Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis.
Host and dates: Pembroke College, Cambridge. 17-18 September 2026.
Deadline for submissions: 16 January 2026.
Event presentation
Gendered work on medieval popular politics has ended to revolve around the exceptional. This workshop explores how studies of gender can reconfigure discourses of medieval political community. We ask how attending to gendered bodies and identities might help us better understand the fissures in political culture in medieval Europe. Marking, for example, women’s participation as either absent or rare confines their involvement to the historical margins. How did literary as well as non- literary texts from various genres, ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, engage with gendered political action? How did ideas of gender stabilise or destabilise political performances?
We invite abstracts for 25-minute papers, as well as expressions of interest for participation. We welcome papers with a historical, literary, or interdisciplinary focus. Potential topics could include but are not limited to:
- Frameworks for understanding non-normative gender expressions in political spaces.
- Studies of politics at the intersection of gendered, queer, or trans methodologies.
- Histories of masculinities in the political community.
- Emotion and/or Affect
- Weaponized/defensive gender
- Manoeuvring bodies through political crisis
- Inclusion and exclusion
- Different sites of political discourse, such as domestic and non-violent conflict.
- Collectively, the papers will interrogate the role of gender in political discourse.
Contact details
- Abbie Fray: abigail.fray@unibe.ch
- Alice Raw: ar889@cam.ac.uk
CFP
For further details, please check the event original call inserted below.
Call for Papers (2)(Posted 18 December 2025)