

Knoxville, TN, January 28-31, 2027

 

The Southern Humanities Conference offers an opportunity for scholars, artists, writers, musicians, performers, and humanists of all kinds to share their knowledge, research, work, and experiences in an interdisciplinary, welcoming, and engaging intellectual space.

 

Speculative Fiction and the Materiality of Nonbinary

updated: 
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 - 11:05am
NeMLA
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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?

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of 'Scream'

updated: 
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 - 10:31am
Dr. Alissa Burger
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, August 15, 2026

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream

 

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere). 

 

Call for Contribution "Masculinity in Crisis: Hegemony, Marginality, and Aesthetics of Failure in the Arts" NON A JOURNAL OF ALTERNATIVE SEXUALITIES IN ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

updated: 
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 - 10:15am
NON A JOURNAL OF ALTERNATIVE SEXUALITIES IN ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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.

 

Queering Monstrous Mythologies (NeMLA Panel)

updated: 
Monday, July 6, 2026 - 4:16pm
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Who owns mythological creatures? What do they do in modern literature? Based on the reemerging prevalence of mythological influences in popular culture – cf. Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, Rick Riordan, etc. – it can be read that monstrosity is having a cultural renaissance and reimagining. With new interpretations and uses of mythology, what happens when a lens of modern feminist or queer theory is applied to these stories?

“They Were About Being Alone”: The Poetry of Solitude, Loneliness, or In Between (2027 NeMLA Creative Session, Newport, RI

updated: 
Monday, July 6, 2026 - 4:04pm
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, humans are conditioned to seek out human companionship and to despise being by themselves. Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer of Emotional Engineering, relates a story to Bernard Marx about being disciplined for sharing some of his poems with the students he was paid to indoctrinate. When asked what the poems had been about, Helmholtz tells a surprised Bernard, “They were about being alone.”

OMNIALANG: International Journal of Language Continuum (Omnia-LC) Volume 1, Issue 2

updated: 
Monday, July 6, 2026 - 2:32pm
OMNIALANG: International Journal of Language Continuum (Omnia-LC)
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, November 15, 2026

OMNIALANG: International Journal of Language Continuum (Omnia-LC) invites original, unpublished manuscripts for Volume 1, Issue 2.

Omnia-LC is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on language, literature, linguistics, translation, education, and related fields. The journal welcomes innovative theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that deepen our understanding of language and its diverse cultural, social, and literary contexts.

We welcome submissions in (but not limited to) the following areas:

Subtle Performances of the Body: Female Agency and Autonomy in Literature

updated: 
Monday, July 6, 2026 - 1:07pm
Kasey Waite
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, September 30, 2027

How do female characters employ their bodies to navigate, process, and challenge the cultural and socioeconomic structures of their times? Under the antagonistic system where the pursuit of “good life” is no longer plausible, how do women across different cultures, historical periods, and geopolitical contexts respond by utilizing their bodily autonomy and agency? This panel invites papers that critically investigate female bodily representation in the context of empowerment and change. In particular, this panel is interested in literary analyses that focus on the subtle yet tangible (dis)orientation of female bodies in and out of public spaces.

NeMLA 2026 | Lyric Relations: Poetry, Peacebuilding, and the Ethics of Address

updated: 
Sunday, July 5, 2026 - 10:11pm
Jill Keegan / University of Notre Dame
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

How does lyric address create forms of relation across difference? This panel invites papers examining the intersections of poetry, lyric address, and peacebuilding, with particular attention to coexistence, care, responsibility, witness, repair, and collective life.

 

Northeast Modern Language Association 58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI, March 6-9, 2027 (Salve Regina University)

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30, 2026 

Please submit abstracts via the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22533

 

The Invisible Labor of Women in Canon Formation

updated: 
Sunday, July 5, 2026 - 6:08pm
NeMLA
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

In keeping with the theme of Empowering Communities, this panel looks at the ways in which scholarship can make visible the previously obscured agency of women and other historically marginalized groups. Invisible labor is a concept frequently applied to the domestic sphere to describe the work women do to maintain households. In the literary world, too, women have shaped the canon in ways that have been overlooked.

The Chorus: Blackness, Visitation, and the Poetics of Enclosure (ACLA '27; May 16-17)

updated: 
Saturday, July 4, 2026 - 5:00pm
Andrew Santana Kaplan, University of Denver / Joy Priest, University of Pittsburgh
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 21, 2026

This virtual seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also furnishes a paradigm for thinking—to play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion—Black (non)being singular plural. In Wayward Lives, Hartman suggests that any of the minor figures can stand in for the others, not as a claim of homogeneity, but rather as a contention that their singularity can be read as paradigmatic of waywardness—in its queer heterogeneity—in general. The chorus of black femme and queer youth is thus at once a singular plurality and a plural singularity as they make beautifully riotous lives within the enclosure of social death.

FEMSPEC - Call for Peer Review Coordinator

updated: 
Saturday, July 4, 2026 - 12:09pm
Femspec
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, December 31, 2026

FEMSPEC, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to challenging gender through speculative means in any genre, seeks a volunteer to fill the role of Peer Review Coordinator.

