Literature and Gender
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?
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