[Air-L] Call for Papers: “Resistance and Resilience: Gender/Sexuality in Digital Culture”

[Han, Woori]

Call for Papers: “Resistance and Resilience: Gender/Sexuality in Digital Culture”

May 16, 2024

Exeter, UK

Department of Communications, Drama, and Film, University of Exeter

Deeply embedded in our everyday life and our body, digital media have transformed gendered and sexual cultures and practices. Gender and sexuality as the performative have also transformed digital cultures, carving out important spaces for resistance and resilience in the face of systemic dehumanization. We have been witnessing how increasing (self-)representations of feminisms and LGBTQ people in the digital media landscape challenge and provoke backlash and how digitally mediated bodies (expressive form of gender and sexuality) complicate sexual and gendered norms. For example, the #MeToo movement has since evolved into a global phenomenon, symbolising the anti-sexual harassment movement in the digital age. Critical analysis within tweets, vlogs, TikToks and memes have become essential to deconstructing the transphobic rhetoric of the mainstream media.

The dialectics of gender/sexuality and digital media urge us to question changing forms, nature, and modes of resistance and resilience practices around patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cis-normativity at the intersection of racism, nationalism, colonialism, and neoliberalism. To tackle this question, and to launch a new Research Centre for Gender, Sexuality, and Digital Culture, we invite scholars from all disciplines to join us at the Resistance and Resilience conference to engage in conversations about how networked digital media complicate national and cultural belonging and rearrange gendered, sexual, and bodily norms that move beyond colonial and neoliberal resilience.

The topics include but are not limited to:

  *   Feminist and LGBTQ digital activism, solidarity, and resistance in the rising backlashes
  *   Popular feminisms and/or neoliberal feminisms
  *   Digital embodiment of gender and sexuality
  *   Fandoms, celebrity and influencer culture
  *   Representations of women and LGBTQ people in games
  *   Queer Diasporas
  *   Body weight, health, beauty, cisnormativity and queer bodies online
  *   Digital sex work and heteronormativity, romance and intimacy online
  *   Postcolonialism and critical race theory in digital spaces

The conference organizers welcome abstracts from Early Career Researchers and particularly encourage academics from marginalized groups to apply. The conference committee invites proposals for individual 20-minute papers: Please email a 350 word abstract (+50word bio) in a single Word document to Dr. Woori Han (w.han at exeter.ac.uk<mailto:w.han at exeter.ac.uk>) by Jan 18, 2024.


Key dates:

Submission Deadline Jan 18, 2024

Decision Notification: Feb 26, 2024

Conference: May 16, 2024



Keynote speakers: To be Confirmed





Organizing Committee

Drs. Amelia Morris, Haili Li, and Woori Han

Department of Communications, Drama, and Film, University of Exeter



Dr. Woori Han
Lecturer in Media and Communications
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
University of Exeter

Office 5, White House, Thornlea, Exeter, EX4 4LA, UK

Office hours: Thursday 11:30-12:30 pm and Friday 12:30-1:30 pm,