“Engaging with the Woman Fantastic’ collection call for papers

By John Freeman on September 14, 2013

The past 30 years have offered a growing and changing body of scholarship on images of fantastic women in American popular culture. Collections from Marleen Barr’s Future Females (1981) and Future Females: The Next Generation (2000) to Elyce Rae Helford’s Fantasy Girls: Gender and the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television (2000) and Sherrie Inness’s Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (2004) have offered multifaceted commentary on ways in which contemporary media culture posits and positions “empowered” women in speculative fictions.

A new academic title now in the works, Engaging the Woman Fantastic in Contemporary Media Culture, takes part in this tradition and brings it to the present day with emphasis on texts from the 1990s to the present and media from young adult fiction to social networks.

In particular, this edited scholarly collection, to be published in 2014 by Cambridge Scholars Press, engages with female protagonists, antagonists, and characters that challenge such simple binaries in popular literature, television, comics, videogames, and other new media.

As a whole, the volume will examine how images of fantastic women address prevailing ideas of gender, race, sexuality, class, nation, and other facets of identity in contemporary American culture.

In their call for papers, the editors say they welcome proposals on all aspects of the “Woman Fantastic” within an imaginative fictional context and originating or retaining special media resonance from the mid-1990s to the present. Submissions should be grounded in a particular critical or theoretical perspective and center on a single text and/or character.

They especially seek manuscripts engaging with social networks and internet culture, utilizing postcolonial, queer, disability, or fandom studies approaches, or focusing on images of women of color and/or queer women in any medium other than film.

The editors have emphasized that they are not seeking submissions on film, non-American texts, or DC Comics. Also, because they are most interested in publishing studies of texts that have not been written about extensively elsewhere (e.g. the Harry Potter novels), any proposal should be sure to offer a unique focus or new angle if you write on academically popular texts.

• To submit, send a two-page proposal with working bibliography and brief vita (as a single .doc or .rtf attachment) to ewfcollection@gmail.com by 1st November 2013. Complete, polished manuscripts are due by January 30, 2014. Queries are welcome. Acceptance will be handled on a rolling basis

John Freeman

The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.

He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.