Call for papers: Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal (A&HCI)

Special Issue: Quilting and Women's Storytelling

Guest Editor: Hairong Chen

Quilting has long been associated with women's creativity, domesticity, and storytelling. As a global art form found across many civilizations, quilting remains intimately tied to women's hands and hearts, offering a lens through which to understand their resilience and resistance: their modes of expression, community-building, and pursuit of social justice and freedom. From grandma's quilts passed down through generations to communal "quilting bees" that fostered solidarity and cultural continuity, quilting stitches together histories that reflect women's voices, tastes, and values through fabric and thread. It offers an alternative discourse that challenges dominant historical narratives and remains accessible even to women with limited literacy. The reevaluation of quilting in recent decades has reclaimed its aesthetic and cultural legitimacy. This reclamation is evident in the work of feminist artists like Faith Ringgold, whose story quilts speak to identity, anti-war resistance, and social justice, and in the writing of authors like Alice Walker, whose womanist vision brought both quilting and women’s writing into public and critical consciousness. As seen across many forms of women's storytelling, including oral, visual, written, or digital, quilting has become an indispensable narrative resource as a culturally symbolic and materially grounded tradition. This special issue aims to bring together scholars working in feminist literary criticism, cultural history, visual and textile arts, material culture, and transmedia studies to examine the aesthetic, political, and epistemological dimensions of quilting. While it is particularly interested in women’s writing, we also welcome interdisciplinary contributions that explore quilting across literary, historical, artistic, and embodied contexts. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How have women used quilts as a visual, material and symbolic language to express unwritten or silenced experiences?
• In what ways does “quilting literature” function as a literary subgenre within the tradition of women’s writing?
• How has quilting culture shaped the ways women tell stories, whether in written, oral, visual, or hybrid forms? 
• How do feminist artists and writers draw on quilting to engage with themes such as female subjectivity, cultural memory, collective identity and modernity?
• What does quilting reveal about women’s aesthetic agency, material knowledge, and embodied creative practices?

Please submit abstracts of 300 words, along with a short bio, by 20 August 2025 to Hairong Chen at hairong.chen@hznu.edu.cn. Authors will be notified by 30 August 2025 if their proposals are invited for full-paper submission. Full papers submissions will be due by 20 November 2025.