Call for Papers: Unfinished Histories: Gender, Literature, and Strange Temporalities

Special Issue of The History of Nordic Women's Literature

In recent years, antifeminist and anti-gender movements have gained increasing cultural and political visibility, while the manosphere and tradwife culture have revived traditional understandings of gender roles. At the same time, conceptions of gender as socially and historically constituted and subject to change are being challenged. These developments invite not only analyses of contemporary literature and culture but also renewed reflection on how we read the literary past.

This special issue seeks to explore how older literature can be brought into dialogue with the pressing gender-political concerns of the present and, conversely, how literary history might reshape our understanding of contemporary conflicts. We invite a strategically presentist approach to literary history: not an uncritical projection of contemporary values and concepts onto the past, but a methodological attentiveness to the relationship between the historical situation of a text and the present moment of its reading. We are interested in contributions that make both the connections and the distances between past and present productive, while reflecting on their methodological and literary-historiographical implications.

We welcome articles that take older literary texts and authorships as their point of departure to illuminate contemporary political, social, and cultural questions concerning gender.

Possible topics include:

• Antifeminism and anti-gender discourses
• Tradwives, ideals of domesticity, and the housewife
• The manosphere, masculinity, and gender conflict
• Motherhood, reproduction, and childfreedom
• Women, work, and economic independence
• Care, reproductive labour, and the welfare state
• Sexuality, family formations, and kinship
• Feminist progress, regression, and historical repetition

We are particularly interested in articles in which a contemporary concern does not merely provide a pretext for rereading an older work, but where the encounter between past and present generates new questions for literary history.

The special issue draws inspiration from recent feminist and queer theories of temporality that challenge linear and progressive understandings of literary and feminist history, foregrounding instead the significance of anachronisms, displacements, repetitions, and unfinished histories. From this perspective, the past is never entirely concluded. It may haunt the present, repeat itself, become reactivated, or suddenly become legible in unexpected ways. It may also reveal more radical, sustainable, or innovative possibilities than we might initially assume.

Possible theoretical points of departure include Sam McBean's work on feminism's queer temporalities and critique of wave and generational models, Jack Halberstam's concept of queer temporality, and Elizabeth Freeman's notion of temporal drag. Other relevant approaches include strategic presentism, anachronism, chrononormativity, and feminist and queer critiques of linear historical time. Contributions need not be grounded in these particular theoretical frameworks, but we encourage reflection on what it means, methodologically, to read the literature of the past from a present marked by conflicts over gender.

Contributions may adopt comparative approaches, connecting Nordic literature with international works, authorships, cultural movements, and theoretical debates. We particularly welcome articles that move across national literary histories and establish connections between different historical periods.

Submission Guidelines and Important Dates

We invite scholars to submit proposals for articles for the special issue Unfinished Histories: Gender, Literature, and Strange Temporalities.

Abstract submission deadline: 15. February 2027 Please submit an abstract of no more than one page to cas@sdu.dk or ejh@sdu.dk, including your name, institutional affiliation, and a short biographical note.

Full article submission deadline: 1 October 2027 Articles should not exceed 36,000 characters, including spaces, and may be written in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, or English. All submissions will undergo peer review.

Contact:
Camilla Schwartz cas@sdu.dk
Emily J. Hogg: ejh@sdu.dk

Website
Read more about The History of Nordic Women's Literature at: nordicwomensliterature.net/