Women and Horror
Due Date: 08-01-2025
This special issue of Horror Studies aims to address female empowerment (cis- and transgender women) in literary and cinematic horror from 2010 to the present. The issue will showcase horror media (literature, films, television, and gaming) created by women. An intersectional approach should be applied to analyses, stressing categories of race, gender, sexuality, class and/or age in submissions. While we are interested in submissions focused on various forms of horror media, we are eager to receive submissions that foreground literary texts.
The recent proliferation of horror media created by (and often for) women suggests that horror is being enacted as a space of transformative justice. In effect, the reconfiguration of the monstrous-feminine, a concept developed by scholar Barbara Creed, and new understandings of the abject, alongside a notable repositioning of the viewer’s/voyeur’s gaze, signify a shift in both the production and consumption of horror literature and film and a decentering of white heteronormative patriarchal constructions of women.
Drawing on this profusion of exciting scholarship, the special issue will center women who create horror across various media formats, with a particular emphasis on literature, in order to explore how the genre is being deconstructed and reconfigured to challenge ingrained ideas about gender, sex, race, desire, and the body.
Possible topics may include:
● Madness, trauma, ‘hysteria’, or mental illness
● Corporeality, embodiment, body horror, or the body as a site of resistance
● Female or feminized monsters, i.e., witches, vampires, mermaids, sirens, etc.
● The environment (EcoHorror), nature, and anthropocentrism
● Cinematography, the female gaze, and bodies on screen
● Ageism and the aging body
● Fatphobia and fat bodies
● Consumption and the grotesque
● Mothers, motherhood, pregnancy, and the maternal
● Adolescence and transformation
● Gynehorror and menstruation
● Religion and the supernatural
● Sexual violence, exploitation, (rape) revenge
● Indigenous horror and MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women)
● Colonialism and neocolonialism
● The Black body and racism intersectionality
● Female social justice movements (including #MeToo and the Pussyhat protests)
● Classism, precarity, the neoliberal economy, and capitalism
● Transgender identities and bodies, body dysphoria, transphobia
● Sex, desire, transgression and “monster fucking”
● Sex work
● Social justice and activism
● Slasher films and the Final Girl characterization
Send 500-word abstracts and a brief CV to mamarotta@wm.edu and miranda.corcoran@ucc.ie by 1 August 2025. Once abstracts have been accepted, completed submissions of 5,000-6,000 words (including notes and references) are due by 1 December 2025. Horror Studies is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal.
For further information, please see Intellect’s Information for Journal Editors and Contributors. Contributors are required to use the Intellect Style Guide for referencing.
Please direct inquiries to mamarotta@wm.edu and miranda.corcoran@ucc.ie.