CFP: Literature and Gender

Aaron Aquilina Announcement
Location
Malta
Subject Fields
Literature, Sexuality Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies, Social History / Studies, Humanities

 

The international journal antae is inviting full length contributions on the interspaces between literary studies and gender studies.

If gender is often scripted, then it might be best to examine how its narrative qualities can be produced, reproduced, rewritten, disrupted, or suspended. But what are these qualities, and how can one think—and write—otherwise?

After all, our script is often dictated to us before we can even read—at birth, medical narratives decide our path for us. How might one read medical categorisation otherwise, as Jeffrey Eugenides does, for instance, in Middlesex? What formations of femininities and masculinities are championed through issues of birth control, reproductive technologies, sex-reassignment surgery, mental health, physical illness, and even death? What kinds of policing of trans* issues are at play across multiple sites, and how might heteronormative values, as Rebecca Brown’s The Gifts of the Body suggests, still underpin narratives of HIV/AIDS? In short, what visibility have these othered narratives—and othered bodies—been granted in literature and other texts?

Additionally, how has literature engaged with or even preceded contemporary social rearrangements like the #MeToo movement, the 2018 ruling striking down India’s Section 377, or Trump’s transgender military ban? Among other narrative lineages, Foucault’s instructive reception of Herculine Barbin’s memoirs allows us to ask how works, literary and otherwise, address the shifting borders of body, self, and power.

Moreover, gender, as a concept, often lies at the intersection of other politics, namely: race, religion, disability, age, employment and economic standing. In what ways are these intersections depicted and challenged? How do social and economic politics affect gendered relations—ones familial or romantic, or of kinship and friendship? In what alternate ways has gendered autonomy been represented and addressed?

Ultimately, who “authors” gender in the dual sense of authorship and authority? In what ways is this resistible, and in what ways can literature, alongside other cultural and artistic texts, rewrite gender, sex, and sexuality?

As suggested above, gender is truly and necessarily trans-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary, and intersects with a vast range of disciplines that include also psychology, theology, trauma studies, sociology, and anthropology, among others. In light of this, the editors of antae (ISSN 2523-2126) welcome complete essay submissions on or around the topic of Literature and Gender. The authorial guidelines are available on www.antaejournal.com, and the deadline for submissions to antaejournal@gmail.com is the 8th of March, 2020. Submissions should be in the form of articles between 5000 and 7000 words and accompanied by a brief biographical note. Questions may be addressed to the email address provided above.

Issues and topics relevant to this publication include, but are not limited to:

 

  • Literature and gender studies, feminist thought, queer theory
  • Sex, gender, and medicine
  • Gender and contemporary societies
  • HIV/AIDS narratives; sex and death
  • Gender and (identity, cultural, economic, global) politics
  • Gender and high, low, pop culture
  • Philosophy and gender: corporeality, phenomenology of gender, poststructuralism, existentialism
  • Body, self, power
  • Gender and other texts: film, television, painting, photography, sculpture, music, dance

 

Contact Information

 

antae (ISSN 2523-2126) is an international refereed journal aimed at exploring current issues and debates within English Studies, with a particular interest in literature, criticism, and their various contemporary interfaces. Set up in 2013 by postgraduate students in the Department of English at the University of Malta, it welcomes submissions situated across the interdisciplinary spaces provided by diverse forms and expressions within narrative, poetry, theatre, literary  theory,  cultural criticism, media  studies, digital cultures, philosophy, and  language studies. Creative writing and book reviews are also encouraged submissions.

Contact Email
antaejournal@gmail.com