Call for Abstracts: The Lesbian Issue

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for the ‘The Lesbian Issue’ for Women, Gender & Research (2/2027). In this Special Issue, we welcome contributions that critically and creatively engage with lesbian lives, cultures, intimacies, and sexual practices across time and space, attending to both continuities and ruptures between pasts, presents, and possible futures.

Despite its centrality to feminist and queer scholarship, Lesbian has never before been the subject of a dedicated Special Issue in this journal – an absence that itself speaks to the complex place this term occupies within gender studies. This Special Issue sets out to address that gap, and to do so by treating Lesbian not as a fixed or self-evident category, but as a rich, contested, and generative term: one that holds within it a multiplicity of identities, desires, embodiments, and political positions.

Lesbian is a term whose meanings shift across time, space, and cultural contexts. It encompasses – and is complicated by – questions of, among others, racialisation, class, (dis)ability, nationality, and indigeneity, as well as the ongoing tensions between anti-gender, trans-inclusive, and queer feminist frameworks. This special issue invites submissions that critically engage with these tensions, exclusions, and coalition-building, exploring what Lesbian has meant, what it currently means, and what it might yet become as a category of analysis, identity, practice, and political solidarity in the Nordics and beyond.

We invite historically grounded analyses of queer and lesbian lives, including archival research, movement histories, studies of feminist and lesbian political formations, cultural and artistic productions, as well as media and digital representation, digital cultures, and digital activisms. We are equally interested in contemporary work that examines current configurations of lesbian existence within shifting legal, political, social, and cultural landscapes, including questions of rights, citizenship, welfare institutions, healthcare, reproductive governance, education, media, and community formation.

We encourage intersectional approaches that foreground racialisation, Black feminist thought, and critiques of white feminism, as well as analyses of colonial gender and sexuality regimes and their ongoing effects. Contributions may explore how lesbian lives are shaped by migration, nationalism, and the specificities of Nordic welfare states.

Submissions may also address intimate, erotic, and everyday dimensions of lesbian lives, including friendships, sexual practices and cultures, non-normative kinship formations, polyamorous and other non-monogamous relationship models, as well as more-than-human relations. We welcome contributions that engage lesbian sexual cultures and practices, including questions of desire, erotic life, intimacy, sexual health, pleasure, consent, sexual publics, and the regulation or representation of sexuality across different contexts. Contributions engaging queer and lesbian temporalities, such as intergenerational dialogues, memory work, or speculative futures, are encouraged.

We are interested in methodological reflections on feminist, queer and lesbian research practices, collaborative knowledge production, and experimental or arts-based approaches. Overall, we seek work that complicates and expands dominant narratives of lesbian identity, desire, and community, and that attends to resistance, creativity, care, and survival across different social, historical, and geopolitical contexts.

Women, Gender & Research accepts submissions in the form of research articles (max. 8.000 words), essays (max. 4.500 words), interviews, artworks, opinion pieces and book reviews, in accordance with the editorial policy (see Submissions). Artworks could include poems, photographs, drawings, zines, comics, songs, manifestos, and other experiments and interventions. We are encouraging emerging scholars and aspiring academics to submit their work. We welcome submissions in Scandinavian languages and English.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: 

• Anti-gender movements and lesbians
• Archives, memory, and intergenerational transmission
• Black feminism
• Colonial gender and sexuality regimes
• Critiques of white feminism
• Digital lesbian cultures and publics
• Desire, intimacy, and erotic life
• Dykes
• Everyday life, community, and social worlds
• Feminist and lesbian methodologies
• Friendships
• Healthcare, sexual health, and clinical encounters
• Historical and archival queer and lesbian lives
• Intersectional approaches
• Law, rights, and the regulation of sexuality
• Lesbian futurities
• Lesbian sexual cultures and practices
• Media representations and cultural imaginaries
• More-than-human lesbian relations
• Non-normative families and kinships
• Nordic lesbian movements
• Polyamorous and other non-monogamous relationship models
• Queer and lesbian temporalities
• Racialisation
• Reproduction, family formation, and assisted reproduction
• Resistance
• Separatist movements
• Speculative approaches
• Trans lesbians and solidarities

Practicalities

Deadline for abstracts (max 500 words + author bio of ca. 100 words): 15 June 2026

Notifications on abstract acceptance: 29 June 2026

Deadline for full articles/finalised contributions: 15 October 2026

Envisaged publication date: 15. September 2027

Abstracts need to be submitted to the editorial secretary at tidsskrift.dk/KKF.
Please submit both your abstract and author bio here.

We are excited to receive your submissions.

For questions, please contact Rieke Schröder (rieke.schroeder@uni-muenster.de) and Marie Lunau (lunau@ruc.dk).

 

Special Issue Editors

Maya Acharya, ETHOS Lab, IT University of Copenhagen

Kirstine Nielsen Degn, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen

Marie Lunau, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University

Rieke Schröder, Institute for Political Science, University of Münster

Qwin Werle, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen