gender studies and sexuality

We invite proposals for an anthology about drag in Appalachia. The collection aims to explore drag’s artistry, history, and cultural power. We welcome scholars, performers, and community storytellers whose work illuminates the region’s queer lineages, traditions, politics, creativity, and beyond. We especially invite pieces that examine drag as labor, community care, spiritual practice, historical reclamation, or engagement with Appalachia’s diverse cultural landscapes.

“Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets”
- ANDY WARHOL

SAVE THE DATE

Alternative Endings:
A Symposium Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman

October 17, 2026

Northwestern University--Downtown Campus
Chicago, Illinois

Join scholars, filmmakers, artists for a one-day symposium commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking film The Watermelon Woman.

The symposium will feature:

• A special panel showcasing previously unreleased alternative endings from the film, with commentary from invited scholars.

• A luncheon bringing together contributors to the film, panelists, and local Black women filmmakers.

Illness is rarely a purely private experience, yet for women it has historically been rendered invisible: sequestered within domestic walls, dismissed by medical institutions, and silenced in the cultural record. This session examines how film and literature in Spanish and Portuguese bring female sickness out of the shadows, transforming what is often hidden and isolated into a site of testimony, intimacy, and meaning.

Proposals for edited book on 21st cent. Women Poets and Resistance

We –a group of scholars and poets– are assembling a collective book on 21st century Women's Poetries, which will be submitted as an edited collection for one of the series at Palgrave Macmillan. Two of our contributors fell down and we are trying to find a couple of good proposals which can be a good fit and complete our collection.

Fantasy has long explored lifeworlds and paradigms outside of societal norms. Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid protagonist, declares, ‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’ World myths, legends, folk tales, and fairy tales are early promoters of gender-fluidity, populated by the likes of Inanna/Ishtar; Hermaphroditus, the offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite; androgynous Dionysus; Ardhanarishvara; Ometeotl; Guanyin; cross-dressing thunder and trickster gods; heartsick seafaring maidens disguised as sailors; and the mercurial ontologies of the Fae. In this issue we will explore how gender is portrayed and explored in Fantasy.

Call for Papers and Artworks

Queer Ecology and the Supernatural 

A Two-day Symposium and Exhibition at Loughborough University 18th-19th September 2026

The Indian diaspora is the largest diaspora community in the world, with an approximate population of 35.4 million. From the migration of the indentured labour force during the colonial period to the mass immigration of educated Indians to overseas countries in the late twentieth century, the Indian diaspora has indeed become a global phenomenon. Expanding migration circuits, job and business opportunities, shifting lifestyles, skilled and semi-skilled labour force, among others, have resulted in significant socioeconomic mobility, especially over the last 25 years. Besides making significant contributions to varied fields, the Indian diaspora has also arguably brought changes in how others have traditionally seen India.

Appalachian Glass: Furnace of Meaning and Memory

This edited collection addresses a major gap in current work focused on Appalachia’s glass industry. We have catalogs and reference books. We have histories focused on class, labor, and gender. We have histories focused on the rise and demise of glass factories. But the human work of meaning, identity, and memory--in the context of Appalachian glass--has yet to be gathered and shared in book form. 

We invite you to submit an abstract and bio by June 17, 2026, to participate in a Modern Language Association (MLA) 2027 seminar, "Queer Literary Studies NOW." Seminar participants will precirculate 1500-word papers on the theme, and we will discuss the papers and the larger theme during the seminar on the first day of the MLA 2027 conference. MLA 2027 will take place in Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. Participants must be MLA members and register for the conference.

Theorizing Gender, Sex and Sexuality through Speculative Literatures

Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

Editors: Drs. Joshua Horton (Arizona State University) and Sandra Cox (Southeast Missouri State University)

contact emails: jthorto2@asu.edu and scox@semo.edu

Deadlines:

Abstracts (200-300 words) due September 30, 2026 (responses to submitters can be expected about a week after the deadline)

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literature and Popular Music

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary handbook will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in late 2027.

This collection explores how literature and popular music intersect, influence each other, and create new possibilities for artistic expression, and seeks to map the rich terrain where these two cultural forms meet. We will work from broad definitions of both literature and popular music, encompassing work from traditional novels and poetry to digital narratives and graphic novels, from classical and folk sound traditions to electric and contemporary electronic music.

Click here to submit your abstract and bio using SAMLA's internal platform: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19584 

The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of no more than 300 words) for open topic presentations at SAMLA 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia, November 5-7. We will accept proposals for a wide variety of topics about and/or related to Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre, and submissions from graduate students and emerging scholars are encouraged.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar.  The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR.

The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published.  Please send electronic submssions in Microsoft Word format and a current CV to hjamesr@creighton.edu.