Call For Paper
Women And Art: Representation, Creativity, And Resistance
Open Access | Maurer Press, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Edited by Habib Tekin & Ayşenur Özkan Işık
Art has long served as a powerful space in which gender identities, social roles, cultural expectations, and forms of resistance are constructed, questioned, and reimagined. Across different historical periods and cultural contexts, women have participated in artistic production as creators, performers, patrons, critics, and subjects of representation. Yet their contributions have frequently been shaped by unequal access to artistic institutions, dominant aesthetic traditions, and gendered structures of visibility and recognition.
The conference “Women and Art: Representation, Creativity, and Resistance” invites scholars, researchers, artists, and postgraduate students to explore the complex and changing relationship between women and artistic production. The conference seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on how women create, experience, interpret, and transform art, as well as how femininity and gender are represented within different artistic forms.
We particularly welcome contributions that examine the ways in which art can function as a space of memory, identity formation, cultural negotiation, political intervention, and resistance. Papers may address historical or contemporary contexts and may focus on individual artists, artistic movements, particular works, comparative perspectives, or broader theoretical questions concerning women, gender, and aesthetics.
The proposed book seeks to examine the representation, production, and experience of women in art from gendered, cultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to the following areas:
• Women artists in historical and contemporary contexts
• Representations of women in art
• Women and literature
• Women in painting, sculpture, and visual arts
• Women in photography and film
• Women in theatre, performance, dance, and music
• Feminist art and feminist aesthetics
• Gender and artistic representation
• The female body in art
• Self-representation and female subjectivity
• Women, creativity, and authorship
• Women and artistic institutions
• Gender inequality and exclusion in the art world
• Women artists and cultural memory
• Art, trauma, testimony, and memory
• Women, war, migration, exile, and displacement
• Art and resistance
• Women and political art
• Women and censorship
• Queer and intersectional approaches to women and art
• Race, ethnicity, class, and gender in artistic production
• Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to women and art
• Women and indigenous artistic traditions
• Women and popular culture
• Digital art, social media, and new forms of female creativity
• Artificial intelligence, technology, and women in art
• Women as patrons, collectors, curators, and critics
• Gendered spaces and artistic production
• Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to women and art
The book particularly encourages contributions that offer close readings of literary works, films, visual artworks, photography, theatre, performance, music, digital media, or other artistic forms, as well as theoretically grounded analyses that advance current debates on women, gender, and art. We look forward to receiving proposals that critically engage with the intersections of women, creativity, representation, identity, memory, and resistance across artistic and cultural contexts and contribute to ongoing scholarly discussions within Gender Studies, Art Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, and related fields.
Submission Guidelines
• Abstracts of 200–250 words with 5 keywords.
• A short biographical note (not more than 150 words), including institutional affiliation and key publications.
• Please include full contact details.
• The subject line of the email should state: Submission of Abstracts for the Edited Volume on “Women and Art: Representation, Creativity, and Resistance.”
• Authors selected for inclusion will be invited to submit full chapters (approximately 6,000–7,000 words, including references) following acceptance of the proposal by the publisher.
Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 October 2026
Full-Text Submission Deadline: 15 February 2027
Eligibility
Contributors are required to hold a PhD. Alternatively, submissions may be co-authored, provided that at least one co-author holds a PhD. In addition, PhD candidates are welcome to submit contributions within their own field of research, particularly if the proposed chapter is directly related to their doctoral project and falls within the thematic and conceptual parameters of this book.
Publisher
The volume will be published by Maurer Press, Frankfurt am Main, an established publishing house with 35 years of publishing experience.
Publication Fee
The publication fee for accepted contributions is 115€.
Abstracts and inquiries should be sent to: women.art.literature@gmail.com