Journal of Literary Education is a refereed, peer reviewed, electronic journal for those interested in the study and development of Literary Education. Its readership comprises practitioners, teacher educators, librarians, researchers and both undergraduate and graduate students. Journal of Literary Education offers educators a forum for debate about this discipline from a broad perspective. General issues and special issues are published.

Call for Papers

CFP Gender in Literary Education

What may it mean to read and teach literature through the prism of gender? In what ways and methods can we integrate a balanced gender-approach into literary didactics? In what syllabi, strategies and instruction plans can we actually maintain and promote gender equality?  And how can these concerns be adequately addressed and embedded into the literature classroom?

 According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, “ in most Indo-European languages gender is not necessarily correlated with sex”, that is to say, that “ biological sex does not directly or even at all generate the characteristics conventionally associated with it. Culture, society, history define gender, not nature” (Jehlen, 1995, p.263). “Simply speaking”, says Catharine R.Stimpson, “gender is a way of classifying living things and languages, of sorting them into groups: feminine and masculine. However, no system of classification is ever simple”.  (1986, p.1). In fact, from the perspective of gender, the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as well as their conventionalism are being put  under the microscope.  Gender theory emphasizes the ‘trans-sectional’ and ‘transcultural’ (Jamison Green, Ashley Hoskin et al., 2019, pp. 44-45) nature of all gender identities and challenges the notion of cisnormativity. In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler has famously declared that gender is a socially and culturally constructed category, and that gender identity is rather a product of performance, not a natural quality, essentially divided to binary categories. Feminist and post-feminist theories have also had a crucial contribution to the articulation of gender identities from the perspective of women, thus, highlighted the overwhelmingly cultural character of gender too. Classic studies, like Kate Millet’s (1970) or Luce Irigaray’s (1977), emphasized that women are phallicly marked by men, their fathers, husbands, procurers, who, under the law of patriarchy longly operated in societies, dominate women  bearing various systems of oppression upon them.

Gender is inextricably involved with power, culture, language, and themes and debates of key-interest for the contemporary literature classroom. The ways we choose, read and teach texts in the classroom, the policies and the conventions within which we operate, the acts of reading and interpretation we perform, the point of views we adopt in order to deal with our students’ emerging sexuality, are all issues inevitably related with gender. Gender theory constitutes a major and multifarious area within the field of literary studies too. Contemporary critical practice, nevertheless, has put into question and continue to ceaselessly interrogate the sexual rhetoric we use in literary analysis (consider, for instance, when we describe certain rhymes as ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’), or the gendered position within which we ascribe certain qualities to texts (e.g. books which are labelled as boy/girl-appealing).

We invite papers related to the overall theme of the issue as described above. Potential research areas include, but are not restricted to:

• From the book to the classroom: the didactics of gender.
• Gender and power in literature.
• Gender and agency in literature.
• LGTBQ+ voices in literary education.
• Rereading canonical literature through a gender theory lens.
• Visibility of non-binary characters.
• Female writers in the educational curricula and the écriture féminine.
• Feminist and post-feminist approaches to literary texts.

Submissions are opened all year long for both the Miscellaneous and Monograph section. Papers received before 30th April will be considered for 2020’s issue.

References

Butler, J.(1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge.

Irigaray, L.(1987). This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press [first edition 1977].

Jamison Green, J., Ashley Hoskin, R., Mayo, C., sj Miller. (2019). Navigating Trans*+ and Complex Gender Identities, London: Bloomsbury.

Jehlen, M. (1995). “Gender”. In Lentriccia, F. & McLaughlin, Th. (Eds). Critical Terms for Literary Study, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,263-273.

Millet, K. (2000). Sexual Politics, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press [first edition 1970].

Stimpson, C.R.(1986).”Gertude Stein and the transposition of gender”. In Miller N.K.(ed.). The Poetics of Gender, New York: Columbia University Press, 42-62.

Xavier Mínguez López, Catalina Millán and Tzina Kalogirou