Vulnerability has become a key term in contemporary critical theory, ethics, trauma studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. But fiction has long engaged with vulnerability – not necessarily as weakness or exposure, but as a condition of relationality, openness, resistance, and change. From tragic protagonists to marginalized bodies and precarious subjectivities, literary texts have repeatedly returned to fragility, dependency, and risk.

Among the theoreticians who have written on this topic, Judith Butler stands out through her complex account of vulnerability across several works, especially Precarious Life (2004), Frames of War (2009), and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). For Butler, vulnerability is not simply weakness, it is a constitutive feature of embodied, social existence. Butler distinguishes between precariousness which she sees as a universal condition of embodied life – as living beings, we are dependent on others for survival, care, recognition, and social support – and precarity, a politically created condition in which certain populations are made highly exposed to violence, poverty, displacement, or neglect. In other words, vulnerability is universal, but its distribution is unequal. Political systems decide whose lives are protected and whose are rendered disposable.

For Butler, vulnerability means that the self is not autonomous or self-sufficient. As relational beings, we are, physically, socially, and linguistically exposed to others. This exposure is not only a risk, it is also the condition of intimacy, ethics, and social life. Vulnerability, then, is tied to dependency, social recognition, affective attachment, and ethical obligation. 

In Frames of War, Butler argues that not all lives are considered equally “grievable.” Certain deaths are publicly mourned while others are dismissed or justified. This differential recognition reveals how vulnerability is framed by media, state power, and ideology. A key issue she raises is that of whose lives count as lives? Vulnerability becomes political when certain groups such as migrants, racialized communities, queer and trans people are viewed as less worthy of protection.

Importantly, Butler does not regard vulnerability as a passive condition. In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, she argues that collective gatherings – protests, assemblies, public demonstrations – display bodily vulnerability as a form of political power. Thus, when bodies assemble in public space, they expose their precarity, assert their right to appear and transform vulnerability into resistance.

Therefore, we invite submissions for an interdisciplinary volume exploring literary representations of vulnerability across various historical periods, genres, and cultural contexts. Our volume seeks to examine how literature represents, theorizes, complicates, and reimagines vulnerability.

Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):

Vulnerability and embodiment

Trauma, memory, and testimonial writing

Gendered and racialized vulnerability

Precarity, migration, and displacement

Ecological vulnerability and the Anthropocene

Illness, disability, and care

Emotional exposure and affect

Confession, intimacy, and autofiction

Political vulnerability and resistance

Narrative form and the aesthetics of fragility

Vulnerability in children’s and young adult literature

Digital vulnerability and contemporary media ecologies

Hospitality, ethics, and relationality

We welcome theoretical, historical, comparative, and close-reading approaches, as well as interdisciplinary work engaging philosophy, sociology, political theory, psychoanalysis, or medical humanities. Our volume will be published open access on Paradigm.global.reference.com.

Articles will be subject to a blind peer-reviewing process and must not be under consideration for any other publication.

Submission guidelines: The first page of the manuscript should carry the title, names of authors, institutional affiliations, a brief but detailed 200-word abstract, and 7–10 key words/ concepts. The article must be accompanied by a 200-word biographical note and must conform to MLA referencing (9th edition). Please see further information and instructions in the journal’s Submission Guidelines at: https://magazines.ulbsibiu.ro/ewcp/.

Please email enquiries and submissions marked “Literary Representations of Vulnerability” to Alexandra Mitrea  (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania) at alexandra.mitrea@ulbsibiu.ro, before the closing date.