gender studies and sexuality

Osgood Perkins is emerging as one of the most significant directors of horror in the 21st century. His films are wildly diverse and have elicited an equally wild diversity of response from viewers and critics. Perkins has thought a lot about horror, has frequently spoken about its larger meanings in interviews, and is committed to its centrality as a genre – something he articulates in this 2025 conversation with Interview Magazine:

Latina/o/x Literature and Culture Society, ALA, Chicago, Illinois, May 20-23, 2026

This year, the Latina/o/x Literature & Culture Society welcomes submissions focusing on diverse topics, including literary genre, single authors, children’s literature, speculative fiction, comparative analyses, as well as cultural studies approaches. The society also encourages a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary prisms, and a variety of panel types, including traditional paper sessions, roundtable discussions, and sessions dedicated to the teaching of Latina/o/x literature and culture.

Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture is seeking reviews for upcoming issues. The journal welcomes reviews of a wide range of queer media and cultural artefacts. Like other academic journals, Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture publishes reviews of recently released books on queer subject matter. Consistent with the journal's overall focus, however, we also strongly encourage the submission and publication of reviews pertaining to significant films, musical recordings, plays, television series, video games, exhibitions, and related cultural artefacts that are of relevance to queerness in its various forms.

Critical Studies on Bianca Pitzorno, edited by Anna Finozzi and Dalila Forni

The Department of English and Communications at South Carolina State University invites proposals for 20-minute individual papers, panels of 3–4 presenters, roundtable discussions, and creative performances or multimedia presentations for the 2026 SC State Intersectional Studies Remote Conference (ISC), which will be held on Friday, March 27, 2026 via Zoom. In addition to proposals from faculty affiliated with higher education institutions, we welcome proposals from independent scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students from all fields and disciplines. 

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

Steeped in the primal discomfort of the uncanny, dolls and the houses they inhabit are an especially fluid and perennially creepy motif within popular culture. Revealing historical and on-going tensions between what it means to be human and what it means to only perform those attributes, these remnants of childhood carry with them specific cultural messaging that has been particularly fertile ground for the horror genre.

For special issue #10 (spring 2026) of Horror Homeroom, we’re diving into the world of creepy dollhouses and their inhabitants. We’re interested in abstracts about the dolls and dollhouses of horror - or of horror adjacent narratives (thrillers, mysteries, science fiction etc.). 

Stories of Belonging and Nostalgia: South Asian Migrants’ Narratives  

Introductory Note

Midnapore College (Autonomous)
International Seminar
on
“Aestheticism in Art and Literature” (সাহিত্য ও শিল্পে নন্দনতত্ত্ব)
To be organized by
Department of Bengali & Cultural Section
in collaboration with IQAC
on 13 January 2026
Mode: Hybrid(Online & Offline)
“The purpose of art is the realization of aesthetic bliss (Ānanda)” - Abhinavagupta.

In recent decades, research on authority and trust in the US has seen a considerable increase across various disciplines (cf. Leypoldt and Berg 2021). However, in comparison, there has been much less scholarship on aspects of gender since Anette Baier dedicated her influential 1994 collection of essays Moral Prejudices on trust (and related issues)to her “women students, past, present, and future.” Our workshop addresses this lacuna, both from a theoretical perspective, and in the light of current cultural, social, and political developments in the US, and of (once again) contested definitions of gender(ed) identities, practices, performances, and ethics.

Wednesday 17th to Friday 19th June 2026

Falmouth University, UK

This in-person conference will launch the new International Women’s Writing Association (IWWA), offering a global celebration of women’s writing in all its forms, mediums, and expressions at the gorgeous Woodlane campus in Falmouth, Cornwall.

Call for Proposals: Edited volume on screenwriter, actor, director, and comedienne Elaine May

***EXTENSION*** Abstracts now due by January 25, 2026.

SCREEN STORYTELLERS

The Works of Elaine May

Edited by Jonathan Winchell

This edited volume on the works of Elaine May will be a book in the SCREEN STORYTELLERS series published by Bloomsbury Academic. Seeking 250-word abstracts for previously unpublished chapters on Elaine May’s work as a screenwriter and comedy writer. Final chapters will be 3,000-3,500 words, written for an audience of student readers.

The SCREEN STORYTELLERS series is designed for students, professors, and enthusiastic

The Institute for Research on Women (IRW) at Rutgers University is seeking guest editors for the Spring 2027 issue of its online journal, Rejoinder (https://irw.rutgers.edu/rejoinder). Rejoinder features work at the intersection of scholarship and activism that reflects feminist/queer and social justice perspectives and is currently published once a year. Guest editors will be responsible for the overall shape of the issue, and Rejoinder staff will advise on the process.

“WE ARE THE ECOSEXUALS. The Earth is our lover.”  — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, The Ecosex Manifesto

The Graduate Students of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University are proud to announce our biennial conference, to be held on April 17–18, 2026. We are pleased to host keynote speaker Heather Davis (The New School).