gender studies and sexuality

Comparative Woman Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025)

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Comparative Woman is an online journal affiliated with LSU’s Department of Comparative Literature that explores topics related to comparative literature and women/gender studies through art and academic essays. Comparative Woman Journal is inviting papers for Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025) on Aesthetic Education: From Sensibility to Critical Engagement.

THEME

Aesthetic Education: From Sensibility to Critical Engagement 

SUB-THEMES (including but not limited to):

The African American Literature Permanent Section of the Midwestern Modern Language Association (MMLA) is requesting abstracts from potential panelists for this year’s in-person conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Informed by this year’s conference theme, “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives,” this section is calling for scholarly work that ties literature written by Black Americans to concepts of hope and its relationship to artistic production. Potential questions to address include, but are in no way limited to: How have representations of hope in Black American literature shifted across the centuries? What do depictions of hope look like when it has been disrupted or challenged?

Abstract

Queer palimpsests are texts from which queerness has been erased – but only on the surface. Scholars, therefore, are invited to reinvestigate these texts and their underlying queerness. This project includes books, movies, songs, fashion, artifacts, architecture, archives… a queer excavation in order to indicate the traces, specters, echoes, or presences of the past that remain even as many past narrative elements, structures, or tropes are forgotten.

Description

The Academic Association for Doctoral Students & Students of English (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń) is pleased to announce the call for papers for the 11th issue of Currents, on the themes of adaptation and innovation within Anglophone language, culture and literature.

‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.’~ H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether

PAMLA 2025 Annual Conference

We invite paper proposals for an accpetd panel titled “Queer Temporalities, Memory, and Resistance in Asia,” to be held at the 2025 Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Convention in San Francisco (November 20–23, 2025), complementing the broader conference theme of “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.”

This panel explores how non-normative experiences of embodiment, temporality, spatiality, and memory practices intersect with acts of resistance across diverse Asian contexts. We invite submissions that examine these themes across Asia and its diasporas. 

Call for papers Heteroglossia 21 (2025)

In a 2022 article, one of a number of related works, and drawing on the work of Didier Deleule and François Guéry (2014)– the late art theorist Marina Vishmidt critiqued the manner in which an analysis of ‘bodies’ seemed to be overly focused on the register of vulnerability, or the post-structuralist, discursive, or psychoanalytic dimensions, thus relegating bodies excessively to the realm of the abstract, to the exclusion of the concrete. Anatomy, with regards to both its aesthetic and scientific purposes, also has abstract and concrete dimensions – as innovative recent works analyzing anatomy within its broader social and historical contexts demonstrate.

Feminism, Antifeminism, and the Mobilization of Regret

Concept Note-

We invite papers for an in-person panel, “French: Cultural Issues,” at the 2025 Midwest Modern Language Association Conference themed “The Humanities is Where Hope Lives," which will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at Marquette University, 14-16 November 2025. 

Keywords: Colonialism, Hauntings, Postcolonial, Memory, Imperial, Afterlives, Bodies, Narratives 

Empire's ghosts persist beyond colonial rule, manifesting as hauntings that collapse the distance between past and present. These specters transform the immaterial into tangible forces that infiltrate daily life. The colonial past is never truly gone; it lingers, erupting through material and psychic traces.

2025 MMLA theme "The Humanities is Where Hope Lives"

Gender Studies

Panel Title “Hope for Voice and Gender” – Virtual Panel

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential,

flooding, eroding, quiet, steady, filling the earth, collecting in hidden springs.

When it rains, when we love, new life grows.

—Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (232)

This panel invites papers addressing the formative roles played by the queer print infrastructures that established, defined, and perpetuated literary modernism. Via the material production systems of independent magazines, small-run presses, special edition printings, and specialist bookstores (including Shakespeare & Co., The Little Review, The Egoist, Hogarth Press, Fire!!, etc, etc) queer/non-normative people had a remarkable shaping effect on the material productions and aesthetic coherences/incoherences of commercial and ‘high’ modernism.

The conference, "Undercover Agents: Women, Crime, and Detection in the Global Nineteenth Century" will be held on 28-29 August 2025 at the School of English, University of St Andrews, and is supported by funding from the British Association for Victorian Studies.