CFP: Upcoming Issue of NuBE

Gender-based Violence in Contemporary European Literatures: Representations, Subversions, Counter-narratives

 

In recent years, transnational movements such as #MeToo and feminist mobilizations have contributed to the development of a new social awareness of the multiple forms of oppression and violence affecting women and feminized subjects who are positioned in a condition of subordination within the binary system that upholds the patriarchal order. In this context, notions such as abuse, harassment, rape and consent have become central political categories, shaping a perspective that diverges from traditional legal interpretations of these phenomena. Indeed, they introduce new ways of naming, denouncing and condemning gender-based violence, while promoting social programmes aimed at protecting and empowering oppressed people. Public debate on gender-based violence has undergone a profound transformation, bringing experiences long confined to private life into the collective sphere. As Rita Segato shows in La guerra contra las mujeres (2016), patriarchal structures continue to reproduce themselves through symbolic and material mechanisms rooted in family and social life, while the growing visibility of testimonies of abuse reveals their persistent forms of normalization. At the same time, public attention has shed light on the limitations of institutional and legal responses, which are often unable to guarantee protection, justice and reparation.

Such being the case, literature and cultural production play a central role as sites of critical analysis and political imagination. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s perspectives put forth in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), writing can operate as a “war machine” that is capable not only of representing violence, but also of dismantling its assumptions, questioning its discursive forms and developing counter-narratives. Starting from this perspective, the upcoming monographic issue of NuBE, scheduled for the end of 2026, aims to investigate the multiple forms and directions through which contemporary literature addresses gender-based violence – as an individual and collective experience, as historical and intergenerational trauma, as a device of social control, as the product of patriarchal languages and imaginaries – also in critical dialogue with frustrations toward the law and with internal (dis)agreements within feminism, subverting hegemonic representations of violence, resorting to poetics of revenge and imagining alternative forms of justice, protection and care.

Multiple geographies of violence highlight how writing can become a place of memory, testimony, reparation and healing, inviting reflection on the ethical, aesthetic and political challenges that accompany literary representations of different forms of gender-based violence – from the sexual slavery of “comfort women” to war rape and contemporary femicides. Among the many examples, we can cite, for the Iberian area, the cases of Itziar Ziga (La feliz y violenta vida de Maribel Ziga), Marta González Novo (Una bañera de hojas secas) and Lídia Jorge (Marido e outros contos); in the English-speaking world, authors such as Caryl Churchill, Debbie Tucker Green, Candice Carty-Williams, Warsan Shire, Claire Keegan, Sarah Gilmartin and Ali Smith; in France, works such as Mémoire de fille by Annie Ernaux, Le Consentement by Vanessa Springora, Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes by Ivan Jablonka, and Phallers by Chloé Delaume; in the German-speaking world, the novels Scherbenpark by Alina Bronsky, Das Mädchen by Angelika Klüssendorf, or the more recent Sehr geehrte Frau Ministerin by Ursula Krechel and Lügen über meine Mutter by Daniela Dröscher. For Finnish and Scandinavian literature, relevant works include Puhdistus by Sofi Oksanen, Kätilö by Katja Kettu, the works of Susanna Hast and Iida Rauma, or those of Lena Andersson, Monika Fagerholm, Hanne Ørstavik, Aase Berg and Matilda Södergran; for Slavic literature, one may refer to fempoezija (e.g. the anthology La mia vagina edited by M. Maurizio) or the famous volume by Victoria Amelina (Guardando le donne guardare la guerra: diario di una scrittrice dal fronte ucraino), but also, with regard to post-Yugoslav writings, Slavenka Drakulić (Kao da me nema), Stevo Grabovac (Poslije zabave), Tanja Stupar Trifunović (Duž oštrog noža leti ptica), Rumena Bužarovska (My husband) and the committed poetry of Ivančica Đerić, Monika Herceg and Olja Savičević Ivančević.

Possible lines of inquiry include:

1. (Dis)encounters and subversions in feminist movements: analysis of tensions among different waves of feminism, internal critiques, and literary representations of their ability/inability to respond to violence, including alternative forms of justice and reparation.
2. Legality and gender violence in literature: reflections on consent, vulnerability, victimization, responsibility, and agency in light of contemporary non-fiction (from Clara Serra's El sentido de consentir to Segato's critique of institutions), and on how literary works rework – or disrupt – legal and moral paradigms.
3. Poetics of revenge, alternative justice and feminist rewritings: investigations into explicit or symbolic forms of narrative revenge, liminal female characters (witches, femme fatales), their re-signification through feminist categories (male gaze, intersectionality, rape culture) and the ways in which the act of “responding to violence” is represented.
4. Narratives of femicide and representation of the victim: analysis of the rhetoric of representation (visibility, empathy, anaesthesia), tensions between male and female gaze, practices of restoring narrative dignity to victims, and the social, ethical, and aesthetic function of testimony.
5. Contemporary rewritings of classical myths, gender and violence: explorations of the re-semanticization of female mythological figures – from Circe to Penelope, from the Trojan women to tragic heroines – and the ways in which these reworkings problematize the relationship between patriarchal violence, agency and female identity.
6. Masculinity, domination and representations of violence: investigations into the historical and cultural configurations of violent masculinities, how violence is learned, performed and narrated, and the ways in which contemporary literature addresses male violence towards women, men and queer subjectivities.

 

The deadline for submitting full articles is 30 June 2026. Articles should not exceed 40,000 characters (including spaces). The main languages of publication are Italian and English. Articles in languages other than Italian and English are welcome, but in this case please contact the editorial board.