Vabilo k prijavi prispevkov na konferenci
Articulations of female sexual desire and eroticism were rare before the advent of modern feminism, largely due to the historically restricted social roles and positions of women. When such articulations did emerge, they were often encoded and veiled in metaphor, reflecting their transgressive nature. Women writers frequently had to invent the language of eroticism and desire anew, often without access to earlier female expressions of similar experiences.
In Catholic contexts in particular, femininity was caught between two extremes: the glorification of Marian virginity and the condemnation of eroticism embodied in Eve. As a result, female sexuality was typically considered sinful unless contained within the heterosexual matrix of marriage. Yet many women writers boldly transgressed social, moral, and aesthetic boundaries in their exploration and expression of desire; whether directed toward men, other women, or the self through narcissistic love.
This conference seeks to explore representations of female desire and its intersections with other emotions, especially pride, joy, and shame, in women’s writing. We invite papers that build on existing scholarship as well as new readings, analyses, and interpretations of women’s writing, particularly from so-called peripheral literatures. The aim is to shed light on how women writers contributed to the discourse on sexual desire up to the interwar period, and how their work shaped cultural understandings of female eroticism and emotion.
As a key point of departure, we draw on the SHE WROTE database (shewrote.rich.ru.nl), which enables users to collect, share, and analyze historical data documenting the international reception of works by women writers before c. 1940. This resource provides evidence of book ownership, readership, re-editions, translations, intertextual references, and commentary on women’s writing. Since representations of sexual desire have historically provoked particularly strong reactions from readers and cultural gatekeepers, we are very interested in the reception of this topic in women’s writing.
We especially welcome contributions that approach women’s writing from comparative, transnational, or digital humanities perspectives.
Possible research areas include, but are not limited to:
Exploring Female Sexual Desire
- What forms of intimacy did women writers associate with sexual desire?
- How did literary texts negotiate the tensions between women’s social roles, such as motherhood, and their intimate choices?
- Which literary genres did women writers find most suitable for exploring desire?
- How is language employed in women’s writing as a means of articulating and negotiating sexual desire?
- How were texts expressing female desire received by readers, especially by women and other women writers?
- How did critics respond to these articulations of female eroticism?
- In what ways did censorship constrain or stimulate creativity in representing desire?
- What was lost or gained in translation?
- How is the rhetoric of sexual desire manifested within women’s discourse, and how is the liminal position of women encoded linguistically?
- What lexical choices, metaphors, metonymies, and erotic euphemisms or dysphemisms do women authors employ?
- At what points do these texts interrupt or silence their narration — through ellipsis, omission, or restraint — as acts of self-censorship in response to the provocative nature of their subject matter?
Archiving, Digitalizing, Modelling and Visualizing Desire
- How can readers' and critics reactions to representations of sexual desire, shame, and other emotions be effectively modeled and mapped in digital form?
- How can descriptions, expressions, and emotions in readers' reactions and reception texts be systematically translated into digital data
- In what ways can such categories be theoretically and structurally conceptualized within a database framework?
Conference language: English.
Keynote speakers: Prof. Dr. Viola Parente-Čapková (University of Turku).
Please send proposals of around 250 words to desire@ung.si.
The abstract should include your name, email address, affiliation (if any), and the title of your paper. Presentations must not exceed 20 minutes in length.
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2026.
Programme committee
Dr. Katja Mihurko (University of Nova Gorica)
Dr. Ivana Zajc (University of Nova Gorica)
Marie-Louise Coolahan (University of Galway)
Dr. Biljana Dojčinović (University of Belgrade)
Dr. Alenka Jensterle Doležal (Charles University Prague)
Dr. Alicia Montoya (Radbout University)
Dr. Amelia Sanz (Complutense University Madrid