Special thematic dossier | STEM in US Popular Culture: Assessing Gender Discourse, Stereotypes and Mainstreaming

Editors: Laura Álvarez Trigo (Universidad de Alcalá) and Erika Tiburcio Moreno (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

This special thematic dossier aims to offer different explorations and analyses of the ways in which US popular culture texts can offer both positive and negative representations of the STEM fields in connection to gender. We are looking for intersectional approaches that go beyond ‘white feminism’ and beyond a limited understanding of gender, paying attention to gender-nonconforming individuals, class-related issues, neurodivergence, and any instances of othered bodies in fictional and non-fictional popular culture from the United States.

We are interested in papers that seek to engage with questions of intersectionality and STEM in US popular culture, prominently focusing on gender representation, spanning from cultural products aimed at dissemination and debate on STEM to Science Fiction texts such as films, TV series, comics and graphic novels, genre fiction, and digital media.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Interrelationship between STEM, gender, and popular culture: the portrayal of masculine, feminine, and gender-nonconforming individuals in STEM-centered popular media narratives

• Representation of STEM in popular culture: specifically those texts aimed at women and/or prominently featuring female protagonists 

• How popular culture representations of STEM and gender operate within the struggle for power among culture, ideology, and subculture

• Othered bodies: marginalization versus intersectionality in science and technology dissemination 

• Race/Ethnicity and STEM with a gender perspective: Afro(Latinx), Indigenous, and Chincanx popular culture, minority perspectives, borderland spaces, and Afrofuturism

• Representations of women, non-binary people, and non-normative gender explorations in sci-fi 

• Pedagogy and education: STEM dissemination in popular culture, deconstructing the existing gendered challenges within the field and working toward equality

• Digital technology and virtual realities as safe spaces for marginalized groups

• The use of science and technology in depictions of the future as critiques or reevaluations of current realities: tech-noir and sci-fi utopias, dystopias, post/apocalyptic scenarios, and retrofuturism

• Cyborgs, AI, and the human: representations, conflicts, and horrific developments

• Representation of health issues and technological advancement: care robots and the representation of disabilities, human aging, biomedical issues

• The gender gap through the science and technology behind superhero narratives

• Relevance of gender representation and STEM in hybrid genre narratives

Deadline for submission: December 1, 2022 | to be published in vol 4 no 2 (May 2023)

Submission guidelines

REDEN accepts proposals of articles (6000-7000 words approx. including references) about any aspect related to the call. Please, upload your full article to https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/reden as a single file (.doc, .docx, .odt). Keep in mind that you will have to upload an abstract and keywords as well during the submission process.

You can find author guidelines here on the journal’s page (https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/reden/about/submissions) to prepare your paper, as indicated using the MLA manual of style 8th/9th edition.

REDEN (Revista Española de Estudios Norteamericanos, ISSN: 2695-4168) is an open access interdisciplinary, academic, double blind peer-reviewed journal. In 2021 it was relaunched focusing on the study of the US popular culture manifestations and the representations of the United States in popular culture.