CFP Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media (3/1/2026)

Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media

deadline for submissions:
March 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Special Issue of Women's Studies on the Female Gothic

contact email:
Haunting_revisions_submissions@mailfence.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/12/haunting-revisions-the-female-gothic-across-time-and-media

Call for Publications

Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Taylor & Francis)

**Special Issue on

Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media**

Guest Editors:
Dr. Cindy Murillo, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Dr. Jennifer Nader, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Overview

The Female Gothic has long served as a vibrant site of cultural critique and imaginative resistance. From its eighteenth-century origins to its twenty-first-century reinventions, the mode has provided women—and now feminist, queer, trans, and nonbinary creators across media—with narrative tools for exploring domestic captivity, gendered violence, racial haunting, queer desire, environmental dread, and the uncanny dimensions of embodiment. Foundational scholarship by Ellen Moers (1976), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), and later Diana Wallace (2009) and Andrew Smith (2009) has shaped the field, while more recent work increasingly examines the Female Gothic’s global, intersectional, and multimedia transformations.

This special issue, Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media, emerges from the panel “Unhomely Heroines: Rewriting the Female Gothic in American Fiction,” presented at the American Literature Association Symposium on the Female Gothic (October 17, 2025). The panel’s high attendance, lively discussion, and subsequent scholarly inquiries demonstrated a pressing need for renewed interdisciplinary engagement with the Female Gothic—especially given the profound cultural upheavals that have reshaped feminist discourse since the last major collected study in 2009 (Wallace & Smith).

Why Now?

Although scholars continue to publish monographs and articles on Gothic women’s writing, there has not been a recent special issue of Women’s Studies dedicated to revisiting the Female Gothic in light of the past decade’s cultural, political, and technological shifts. These include:

• The global #MeToo movement and feminist protest cultures
• Potential rollbacks of women’s voting and property rights through revived coverture frameworks
• Legal assaults on reproductive rights following the overturning of Roe v. Wade
• Rising visibility of trans and queer identities amidst escalating backlash
• Renewed racial justice movements and examinations of colonial hauntings
• Fictional and nonfictional digital Gothic forms (podcasts, TikTok horror, glitch aesthetics, AI-generated Gothic, virtual hauntings)
• Climate crisis, domestic precarity, and post-pandemic isolation reconfiguring the home as both sanctuary and site of terror

In this context, the Female Gothic has not faded—it has expanded, taking on new forms to express contemporary anxieties, desires, and resistances. Recent scholarship by Monica Germanà (2022), Gina Wisker (2016), and Maisha Wester (2012) highlights the evolving forms of the Female Gothic across global, racial, queer, and intersectional frameworks, making a 2027 special issue both timely and necessary.

Aims of the Special Issue

This special issue seeks to:Re-examine the Female Gothic through transnational, intersectional, and multimedia lenses.
Investigate how contemporary social and political pressures reshape Gothic tropes.
Explore the ways women and gender-minority creators use the Gothic to articulate trauma, agency, resistance, and radical imagination.
Highlight global, queer, racial, environmental, and posthuman approaches that extend the boundaries of Female Gothic scholarship.
Foster interdisciplinary conversations across literature, film, television, digital media, music, art, and performance.

We welcome full-length scholarly articles (approximately 20–30 pages), shorter essays, interviews, creative-critical forms, and interdisciplinary approaches.

All submissions will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review process.

Topics May Include, but Are Not Limited To:

• Historical and Global Female Gothic Traditions
• Race, Coloniality, and Haunting
• Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary Gothic
• Digital, Virtual, and AI Gothic Media
• Domesticity, Intimacy, and Reproductive Futures
• Environmental and EcoGothic Perspectives
• Posthuman, Abject, and Embodied Gothic
• Female Gothic in Film, Television, Music, and Games
• Archival, Historical, and Recovery Work



Key Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 1, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: April 10, 2026
Full Article Submission: August 10, 2026
Peer Review Decisions: October 10, 2026
Revisions Due: January 10, 2027
Final Copy Deadline: February 20, 2027
Publication: Mid-2027

Submission Guidelines

Please email a 250-word abstract (with 3–5 keywords) and a short bionote to:

Haunting_revisions_submissions@mailfence.com by March 1, 2026.

Completed manuscripts will be submitted through Women’s Studies’ editorial system after abstract approval.


Last updated December 12, 2025