NeMLA Panel 2027: Women's Writing and the Question of Canon (NeMLA Conference)
Virtual
Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association
Event: NeMLA Conference
Women's writing emerged as a critical category in response to the historical exclusion of women from literary canons and archives. The recovery of neglected texts, authors, and traditions has transformed literary studies, creating new genealogies of reading and interpretation. Yet the category itself raises important questions. Does the designation "women's writing" continue to serve as a productive framework, or does it risk reinforcing the very marginalization it seeks to address by positioning women outside the literary mainstream?
As Elaine Showalter argues, feminist criticism should not simply “fit women between the lines of the male tradition” but attend to the cultural and historical conditions that shape women’s literary production and reception. Her influential formulation of gynocriticism intends to recover neglected women writers and establish women’s writing as a significant field of scholarly inquiry. Subsequent feminist scholarship has complicated these foundations further. Black feminist critics such as Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Hortense Spillers challenge the tendency to treat “woman” as a universal category, while postcolonial theorists including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty question the assumption of a coherent global female experience. Likewise, theorists such as Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam have interrogated the stability of gender itself. Together, these interventions have encouraged scholars to frame women’s writing not as a singular tradition but as a diverse and contested field shaped by race, class, caste, sexuality, nationality, language, and other intersecting forms of identity and power.
This panel invites papers that reconsider critical strategies for studying women's writing, with particular attention to the reception of women's writing. How do questions of race, class, sexuality, language, nation, and geography influence the ways women writers are read, taught, circulated, translated, archived, and canonized? Topics may include feminist literary criticism, reception studies, archival practices, translation, publishing histories, readerships, pedagogy, and comparative perspectives on women's writing across languages and cultures.
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22585
Dr. Urvi Sharma