Panel Organizer: Monica Sousa, York University, msousa93@yorku.ca

Panel to be held at ACCUTE 2024, in Montreal, Canada 

The ACCUTE Conference runs June 12- 15, 2024 at McGill University. 

The psychological thriller novel has seen widespread commercial success among popular literary genres in the last decade. Origins are traceable to Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’ 2015 novel The Girl on the Train. Both bestsellers have often been compared, and not just for their choice to include “girl” in the title. Both novels include unreliable female narrators, explore domestic life, and employ the “missing woman” thriller trope. However, these are not the only common elements brought to the forefront by psychological thriller novels that focus on women; for example, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies discusses domestic abuse and Layne Fargo’s They Never Learn follows a female serial killer targeting evil men. With its myriad of topics that explore gender relations and the human condition, the topics continuously circle back to crucial discussions of female violence – often perpetuated against or by women. This panel seeks abstracts that explore these discussions. Topics of particular interest include (but are not limited to) female vengeance, the missing/dead woman trope, the cult of motherhood, the dissolution of heteronormative marriage, the female body as cultural currency, women submitting to the male gaze, intersectional oppression, and anti-feminist complicity conditioned by patriarchal sexism.

Submit your 300-500 word proposal, including a 100-word abstract and a brief biographical note, by November 17th, 2023.

Submissions must be uploaded via the ACCUTE portal -- see link for more details: https://accute.ca/accute-2023-2024-online-submission-form/

Note: Panel type is "Member-organized"