gender studies and sexuality

Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991) is a cult classic with a crucial role in the history of American cinema. The movie is unusual in many ways. It does not have a traditional narrative; it follows 100 characters around the UT Austin area in a way that seems completely random. There is no protagonist, no story, no thread to the individual events, yet somehow it is a completely coherent and engaging movie that sparks as many reflections as the number of scenes it has.

We are looking for chapter proposals in the form of abstracts. Topics already included are work, capitalism, Buddhism, film as a dream, narrative, episodic views of life, and absurdity. Possible topics for new chapters include:

In the last fifteen years, a new generation of African female and nonbinary authors have made major interventions in the field of African Literatures, from Akwaeke Emezi to NoViolet Bulawayo, Djaïli Amadou Amal to Kopano Matlwa. In parallel, women writers from earlier generations, such as Tsitsi Dangarembga (winner of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2021), Paulina Chiziane or Ana Paula Tavares (who were both awarded with the Camões Prize in 2021 and 2025 respectively) have received major literary distinctions, celebrating their contributions to African postcolonial literatures in particular, and literature in general.

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (LCH) is accepting submissions for the 2026 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture, and the humanities.

Existing scholarship in Asian (North) American Literature has long examined travel narratives about Asian travelers within immigrant or diasporic paradigms: Sau-ling Wong famously establishes the Necessity/Extravagance framework in understanding transpacific mobility by early Asian American immigrants (1993), whereas Chih-ming Wang reads the autobiographical travelogues by diasporic Vietnamese American writers as “homecoming stories” (2013), and Patricia Chu interprets them as “return narratives” deploying acts of countermemory and postmemory to address racial melancholia (2019).

5th IRW Theme: “Rhetorical Flows: Building Transnational Solidarities & Cultures of Resistance.”

Submission Deadline (250-word abstracts in English or Spanish): March 21, 2026

Submit here: https://tinyurl.com/IRW-Submissions

The Planning Committee for the 5th Biennial International Rhetoric Workshop invites international PhD students, emerging scholars, and established researchers to come together and consider the myriad ways that our contemporary and established traditions of rhetorical theory, pedagogy, and criticism inform global flows of meaning-making.

South Asia in Transition: A Literary Cartography

One response to the official archives’ violent erasure(s) of multiethnic subjects (and the associated literatures) in the US has been scholarly investment in digital archiving. Still, the digital archives (and/or the metadata culled from them) can–and often do–reify whiteness as normative and the marginalization of other Americans. MELUS invites papers that consider how digital archiving (re)shapes and/or supports lay communities that inform the literature of the marginalized. We are particularly interested in papers that address how practices of liberatory archiving resist objectification of multiethnic subjects and/or authors. Submit titled proposals (250 words), a brief CV, and AV needs.

Fat has been ever-present in public imagination in various forms. Fat is perceived as a

public enemy and “demonized in medicine and public policy” (Blank 2020). It is “adored by chefs

and nutritional faddists, desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a

multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry” (Blank 2020). Yet, ‘Fat’ as an area of

academic research has remained remarkably underdeveloped in the Humanities and Social

Sciences domain. Only recently, it has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field that interrogates

Call for ChaptersInvoking History: Power, Bodies, BDSM

Edited Volume (proposed for Routledge)

About the Volume

The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel on testimony and resistance in Margaret Atwood’s work. In keeping with the MLA 2027 presidential theme, this panel welcomes papers that examine how Atwood’s narratives represent coercion and constraint while also tracing the risk and agency at stake in claiming liberatory space. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Testimony, witnessing, and the politics of voice

• Surveillance, secrecy, confession, and the archive

• Gendered power, reproductive politics, and bodily autonomy

• Critical reception and adaptation

CFP: The Body, Anatomy, and Aesthetics 

Special Issue: Art & the Public Sphere 

Call for Papers: SCMS Horror Studies SIG Graduate Student Essay Prize

The SCMS Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group is delighted to announce that submissions are now open for our annual Graduate Student Essay Prize.

The winning essay will be published in an upcoming issue of the open-access journal Monstrum and the author will receive:

Our present conjuncture demands urgent engagement with the now of gender. Authoritarian resurgence, border militarization, algorithmic
governance, climate precarity, and uneven recoveries from overlapping pandemics shape how gender is lived, and resisted across diverse contexts: from settler colonial democracies to postcolonial nation-states and stateless territories. Anti-trans legislation, family policing, and reproductive surveillance intensify biopolitical control, while migration regimes, humanitarian aid economies, and asylum adjudication render certain genders and kinship forms precariously provisional.

Women, Literature and Art in Republican China

A Special Issue in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 57, nos. 1-8 [TBD], 2028

Abstracts Due: April 1, 2026

Manuscripts Due: October 30, 2026

Special Issue Editor(s): Lang Wang and Ying Xiong

Submissions Portal: par e-mail