Lesbian-Feminisms and Religion Unit

The Lesbian-Feminisms and Religion Unit invites papers, panels, or roundtable sessions focused on trans, queer, lesbian, and/or feminist scholarship. We seek proposals on the following themes:

• We are arranging a Lightning Round Session centered on thinking queerly with keywords in right-wing rhetoric and/or the conservative playbook and political imaginary (e.g., indoctrination, gender ideology, wokeism, social contagion, Marxist ideology, anti-vax, infiltration, CRT, religious discrimination, toxic empathy, etc.). Each panelist will have 5 minutes to share how they are thinking with and against their chosen term. Anyone interested in joining this lightning round session should submit a short proposal (under 500 words) that names a right-wing buzzword and describes how they will approach it.
• For a potential co-sponsored panel between Lesbian-Feminisms and Religion Unit, Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit, and Theology and Religious Reflection: a panel engaging Wendy Mallette’s Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Queer Negativity, and Inherited Guilt (NYU Press, 2026). This is a largely pre-arranged author-meets-respondents session, but we are interested in including additional scholars interested in historical and/or theological approaches to queer, lesbian, feminist, and trans studies, Christian discourse on sin, and American religious cultures. Please email Siobhan Kelly (smk@ku.edu) if you would like to be considered as a panelist.
• We seek proposals engaging discourses surrounding the turn away from sex: sex negativity, celibacy, virginity, the longue duree of #MeToo, and the moral panics and political imaginaries that suffuse current concerns around childless cat ladies, putatively gratuitous sex in media, and younger generations seeming disinterested in sex.
• We are interested in papers thinking about lesbian iconography of the American West. Examples include, but are not limited to, films like Desert Hearts (1985) and Thelma and Louise (1991), gay cowboy culture, Georgia O’Keeffe, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, Torrey Peters’ 2025 novel Stag Dance, etc. We invite reflections on how lesbian iconography reproduces, challenges, and engages with settler colonial aesthetics and imaginations. What desires and religious/spiritual fantasies mark lesbian westward flights? What makes a space or geography read as lesbian, queer, and/or trans?