Call for Papers. Gothic and Gender: Feminism and the Politics of Care in the Literature of Terror

Posted on 2026-07-06

Gothic and Gender: Feminism and the Politics of Care in the Literature of Terror

Editors: Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno (Binghamton University, New York, USA) and Inés Ordiz (UNED, Spain)

Article submission deadline: January 31st, 2027

Publication date: January 2028

Languages: Spanish, English, and Catalan

For further information on the issue: ines.ordiz@flog.uned.es, casanova@binghamton.edu

Instructions for Authors: https://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/asparkia/about/submissions

Studies on the Gothic in literature have grown steadily since the second half of the twentieth century, expanding their theoretical approaches, geographical frameworks and languages of analysis. Recent studies recognize the Gothic as a transnational narrative form (Byron, Duncan, Elbert and Marshall) and one that is especially alive in the Americas (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz, DeVirgilis and García Gutiérrez). These studies coincide in highlighting the potential of the Gothic mode to represent unequal relations between centers of power (economic, political, racial, and gendered) and their margins, as well as to symbolically convey collective fears and critically interrogate the systems that produce them.

Partly because of this ability to question social structures, the development of the Gothic has been linked to the advances of Western feminism, both in its practice and in its critical and academic analysis. The prominence of the Gothic novel in Europe in the eighteenth century coincided with the emergence of modern feminism and, although Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is considered the first example of this type of literature, it was authors such as Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) who popularized the genre. Great works of fictional horror are also key to feminist literary criticism, as is the case of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the pioneers of feminist thought in Europe). Thus, the second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s inspired academic readings of horror novels written by women, including Ellen Moers's famous theorization of the "Female Gothic" (1976). From this concept, which has been redefined and expanded by subsequent criticism (Wallace and Smith), numerous academic studies have focused on exploring the ability of the Gothic to represent women's realities and subvert the heteropatriarchal status quo. As far as contemporary Western horror literature is concerned, the key to its relationship with feminism lies in the capacity of both to resist established norms and to undo systems of meaning. The new critical approaches to the Gothic from intersectional feminism and Queer Studies (Haggerty, Haefele-Thomas, Ollett) testify to the persistent interrelationship between the two.

The monograph we propose seeks to deepen the broad tradition of feminist analysis of the Gothic with a thematic framework focused on the multiple dimensions of care work, generally unpaid or poorly paid. This perspective has been fundamental in Gender Studies and, in recent years, has begun to be explored from the perspective of film horror. Recent works on horror cinema such as Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (2024), edited by Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton, and Monsters vs. Patriarchy: Toxic Imagination in Global Horror Cinema (2024), by Patricia Saldarriaga and Emi Manini, explore the links that connect the Gothic and its different narrative manifestations with the dehumanization, precariousness, and feminization of work. For other authors, such as Lisa Coulthard, domestic horror films centered on women do not depict the home itself as a site of terror; rather, it is the demands of domestic life that generate an overwhelming sense of horror. Similarly, building on the ideas of Silvia Federici, Saldarriaga and Manini argue that the genre exposes the pressures exerted on reproductive bodies by patriarchal society, highlighting the ambivalence surrounding motherhood as an invisible, obligatory, and unpaid labor essential to sustaining capitalism.

In dialogue with the existing critique presented so far, we propose an approach that broadens the critical space by incorporating the feminist perspective focused on care into the study of the Gothic. This angle, which has not yet been analyzed in relation to this mode, allows us to shed light on aspects that have been little explored: the multiplicity of figures that appear in fictional Gothic and that are linked to care, either as agents or as subjects of care (mothers, medical and nursing staff, people who require care, sick women, among others), and the tensions between power, domesticity and gender that they reveal.

