CFP: Textual Reception – Exploring Audiences’ Writing Practices from a Gender Perspective (special issue of Genre en séries / Gender in Series)

CFP: Textual Reception – Exploring Audiences’ Writing Practices from a Gender Perspective (special issue of Genre en séries / Gender in Series)

deadline for submissions:
November 30, 2016
full name / name of organization:
Labex ICCA / IRCAV (Université Paris 3)
contact email:
sebastien.francois@rocketmail.com
CFP: Textual Reception – Exploring Audiences’ Writing Practices from a Gender Perspective (special issue of Genre en séries / Gender in Series)



Whether through fan mail sent to celebrities and the popular press, critical pieces, derivative narratives such as fan fictions and other outlets, media audiences have often chosen writing as a privileged way to extend their experiences of reception. In very different contexts indeed, individuals have written about the cultural objects they loved or execrated, using various media to express themselves. If preserved and accessible, all these texts can reveal a lot about their authors, but also about the composition and structure of the audiences they belong or have belonged to. Above all, they are spaces in which the making of gendered identities and relationships within these audiences can be observed, providing scholars valuable resources to study media reception from a gender perspective.



This special issue of Gender in Series aims to gather works dedicated to the analysis of audience's writing practices through the lens of gender, broadly speaking, to illuminate both the media cultures and the social discourses produced by these specific audiences. Previous works have already showed how “ordinary”, “domestic” or “fan” writings may be highly gendered and researchers are therefore invited to provide new case studies. Contributions that focus on the writers’ profiles, their writing and, if applicable, publishing conditions, are particularly encouraged, as well as those interested in the social meanings and uses of audience’s texts from individual or collective perspectives. In the line of works that have explored the relation between reading and gender or the construction of identities through mass media, it seems essential to understand how these writings can be means of self-presentation or how they convey ideological representations and determinations about gender. It is all the more important since they are inspired by cultural contents which are themselves embedded within social and gendered norms. Besides, as writing forms continue to have a central role – offline and online – in reception practices, this special issue also welcomes comparative works establishing bridges between different kinds of writing materials or between heterogeneous eras or contexts: identifying the proximities or ruptures within forms of textual reception will be helpful to discuss how media cultures and gender issues interact and how these interactions may change in time.



Contributors should feel free to focus on any type of written textual reception, whatever its content (correspondence, commentary, fiction, etc.) or media (paper, digital, etc.), and whether the texts were supposed to be publicly released or to remain in the private sphere. This special issue wishes to address textual reception in its diversity: articles may deal with objects of affection (or disgust) from literary, musical and audiovisual fields or deal with celebrities related to arts, sports or even politics. Proposals from any of the different social sciences (sociology, history, film and television studies, cultural and media studies, etc.) will be considered, provided the analysis is based on empirical material, derived from archives, ethnographic research and/or digital research. Articles may deal with the most involved amateurs, such as “fans”, but may also focus on more “ordinary” cultural consumers, as long as they have taken a pen or a keyboard to express themselves. Finally, even if studies about writings produced between the end of the nineteenth to the twenty-first century are preferred, more comparative works or approaches relying on older writings will, when appropriate, be taken into account.



Full CFP (with additional research directions, references, and practical information): http://www.thomaspillard.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CFP-Gender-in-Series-Textual-Reception.pdf



(suggested references: http://genreenseries.weebly.com/bibliographie-appel-numeacutero-7.html)





Abstracts should be sent to the coordinators of this special issue:

- Sébastien François: sebastien.francois@rocketmail.com

- Thomas Pillard: thomas@pillard.nom.fr



Important dates:

- Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2016

- Notification of acceptance or rejection: December 15, 2016

- Reception of full papers: March 1, 2017

- Reviews sent to authors: May 2017

- Reception of final articles: September 1, 2017

- Online publication: Fall 2017