Call for Papers

Updated September 22, 2025

Atlantis has ONE current call for papers: "Generation: A Critical Femininities Issue."

SEE DETAILS BELOW

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Call for Abstracts 
Generation: A Critical Femininities Issue

Editors: Hannah Maitland, Andi Schwartz and Laura Brightwell


Deadline: October 31, 2025

To generate is to cause, create, or bring about. A generation may refer to a relation in time or the creation of art, scholarship, solidarity, or power. This special issue of Atlantis aims to explore what is generative about femininities as well as the multifaceted dimensions of and attitudes toward femininities across different generations. 

We ask these questions at a critical moment when notions of generation are being deployed in the service of a “return” to colonial, white, and middle- to upper-class definitions of femininity as essentialist, maternal, domestic, and subservient. This is evident through the rise of white supremacist “pronatalist” and “tradwife” movements, restrictive and intentionally transphobic legal definitions of womanhood, and the clawing back of reproductive rights. A classist, colonial, white, heterosexual, cis, able-bodied ideal of femininity is reinforced through the ongoing rise of the Far Right, Trump 2.0, rising wealth inequality, and violently enforced colonial borders, from Turtle Island to Palestine. In the current genocide in Gaza, hierarchies of femininities are on display: the non-normative, militant femininities of Israeli soldiers are presented as empowered, while Muslim femininities are depicted as weak and subjected to a voyeuristic, Orientalist gaze (Pratt et al. 2025). In this moment, critical analysis of femininities—and the racialized and classed hierarchies between them—is vital. 
Critical femininities frameworks offer a useful alternative to these normative narratives and oppressive mobilizations of femininity. As a discipline and praxis, critical femininities challenges the essentialist collapse between femininity and womanhood, opening up possibilities of a range of non- and anti-normative femininities. Critical femininities scholars consider femininity beyond its simplistic framing as a patriarchal tool of oppression to explore its potential as a radical site of political, theoretical, and cultural engagement and production (Brightwell and Taylor 2021; Dahl 2012; Hoskin and Blair 2022; McCann 2018; Nash 2018; Schwartz 2020; Spurgas 2021; Stardust 2015; Streeter 2021; Taylor and Hoskin 2023).

Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled and femme theorists have critiqued colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist definitions of lineage, and envisioned alternative generational kinship structures that resist the limitations placed on femmes and feminine subjects (Eguchi and Long 2018; Hill Collins 2000; Weston 1991). French poststructuralist feminism from the 1970s on theorized écriture féminine, a feminist, non-patriarchal language (Cixous 1976; Irigaray 1985). Feminist and femme scholars have also presented femininity as a site that can generate affective connections (Dahl 2017; Kokka et al. 2024; Schwartz 2020), critical theoretical perspectives (Hoskin 2017; McFarland and Taylor 2021; Schwartz 2018; Shelton 2018), political movements and interventions (Brightwell 2025; Deliovsky 2008; Tinsley 2022), and expansive and reparative understandings of gender (Ellison 2019; Nnawulezi et al. 2015). As we witness the (re)generation of destructive norms of femininity and the attempted destruction of resistant cultures of femininity, we invite submissions that draw on these lineages to offer critical and intersectional contemplations about what past generations of femmes and feminine figures have left for us, and what we might leave for future generations.

This special issue of Atlantis seeks to expand upon the conversations initiated at Generation: The Fourth Annual Critical Femininities Conference, hosted by the Centre for Feminist Research at York University from August 16-18, 2024. We invite proposals developed from presentations delivered at this conference and new proposals that interrogate how various social, cultural, political, and technological factors intersect with and shape the generative and generational experiences and discourses of femininity. Possible themes may include, but are not limited to:
• Femme perspectives and meditations on generations, kinship, lineage, and structural disruptions in intergenerational relationships (e.g. the AIDS epidemic; the occupation and genocide in Palestine, residential schools; the Sixties Scoop; transnational adoption)
• Femininity and matricentric and/or maternal feminisms, particularly as they intersect with race, class, transness, queerness, or disability 
• Transnational, decolonial, queer and trans BIPOC perspectives on femininity, generation, and kinship
• Indigenous, Indigiqueer, and Two-Spirit perspectives on femininity, generation, and kinship
• Generations of trans and nonbinary perspectives on femininities, femme communities, and femme-inist futures
• Fat studies perspectives on femininities, femme communities, and fat femme-inist futures
• Critical femininities perspectives on history and history-making
• The role of racialized femininities in war, colonization, and nation-building 
• (Inter)generational work building on the provocations and limitations of proto-femme theories in literature, cultural production, and art, such as the work and legacy of Sojourner Truth, Judy Chicago, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Patricia Hill Collins, and others
• Femme and feminine-generated subjugated knowledges, low theory (including popular culture and cultural production), and forms of creative resistance 
• Critical perspectives on pronatalism, “tradwives” and other regressive approaches to reproductive justice, families, reproduction, and reproductive labour
• Queer, trans, crip, BIPOC, femme, and feminist environmental and anti-capitalist critiques of the generation of wealth, electricity, generative AI, and extractive attitudes towards ecosystems; and alternative orientations (decolonial, feminine, holistic, nurturing, and other) towards these crises and desires
• Posthumanism and the Dishuman as a turn to “generation” and creative notions of the body

Submissions can be single-authored or co-authored academic papers, autotheoretical and artistic narrative, visual art (static images that can be published in PDF format only), poetry, and analyses of art, music, and film. We welcome submissions from graduate students, emerging, independent, and established scholars, and artists/writers working beyond the university.

Submission Process
**Please read Atlantis Journal’s scope and submission guidelines at atlantisjournal.ca before submitting work for follow the guidelines below carefully.**

• Submit an abstract of 250-300 words by October 31, 2025.
• Abstracts must be submitted through Atlantis’ OJS platform. Clearly state in the “Comments to Editor” that your submission is for the “Generation” issue.
• Submit your abstract as an “article text.” Note that OJS has no provisions for submitting an abstract alone.
Requests for full papers will be sent by December 15, 2025.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full article by May 30, 2026. Invitation to submit a full paper does not indicate or guarantee publication. All research papers will be sent for anonymous external peer review.

For questions about OJS and/or the submission process, please contact Katherine Barrett, Managing Editor: atlantis.journal@msvu.ca. For questions about submission scope and content, please contact the guest editors Hannah Maitland, Andi Schwartz, and Laura Brightwell at generationspecialissue [at] gmail [dot] com. 

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Forthcoming Issues (submissions now closed)

LIVEABLE FUTURES: RADICAL IMAGINATION AS METHOD // RADICAL IMAGINATION AS SURVIVAL.
Co-Editors: Ardath Whynacht and Alex Khasnabish

"HEALING IS AN ACT OF COMMUNION": CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN'S HEALTH, WELLNESS AND DISEASE
Co-Editors: Shannan Grant and Barbara Hamilton-Hinch

MIGRATION AND THE WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA
Co-editors: Tatjana Takševa and Nancy Annan

DISABILITY, DIVERGENCE AND CREATIVE EXPRESSION
Co-editors Jordana Greenblatt and Drew Danielle Belsky

THE INDIGENOUS NEW WAVE MOVEMENT: GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN CULTURE PRODUCTION
Co-editors Margaret Robinson and Krista Collier-Jarvis