gender studies and sexuality

Hello! Seeking 1-2 additional papers to join a trans studies panel at the 2026 American Studies Association Conference. Abstract for the proposed panel is below; please contact Anna James (AJames@franklincollege.edu) if interested. Thanks!

Panel Title: Minoritarian Gestures, Improvised Lives: Everyday Performance of Trans Resistance

C21 is inviting scholars and researchers to contribute book review essays for upcoming issues. We currently have a selection of titles published in 2025 available for review, spanning literary studies, film and media studies, cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. We invite prospective authors to submit ideas for review essays that discuss 2–3 recently published scholarly texts. For the full CFP, and to see our list of available titles, please visit: https://c21.openlibhums.org/news/923/.

This special section of Whatever: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies will function as a critical retrospective on Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. While much has been written on the film in relation to feminist theory, this special section seeks to excavate the queer possibilities of Eggers’s now iconic film. Taking a broad view of queer theory, we imagine queerness as that which challenges binaries and hierarchies. In this way, The Witch might be understood as queer in terms of the challenges it poses to heteronormative, patriarchal structures, as well as through its dismantling of the boundaries between self and other, human and animal, nature and culture.

Walls, barriers, barricades, borders are lines (real and imaginary) reified to divide, define, and contain, but there are also borderlands and border crossings which necessarily blur and defy arbitrary lines and lead to rethinking notions of belonging and belongings.

Literary Representations of Co-Existence 

Conference location: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia

Keynote speakers: Mark Bould (University of the West of England Bristol) in-person

                               Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sydney) online

Conference dates: Sept 3-5, 2026

Conference fee: 75 Euros for the fully employed, 50 Euros for students and those not fully employed

Send abstracts of 200 words, and a short biography, to bwillems@ffst.hr by May 1, 2026

MLA 2027 – Early American and Sexuality Studies Forum 

“The Body Before Sex”

This collaborative panel by the Early American LLC and Sexuality Studies TC of the Modern Language Association aims to bring forward trans, environmental, and affect methodologies to consider the historically and culturally specific ways the body and sex intersect and depart. We are particularly interested in papers that stretch and transgress temporal and spatial domains, offering critical juxtapositions that reexamine the materialities and temporalities that make visible the body before it becomes associated with, and attached to, sex. 

The International Vladimir Nabokov Society seeks paper proposals for presentations on the following themes for the Modern Language Association’s Annual Convention (January 7-10, 2027, Los Angeles):  

Nabokov, Freedom, and Anti-Authoritarianism

Book Chapters on African and Australian Women, 500-1500.

Call for Papers — MLA 2027 (Los Angeles)

Black Motherhood in the African Diaspora: Narrating Care, Resilience, and Futures

Across African diasporic literary traditions, Black motherhood emerges as a crucial site through which histories of slavery, empire, migration, and racial capitalism are negotiated and reimagined. Literary representations of motherhood register both the intimate labor of care and the broader structural pressures shaping diasporic life, often producing alternative temporalities, ethical frameworks, and speculative futures.

In an era marked by digital mediation, political polarization, and heightened ethical scrutiny, humour has become a high-stake cultural practice: jokes travel rapidly, provoke backlash, generate solidarity, and often become flashpoints for debates around offence, free speech, and accountability. In the twenty-first century, humour has emerged as one of the most powerful, contested, and ubiquitous modes of cultural expression. Circulating across literary texts, theatrical stages, digital platforms, popular media, and everyday social interactions, humour today functions not merely as entertainment but as a deeply performative, political, and ethical practice.

Call for Papers: Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania EXTENDED DEADLINE

Institute of Literature and New Media at the University of Szczecin, Poland invites you to take part in the international academic conference on the 160th anniversary of the birth and 85th anniversary of the death of the author Elizabeth von Arnim and Pomerania

6-7 June 2026

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Dr Jennifer Shepherd, The Open University Belfast, Northern Ireland
prof. Noreen O’Connor, King’s College, Pennsylvania, USA

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

For the 150th anniversary of Harriet Martineau’s death, the Martineau Society will be hosting its annual conference in conjunction with the University of Cumbria, Ambleside Campus, in Ambleside, England. The Martineau Society conference is an interdisciplinary conference that focuses on the lives, work, and contributions of the Martineau family, including its two most famous and influential members, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) and James Martineau (1805-1900). Harriet Martineau resided in the Lake District for much of her later years, from 1845 until her death in 1876.

UCD Centre for Gender, Feminisms & Sexualities - 2nd CGFS Conference  Call for Papers: 'Thinking Gender Justice: Oppression, Resistance, Liberation' University College Dublin, Ireland, 17-19 June 2026  Proposal Deadline: 27 February 2026. Notifications: 9 March 2026Registration opens 6 MarchProposal Submission form: https://forms.gle/4qkYr9riQ1yWgnwR7