We invite the submission of proposals that are articulated around the following thematic axes and lines of research:

  • Vulnerability, dependency and failure of care. The Gothic as a dramatization of the failure of care and its consequences on bodies and minds. Construction of the female figure as fragile or sick as a result of failed care systems. Isolation and confinement as an intensification of dependence and loss of agency.
  • Spaces of care that become Gothic. Representation of hospitals, insane asylums, panopticons, schools and doctors' offices as Gothic spaces where care becomes control and surveillance. Gothic architecture and the production of vulnerable bodies: confinement, cloisters, and labyrinths as devices of dependence, particularly in relation to gender.
  • Affective networks and collective care. Alternative communities of care in the Gothic: covens, sororities and monstrous friendships as resistance against systems of oppression. Monstrous kinships and feminist/queer critique of the dehumanization and precariousness of care.
  • Caregiver figures and feminization of work. Representation of caregivers (mothers, nurses, teachers, domestic workers) in Gothic literature. Negotiation of power in relationships of gothic care.
  • Palliative care and assisted dying. Control of the sick and dying body, and precariousness of the work of caring for these bodies. 
  • Body care. Witches, healers, midwives and abortionists as monstrous figures linked to the care of (trans)feminine, queer, racialized or disabled bodies. Patriarchal control of these bodies and Gothic medicalization. Alternative or ancestral knowledge in the face of institutional violence in health care.
  • Gothic and violent health systems. Obstetric violence in gothic narratives. Nonconsensual medical interventions and dehumanizing healthcare systems. The Gothic as a critique of institutional violence in care.

The editors seek to incorporate into the special issue both works by specialists in the Gothic and horror that address the dimension of care from a feminist approach, as well as proposals rooted in Gender Studies that approach the analysis of the Gothic.

Finally, given that these territories have traditionally been less explored (especially from a comparative perspective, beyond the U.S.) and considering the rise of new approaches to these narratives, priority will be given to the inclusion of contributions that analyze literary texts written in the Americas. For the purposes of this monograph, we understand "the Americas" as the set of territories that make up the American continent in its entirety, including North America (Canada, the United States, Mexico and associated territories), Central America (countries between Mexico and Panama, along with the insular Caribbean), South America (from Colombia to Argentina and Chile) and the Caribbean (islands and territories).

 

Bibliography:

Briefel, Aviva, and Middleton, Jason. (2023). Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work. University of Texas Press.

Byron, Glennis (Ed.) (2016). Globalgothic. Manchester University Press.

Casanova-Vizcaíno, Sandra. (2021). El gótico transmigrado: narrativa puertorriqueña de horror, terror y misterio en el siglo XXI. Corregidor.

Casanova-Vizcaíno, Sandra, and Ordiz, Inés. (Eds.) (2018). Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture. Routledge.

Cavallero, Lucí, and Gago, Verónica. (2022). La casa como laboratorio: finanzas, vivienda y trabajo esencial. Tinta Limón.

Cavallero, Lucí, and Gago, Verónica. (2021). Una lectura feminista de la deuda: ¡Vivas, libres y desendeudadas nos queremos! Tinta Limón.

Coulthard, Lisa. (2023). “Sonic Gothic Listening to the Exhaustion of Gendered Domestic Labor in The Babadook and The Swerve”. In Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton (Eds.), Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (pp. 77-94). University of Texas Press.

DeVirgilis, Megan, and García Gutiérrez, Sandra. (Eds.) (upcoming in 2026). Women’s Agency and the Gothic in Spain and the Americas. Manchester University Press.

Duncan, Rebecca (Ed.) (2023). The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic. Edinburgh University Press.

Elbert, Monika, and Marshall, Bridget (Eds). (2013). Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century. Routledge.

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Federici, Silvia. (2009). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.

Haefele-Thomas, Ardel. (2023). Queer Gothic: an Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh University Press.

Haggerty, George. E. (2006). Queer Gothic. University of Illinois Press.

Hester, Helen, and Srnicek, Nick (Eds.) (2023). After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. Verso.

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Ollett, Robyn. (2024). The new queer gothic : reading queer girls and women in contemporary fiction and film. University of Wales Press.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.

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