Gender and Fantasy
In her seminal Fantasy: A Literature of Subversion, critic Rosemary Jackson calls fantasy “a literature of desire”, one that “traces the unsaid and unseen of culture, that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent'”. This issue of gender forum concerns itself with the manifold ways in which the fantasy genre is used to renegotiate these unseen desires, seeking to examine if and how it has moved on from the genre-specific stereotypes of wise wizard, wicked witch, strong hero, and damsel in distress. We are looking for contributions that analyse the role of gender in
• high and low fantasy
• the different subgenres (urban fantasy, dark fantasy, etc.)
• the genre’s classic as well as contemporary texts
• fantasy films
• fantasy TV shows
• theatrical representations
• the adaptation process (novel to film or vice versa)
• …
Abstracts of 400 words plus a brief biography should be submitted by October 15th, 2015. The deadline for the completed papers is January 7th, 2016. (Publication date: Early 2016)
gender-forum@uni-koeln.de