CLIC is pleased to announce the 2025 VAL Symposium, taking place on 28 November 2025 and organised by CLIC members Maxime Honinx, Eva Ulrike Pirker, Marcela Scibiorska, Jade Thomas, and Hannah Van Hove.
Call for papers
Topics Related to the Theme of the Symposium: “Gender Anxieties?”
and
Free Topics from General and Comparative Literary Studies
The annual symposium of the VAL (Vlaamse Vereniging voor Algemene en Vergelijkende Literatuurwetenschap) consists of two components. Firstly, we organise keynote lectures and a panel debate, focusing on a pre-defined theme – this year the topic will be “Gender Anxieties? (Re-)Assessments from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective” (see below).
Secondly, literary scholars from Flanders (or neighbouring regions and countries) have the opportunity to present their own research in parallel sessions. Thus, the VAL wants to offer a forum where researchers from all career stages (from predocs to experienced scholars) share insights and findings from their fields of inquiry. For this part of the symposium, we set up sessions in line with the theme of the day, yet we also organise sessions that provide insight into ongoing research beyond the scope of the conference’s focus.
We welcome abstracts (max. 1 form) for 20-minute presentations until 15 June 2025. Submit your abstract here. We extend an especially warm call to all predocs and postdocs who would like to receive feedback from fellow literary researchers and expand their professional network in the Flemish research community. Presentations are possible in Dutch, English, French or German. We approach literary studies from a broad angle, including various national traditions, languages and periods, as well as cultural studies and literary translation studies. All contributions are eligible for publication afterwards in the peer-reviewed Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (CLW), which is issued electronically and in open access, and is VABB-listed.
The VAL symposium is organised annually by the Literary Studies Departments of KU Leuven, VUB, UGent and UAntwerpen. It rotates between the participating institutions and receives practical and logistical support from the host institution. It is financially supported by the Flemish Interuniversity Council (VLIR) and will receive additional support from the VUB Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC).
Participation is free but registration is required.: https://events.vub.be/val2025/register
Theme of the Symposium:
Gender Anxieties?
(Re-)Assessments from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective
In Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), Judith Butler, whose work over decades has been a barometer for the state of gender debates across disciplines, argues that gender has been transformed into a ‘phantasm’ – a fabricated threat – by conservative political and religious leaders who misrepresent it as a destabilizing force. In their depictions, discourses surrounding gender appear as an ideological threat to a perceived ‘natural’ and morally righteous order of heteronormative family structures and homogenous, binary identity categories. Indeed, the political and institutional landscape in which literary and cultural studies, too, is embedded, is characterised by an increasing contentiousness surrounding gender debates. While ‘non-conforming’ gender identities have always existed, the narratives of non-binary and trans individuals have only recently begun to gain more mainstream visibility. This shift has prompted a productive rethinking of previous approaches to feminist and queer literary studies (cf., e.g. El Ghaoui and Fonio 2013; Lanser 2024; Vakoch and Sharp 2024), yet it has also provided an opportunity for supremacist ideologies to exploit these developments for political gain. These and other developments raise the question of how the academic study of literature and other forms of artistic expression responds to prevailing gender anxieties.
What role have literary and cultural studies played, and do they continue to play, in these debates? How do recent developments impact the study of women's writing, and queer, trans and masculinity studies, and how does literature react to those? To what extent do historical narratives of gender experience inform contemporary gender concepts, and how do these concepts, in turn, shape our (re)interpretation of earlier literary texts? To what extent do dominant gender theories in literary and cultural studies remain rooted in Western or Anglophone academic traditions, and what alternative frameworks might help bridge this gap (e.g. Mwangi 2009; Sullivan 2021)? What are the limits and/or possibilities of translation in understanding gendered, queer and trans experiences and how can we foreground a decolonial praxis in our considerations of these issues (Upadhyay and Bakshi 2020)? In what ways are neoliberalism, literature and representations of gender intimately entangled (Demeyer and Vitse 2024)?
Contemporary scholars in feminist and queer literary studies highlight the importance of acknowledging works by women and queer writers for their engagement with literary form, rather than viewing them solely through an ideological lens (Bradway 2017; Fawaz 2022; Warhol and Lanser 2015). They also urge literary scholars to engage with more intersectional bodies of work and to move beyond conceptualizing gender as the moral domain of white, middle-class, cisgender women (Warhol and Lanser 2015; Fawaz 2023). How can our field productively study literary and artistic gender representations across ethnicities, sexualities, class, or historical and geographical differences, while staying attuned to the material consequences of gender identification?
At the VAL Symposium, we will explore these developments and questions from an international perspective, embracing the broad methodological, transnational, and transhistorical diversity of the research domain. Keynote speakers Teagan Bradway (Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University for 2025-26) and Hans Demeyer (Associate Professor of Dutch & Comparative Literature at University College London) will provide us with food for thought. In the panel debate, we will reflect on the challenges and opportunities for embedding literary and cultural studies perspectives on gender in higher education. An issue of Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (CLW) will be published on the basis of these and other contributions.
References and further reading
Bradway, Teagan. Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Butler, Judith. Who's Afraid of Gender? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
Demeyer, Hans and Sven Vitse. “Autofiction and the Possibility of Life in Neoliberal Ruins: Reification, Friction and the Affective Dominant in Weijers and Heti.” Textual Practice, 2024, pp. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2024.2417073.
El Ghaoui, Lisa and Filippo Fonio, eds. “‘On ne naît pas… on le devient’. I gender studies e il caso italiano, dagli anni Settanta a oggi”. Cahier d’études italiennes, vol. 16, 2013. https://journals.openedition.org/cei/1049.
Fawaz, Ramzi. “Feminism is for Beginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 122, no. 3, 2023, pp. 591-625.
---. Queer Forms. NYU P, 2022.
Lanser, Susan S. “Trans-forming Narratology.” Narrative, vol. 32, no. 2, 2024, pp. 215-224.
Mwangi, Evan Maina. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. SUNY P, 2009.
Sullivan, Mecca Jamilah. The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora. U of Illinois P, 2021.
Upadhyay, Nishant and Bakshi, Sandeep. “Translating queer: Reading Caste, Decolonizing Praxis”. The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender, edited by Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal, Routledge, 2020, pp. 336-344.
Vakoch, Douglas A., and Sabine Sharp, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature. Routledge, 2024.
Warhol, Robyn, and Susan S. Lanser, eds. Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Ohio State UP, 2015.
