Creative people, whether they are visual artists, poets, writers, musicians, designers, or actors (to name a few) have constantly changed the world. We would like to take a closer look at how women have played this vital role. How has women’s creativity changed, shaped, and formed the world through impacting different cultures, environments and disciplines?

Why do women write, paint, dance, and perform? Whether as a hobby or a need, women create for various reasons and because of multiple impetuses: they may do so to connect, to inform, to move, and to inspire others. But what has become manifest is that women who create, for whatever purpose, from anywhere in the world, all do so with courage and strength. As Margaret Atwood said about the writing experience, “A word after a word after a word is power.”

This conference aims to bring together scholars, creatives, postgraduate students, and professionals to explore and discuss the relationship between the feminine and the arts, whether it appears in history, science, pop culture, or any other epoch or discipline.

We welcome 15-minute presentations (academic and/or creative, from scholars, creatives, graduate students, and professionals.) that reflect this spirit and express aspects and issues of the feminine.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

- The feminine in creative non-fiction
- Surrealism and magical realism
- Portrayal of the female experience in popular culture
- The feminine in spirituality
- The feminine in nature
- Gender bias and underrepresentation of women
- The female body
- Female sexuality
- LGBTQ studies in the arts
- The feminine in production
- The maternal
- Archetypes of the feminine
- Goddesses, muses, and classicist influences of women in art
- Gender motifs in poetry, fiction, nonfiction
- The concept of displacement and female creatives
- Women in translation
- The concept of liberty
- Identity
- History through the creative depictions of women
- Psychology
- Daughters, sisters, spouses
- Women and science fiction
- The art of writing letters
- Biography/autobiography
- Poetry and gender
- The feminine in ekphrasis
- Ghostwriting and women
- Journalism
- Cliches of sentimentality
- The struggle of female writers in a male-dominated world
- Influential female writers

Need some inspiration? Check Indelible’s recent issue no. 6, on the theme of The Feminine.

Presenters can either share academic papers and/or creative work (poetry, prose, photography, music, painting, etc.), as we highly encourage arts-based research. Please send abstracts of 250-words and brief biographies on the conference proposal form here to info@labrc.co.uk by February 20, 2023. We aim to notify participants of accepted proposals by February 27, 2023.

The registration fee is:

In-person participation: £150 (including refreshments). Please let us know of any access needs or dietary restrictions.
Virtual participation: £90