At a time of intensified regulation of women’s bodies, movements, and voices, women writers are reconfiguring and reshaping what it means to be a woman and to (un) belong in spaces across the globe. This panel addresses the representation of disruption and disruptive spaces, through which women forge their own path both in literary and cinematic spaces. What does it mean to disrupt a space? To be disruptive? To be disrupted?
This panel invites scholars to explore representations of disruption in women’s literary and cinematic production, attending to how women negotiate, inhabit, resist, and reimagine spaces that seek to exclude or contain them. Disruption may be spatial, social, political, linguistic, affective, or formal, encompassing both acts of resistance and moments of rupture imposed upon women’s bodies, identities, and narratives. The spaces under consideration may be domestic, national, diasporic, colonial/postcolonial, digital, institutional, or cinematic, as well as the literary text/cinematic work itself as a site of disruption.
Papers may engage with feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial, critical race, disability, or affect theory, among other approaches. This panel welcomes papers written both in French and in English.
Please submit an abstract (250–300 words) and a brief bio (100–150 words) to lmd61@psu.edu by March 6th 2026.
