CFP: Impregnable
Jessalynn Keller
CALL FOR PAPERS
Impregnable: Mediated Meanings of the Body in Resistance
Impregnability has many strong meanings - not becoming pregnant but also capable of withstanding assault. It's a term that lives in connotative alignment with infertility, of non- and un-reproducibility, but it also carries presence over absence, power over victimization. Think protesters who link arms to create an impregnable wall of resistance. Think castles that cannot be stormed. Indeed, the word literally means “unable to be defeated or destroyed; unassailable.”
Increasingly, we argue, to be impregnable is a position of political potentiality amidst a social and legal reality of restricted reproductive rights, rampant transphobia, heightened surveillance, brutal terrorization, and the removal of basic health care options that have made sexual experience and experimentation fraught for those who are fertile. We are interested in examining how media as largely imagined (film, television, the internet, podcasts, etc.) has recently become fixated with the impregnable body — from the AI world of robot sex or computer girlfriends, to contemporary discourses on trans and queer bodies and panics over (pre-pubescent) children, to the post-Roe rise of menopausal memoir and romance, to popular resistance movements. Indeed, in the context of abortion rights, we would argue that while Roe has been overturned, the fight for reproductive freedom and gender justice continues to play out in and through representation.
We seek essays for a book that will engage with and expand Impregnability as a concept and analytical framework in and through media. These might include mediated narratives about:
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Forced or elective sterilization
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AI companions
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Abortion
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Infertility
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Childlessness by choice
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Queer and Trans futurity
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Extermination of the AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal)
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Feminism as a Means of Limitation and/or Empowerment
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Resistance through recalcitrance
We have strong interest from a highly respected university press and will move to secure a contract as soon as our roster of authors is set.
If interested, please send a title and 500-word abstract to Brenda Weber brew...@iu.edu; Jen Maher jem...@iu.edu; and Emmy Vaught emv...@iu.edu by March 21, 2026. Final essays will be 5,000 words; due January 15, 2027.
We are happy to consult with interested authors in advance of submission.
Brenda R. Weber, Provost Professor and Jean C. Robinson Scholar, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
Emerald Vaught, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University
Jennifer E. Maher, Professor of Gender Studies, Indiana University
Jessalynn Keller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Communication, Media & Film
University of Calgary
Board Chair, Console-ing Passions