Duties for this position would include the following:

  • Coordinating the scholarly peer review process for the journal
  • Liaising with authors who submit scholarly articles to the journal and distributing their submissions to peer reviewers
  • Returning feedback from peer reviewers to authors
  • Attending collective meetings on a regular basis (now Thursday 12:30 PM EST) - meetings are held every week during production, then move to every other week afterward

Preferred qualifications include:

In/fertile Ground: The Rhetoric and Reality of Early Modern Reproduction (RSA 2027 Panel)

updated: 
Friday, July 3, 2026 - 12:59pm
Lindsay Adams Kennedy & Katey Roden / Renaissance Society of America Conference 2027
deadline for submissions: 
Saturday, July 25, 2026

Due to the rhetorical challenges of sharing the unmentionable, infertility is often underdiscussed in both Early Modern society and today. It has discomforted and continues to discomfort theologians, medical practitioners, politicians, scholars, and everyday people trying to build identities through societies deeply founded on the structure of the family. The very concept of family is built around parents and children–what happens when a couple is childless, what happens when the children aren’t materially seen, only known to the parents that lost them before birth? It has historically forced thinkers to grapple with their understanding of life and death, grace and agency, reality and the supernatural.

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies 37/1&2

updated: 
Friday, July 3, 2026 - 8:17am
Litera, Istanbul University Press
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, November 30, 2026

Call for Papers – Volume 37, Issue 1 & 2 (2027)

Dear Colleagues,

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies – Dil, Edebiyat ve Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi, the official publication of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University, invites submissions for its 2027 issues (Volume 37, Issues 1 & 2).

“Outside the Climatic Environmental Bubble: Sensing Climate Change at the Margins", a panel session of the International Sociological Association Thematic Group 07

updated: 
Friday, July 3, 2026 - 2:27am
Benjamin Harris
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, October 14, 2026

I would like to invite you to submit an abstract to the TG07 Senses and Society session, “Outside the Climatic Environmental Bubble: Sensing Climate Change at the Margins”, within the XXI International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology, which will be held in Gwangju, Korea, from July 4th - July 10th 2027.

 

Session Description

Mental Health and Indian literatures: Men in Representation

updated: 
Thursday, July 2, 2026 - 2:16pm
Department of English, Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, July 13, 2026

 

 

 

Mental Health and Indian Literatures: Men in Representation

7th August 2026

Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi NAAC A++, NIRF Rank- 13 Department of English
Kalkaji, New Delhi-110019

Call for Papers

[The Association for Asian Studies] Racialization, ethnicization, care, and entangled colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies in Asia and the Sinophone

updated: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 - 8:57pm
Jessica Chang
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, August 5, 2026

This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.

“Queer Times, Queer Ecologies” Special Issue

updated: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 - 6:39pm
American Literature Special Issue
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, January 7, 2027

This special issue will highlight new work in queer ecology that engages and extends concepts of queer time developed by theorists such as Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others.

Call for Papers: The Erotic Today

updated: 
Tuesday, June 30, 2026 - 2:30pm
Flatus Vocis
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 15, 2026

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.

“Not a Monoculture”: Ideas of Irishness 


updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 2:30pm
American Conference for Irish Studies Mid-Atlantic/ New England Conference
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 15, 2026

 

American Conference for Irish Studies Mid-Atlantic and New England Regional Conference 

November 6th and 7th 2026

Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 

CFP Proposal Extension:

The Call for Papers deadline for the Mid-Atlantic and New England American Conference for Irish Studies at Seton Hall University has been extended until September 15th, 2026. We encourage both established scholars and those new to the field to submit abstracts. We welcome graduate student abstracts and will hold an undergraduate poster session. Interested undergraduates should submit their poster ideas as an abstract. 

Keynote:

Yesteryear & the Rise of Trad Wife Fiction

updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 2:26pm
Alex M. Anderson
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, August 21, 2026

This CFP seeks submissions for a Just-in-Time session proposed for the 2027 MLA conference.  If accepted, this panel will analyze the recent slew of literary and genre fiction about "trad wives." Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear, Saratoga Sch

NeMLA 2027 | Animals and Madness

updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 1:12pm
Matthew Walsh
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.

Recalibrating the Center: Empowerment through Counternarrative Resistance

updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 12:06pm
North-Eastern Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 30, 2026

"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."

— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Gender and the History of Institutions

updated: 
Monday, June 29, 2026 - 6:01am
MARIA ISABEL ROMERO RUIZ
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, December 31, 2029

The aim of this book series is to examine the history of institutions around the world through the lens of gender. Of interest
are institutions established with the specific purpose of regulating gender and sexuality (e.g. the Magdalen
asylums, Magdalen hospitals, penitentiaries, refuges, mother and baby institutions) as well as those with more general
purposes where gender has had an important role in their operation and function (e.g. prisons, workhouses, lunatic
asylums), including both religious and private organisations. The series supports the increasing interest in these
institutions internationally, both in academia and in the treatment of ‘historical’ abuse.

Katherine Philips and Company (RSA 2027 Panel)

updated: 
Sunday, June 28, 2026 - 4:41pm
Arya Sureshbabu / Renaissance Society of America Conference 2027
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, July 20, 2026

In keeping with Katherine Philips’s reputation as an exemplary practitioner of friendship and curator of connections, this panel invites papers that put Philips’s work in conversation with writers outside the Society of Friendship, outside coterie poetry, outside the English context, or even outside the early modern period altogether. 

Italian Ecofeminism and Literature

updated: 
Saturday, June 27, 2026 - 8:30am
Nicole C. (Civitano) Dittmer, PhD
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Call For Papers for Italian Ecofeminism and Literature

Deadline for Submissions: September 1, 2026

Notification date: October 1, 2026

Full name / Name of organization: Nicole C. (Civitano) Dittmer, PhD

Contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.com

 

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