Here is the CfP for this year’s annual online conference:
Conference 2026
20 and 21 August
Gendered Narratives / Narratives of Gender
How do we come to know gender? What stories do we tell about it—and what stories does gender tell about us?
This year’s En-Gender conference invites contributions that engage with gender through the lens of narrative. We are interested in the ways gender is produced, stabilized, and contested through stories: in academic writing, in media, in institutions, in everyday life, and in embodied experience.
Rather than treating narratives as mere representations, we approach them as constitutive: narratives shape what can be known, felt, and lived as gender. They organize knowledge, structure experience, and are always embedded in power relations.
At the same time, feminist, queer & trans, crip, post & decolonial scholarship has long emphasized the importance of situated knowledge and lived experience. Taking this seriously, the conference experiments with format: alongside traditional papers, we explicitly invite short narrative interventions. We will invite speakers and signed up audience for sharing their own stories or written words relating to the respective panel theme.
We understand storytelling here not as anecdotal or supplementary, but as a critical feminist method—one that makes visible how knowledge is situated, how categories are lived, and how dominant narratives form us but can also be interrupted.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Narratives of gender in religion, politics, and media
- Colonial and postcolonial narratives of gender
- Storytelling, memory, and embodiment
- Gendered narratives in academic knowledge production
- Counter-narratives and feminist/queer/trans/crip interventions
- Methodological reflections on storytelling and standpoint
We particularly encourage contributions that reflect on the relationship between narrative, knowledge, and power, and that experiment with form.
Contributors may apply in one or more of the following formats:
a) Roundtable discussions
Following the success in the last years of this style of critical exchange, it is staying! This section will have short (5 minute) presentations that should be designed to lay the basis of community discussions. The presentations can be based on research as well as more general ideas and questions. This section specifically aims at engaging undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars from all stages who want to share work and ideas that are still in the making.
b) Paper presentations
The presentations in the section should be based on individual or collaborative research, have a length of 15 minutes and will be structured in thematically fitting panels.
c) Sign up for storytelling
Storytelling should be up to 5 minutes long and can be based on anything that is based on the intersections between gender, narratives, and experiences. At this stage, you do not need to tell us about your story. Click the button in the form and we will later contact you about the themes that appeared in the papers/panels and we will make it fit!
Please send in your abstract by filling out this form until 15 May 2026.
Your En-Gender Team,
Jessica, Dean, Ashley, and Leandro
En-Gender 