CFP: Happy 50th Birthday, Medusa! Celebrating Women’s Writing
by: MAI , January 24, 2025
by: MAI , January 24, 2025
Fifty years ago Hélène Cixous inspired women to be courageous, expressive, and vocal. Since the publication of her groundbreaking article, ‘The Laugh of Medusa,’ we have undoubtedly made great strides in encouraging women from around the globe to tell their stories in literature, art, academia, film, television, and via a great many of new media. Women’s writing has blossomed, challenged, rebelled, and gained much more visibility as a form of expression, a creative force, and a field of research, giving us many reasons to celebrate this moment in history, even if the current political climate sometimes limits our feelings of hope.
Over the past fifty years, the voices of Medusas from diverse backgrounds have grown in strength, inspiring successive generations of women to speak out. With few reservations, they have been articulating their thoughts, hopes, fears, happiness, compassion, pride, worries, oppression, dreams, and desires. The list goes on.
Today, inspired by Audre Lorde and her famous saying, ‘Your silence will not protect you,’ this CFP seeks a reassessment of women’s words, and cries out to hear their diverse voices as they strive for freedom, make critical contributions to society, culture, and politics, and navigate their daily lives, reflecting on their experiences, and confessing how they live in a world that makes promises but often feels like it is not their own.
With this focus issue of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, we aim to further the dialogue on women’s voices, words, and artistic practices. We therefore invite varied contributions that explore the evolving global landscape of women’s writing, from the past to the future—and across a wide range of disciplines, periods, and texts—to celebrate l’ écriture féminine, fifty years on.
This focus issue will question and challenge the boundaries, limitations, and interpretations placed upon women’s words. In doing so, we hope to open new readings, rebellions, and protests in a patriarchal culture that is often resistant to change. Women’s voices are a powerful tool in this progressive and transformative approach, and they are at the heart of our call for papers.
The breadth of women’s writing on page, stage, and screen defies a short outline, so it might suffice to say that we would welcome submissions that fall into the following categories of writing:
- Confessional, academic, and creative writing by women and for women
- Writing for film, TV, and other visual media
- Women’s words in art, craft, photographs, and design
- Writing on feminism and theory
- Writing for film, TV, and other visual media
- Women’s journalism, documentary, and social media writing
In other words, we invite both creative and academic submissions on writing that has served as an expression for women and in any way contributed—directly or as an inspiration—to visual culture in its widest sense.
Subjects can include (but are not limited to):
- Visibility and visual cultures
- Race, class, gender, and resistance
- Activism and protest; freedoms and oppression
- Subversion, transgression, rebellion
- Women’s pasts, presents, and futures
- The economics and politics of women’s writing
- Cultural, historical, and social contexts
- Autoethnography and authorship; memory and memorialisation
- Intersectionality and dualities of women’s writing
- Textual and sexual politics
We encourage submissions from scholars and creative practitioners at all stages of their careers, including early career researchers and postgraduate students.
Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies are welcome.
We welcome proposals in the following formats:
- Academic research/critical reflection articles (max 6000 words)
- Interviews (1000-3000 words)
- Creative writing (poems, short stories, creative responses, max 3000 words)
- Video essays (5-10 min + a brief supporting statement 800-1000 words)
- Photographs, visual/audiovisual or interactive art with critical reflection as written commentary
All submissions should follow MAI formatting guidelines: Submissions.
Focus Issue Guest Editors:
Anna Misiak (Anna.misiak@falmouth.ac.uk)
Joanne Ella Parsons (Falmouth University) jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk
Proposal Submission:
Your proposal should consist of:
- A proposed title of your submission
- An abstract (250-500 words)
- A short bio for each author (100 words)
Submit a Word document to contact@maifeminism.com and jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk.
Please use this subject title in your submission email: ‘Proposal: MAI Happy 50th, Medusa!’
Proposal Deadline: 30 June 2025
Full Submission Deadline: 12 December 2025 (subject to prior proposal acceptance)
Proposed Publication Date: Autumn 2026
Please also see our associated conference on women’s writing taking place at Falmouth University, 18th-20th June 2025: https://thecwwa.org/conference-2025/
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey