More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy
Mythopoeic Online Midsummer Seminar (OMS) 2025
Guests of Honor: Janet Brennan Croft & Leslie A. Donovan
https://mythsoc.org/oms/oms-04.htm
Co-Chairs: Cami Agan, Clare Moore, & Robin Anne Reid
Submission Deadline: March 31st, 2025
Seminar: Aug 2nd-3rd, 2025.
We invite submissions for an online conference that focuses on intersectional feminist approaches to women and gender in fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, or other mythopoeic work and that will honor the first anthology on women and Tolkien, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien (2015), edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan.
Intersectionality, or intersectional approaches, developed out of research and scholarship by Black women, highlighting how aspects of identity (such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class) overlap and intersect. Since then, feminist scholars in a number of disciplines, including literary studies, have adapted intersectionality in their work.
While the focus of this seminar is women and gender in mythopoeic works, we encourage proposals that acknowledge and analyze the intersectionality of gender with other aspects of identity, experience, and embodiment, including the non-human. Proposals should engage with developments in women and gender studies that both acknowledge and seek to move beyond the work of P&F drawing on theories and methodologies from recent years.
Paper topics include but are not limited to the following:
Intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or neurodiversity with female, asexual, agender, or nonbinary characters (mortal or immortal) in:
Tolkien's legendarium;
Works by other Inklings;
Works of contemporary mythopoeic fantasy in any medium*
How mythopoeic fantasy texts engage with gender and its intersections with markers such as race, class, speciesism, or material culture, whether through character, structure, or other fantasy conventions such as magic/enchantment, Faerie, non-human and animal sentience, and worldbuilding/Sub-Creation in:
Tolkien's legendarium;
Works by other Inklings;
Works of contemporary mythopoeic fantasy in any medium*
*Papers, panels, and roundtables from a variety of critical perspectives and disciplines are welcome. We are interested in analysis of ANY form of media (text, graphic novels, comics, television, movies, music and music videos, games) as long as it can be described as fantasy or otherwise mythopoeic.
We also welcome papers on the work of either of our Guests of Honor.
Each presentation will receive a 50-minute slot to allow time for questions, but individual presentations should be timed for oral presentation in 40 minutes maximum. Two or three presenters who wish to present short, related papers may also share one 50-minute slot.
Individual Proposals (~200 words) with bios (150 words, maximum) should be sent to: oms-chair@mythcon.org by March 31, 2025.
Group (two or three presenters) proposals should group the individual proposals together to send to: oms-chair@mythcon.org by March 31, 2025.
Working bibliographies are encouraged, but not required.
Participants are encouraged to submit papers chosen for the conference to Mythlore, the refereed journal of the Mythopoeic Society. All papers should conform to the 9th edition of the MLA Style Manual.