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Central Europe Call for Papers

22 December 2017

Central Europe

Special Issue on Gender and Sexuality

’Writing has yet to catch up with women’s experience’ the British author Tessa Hadley noted in an interview with the Guardian in 2015. The journal Central Europe aims to contribute to remedying this décalage by dedicating a special issue to the study of gender and sexuality from an areal perspective. To mark the centenary of women’s suffrage in most countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, as well as of the Representation of the People Act in the UK, we invite papers addressing the most important contemporary developments that concern women’s lives, rights, and power a hundred years on. Essays will look at topics in women’s representation both in art and legal contexts under various political regimes and different periods of cultural history.

Themes include, but are not restricted to, the following:

  • women’s position vis-à-vis economic and political change;
  • women’s writing;
  • Europe from female perspectives;
  • the representation of women and women’s rights in film and literature;
  • body politics and discourses of emancipation in Communism and Nationalism;
  • women in queer culture, lesbians under Communism;
  • women’s health and discourses of birth-control;
  • prostitution and forms of economic, political, or symbolic exploitation;

The approach to feminist writing is all-inclusive, engaging with questions, issues, and groups which are usually abandoned even in feminism, and exploring groups who are seen as inauthentic or inferior, and as such unable to speak for themselves. This approach is also supported by the areal perspective adopted in the special issue, which hopes to initiate an exchange of ideas addressing the question of what the study of gender, sexuality, and empowerment in Central and Eastern Europe can contribute to the discussion of such themes in the West.

How to Submit

Deadline for submission of manuscripts:

Manuscripts for this special issue will be accepted in several rounds. The first deadline is 30 December 2017, followed by the following in 2018: 20 January, and 20 February.

Genres and length of submissions:

Contributions may vary in length: single-issue and personalised essays may be 5,000-6,000 words while detailed treatments of well-researched subjects may be 10,000-11,000 words.

Book reviews of academic publications on the topic and of literary works (novels, short prose, volumes of verse, and plays) are also invited for this special issue. Reviews will be approximately 1,000 words in length.

For further information, or to run a short abstract of your paper past them, contact the guest editor, Dr. Urszula Chowaniec (u.chowaniec@ucl.ac.uk), or the editors, Dr. Eszter Tarsoly and Dr. Thomas Lorman (centraleurope@ucl.ac.uk)

Editorial information