10th Annual Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations: Queering the Fantastic
GIFCon 2025
- URL: https://fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/
- Event Date: 2025-05-07 ~ 2025-05-09
- Abstract Submission Date: 2025-01-06
- Submission Date: 2025-01-06
- Organizer: Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic (CFF)
Feminism & Women's Studies Gender Studies Humanities, Literature & Arts (General) Sex & Sexuality Visual Arts Drama & Theater Arts English Language & Literature Interdisciplinary Studies (General)
GIFCon 2025: Queering the Fantastic
The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2025, to be held online on 7-9 May, with the theme of ‘Queering the Fantastic’.
Call for Papers
The term ‘queer’ has been conceived as “the point of convergence for a potentially infinite number of non-normative subject positions”(Jagose qtd. in Hollinger), echoing Fantasy’s scope for alternative realities which challenge sociocultural norms. Its etymology points out to strange and unusual qualities, to the eccentric and the odd, which have always been at the heart of SFF, arguably making the genre inherently queer. Yet, fantastika—its academia and industry, creative practitioners and fans alike—has failed to be a safe space for queer identities, as indicated by its cisheteronormative tradition and the Hugo Awards’ Sad Puppies controversy, among others.
Is that still the case?
In recent years, practitioners and audiences alike have reclaimed fantastic media, framing it through the lens of queer experience. Either through bringing queer characters and stories to the forefront, or by effecting reimaginings of traditional fantastic narratives, such as Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein or Aliette de Board’s In the Vanisher’s Palace, the place of the LGBTQ+ community within the field of the fantastic has been increasingly celebrated.
The process of queering fantasy is not limited to the author: the reader actively participates in the process of re-creation. Headcanons and shipping, bringing queer subtexts to the surface through fanfiction and alternative universes, and formats that endorse collaborative storytelling within a fandom, all encompass a process of queer reading, embracing chaos, instability and multiplicity in an ongoing process of community self-expression.
In this conference, we would like to engage with the following questions: How are fantastic narratives reclaimed by people in the margins? What are the implications of such reimaginings? How do we envision a queer future of SFF in terms of multi-media creations and scholarly work? And what challenges will the field/genre face to reach this future?
About GIFCon and proposing your paper
GIFCon 2025 is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether from within academia or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins.
We welcome abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration and our advice for abstract submissions. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form.
We also ask for workshop proposals for 75-minute creative workshops. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form.
Similarly, you may also offer 60-minute roundtable proposals. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form.
The deadline for all three forms is January 6th, 2025, at midnight GMT.
If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, you can contact us at GIFCon@glasgow.ac.uk. Please also read through our Code of Conduct. We look forward to reading your submissions!
Suggested Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Conforming to and challenging conventional depictions of gender and sexuality in fantasy media.
“We could do with a bit more queerness in these parts”: Fantasy and the multiple expressions of the term ‘queer’, in its rich etymological history—strange, unusual, odd and eccentric.
The role of queer identity in authorship: as an act of activism, fighting for representation, resistance to heteronormativity and its consequences, or authors retconning queer identities (e.g. JK Rowling).
The role of queer identity in the reading process: Fandom studies, fanfiction, queer rewritings of the canon, affective responses to queer fantasies by the LGBTQ+ community, ‘straight-washing’ potential queer identities by fans.
Fantasy and the Qu(eerie): weird fiction, the new weird and the eerie.
Queering narratives through collaborative storytelling: RPGs, TTRPGs, hypertext fiction.
Queer narratives and their place in the fantasy publishing and/or media industry (rainbow capitalism): queerbaiting, suppression of queer voices, as well as inclusive initiatives within the industry.
Fantasy worldbuilding to explore the social construction of gender norms and sexualities beyond heteronormativity.
Performing queerness in fantastika: exploring different gender expressions in the performance arts, theatre, drag, pantomime and the importance of camp.
Fantasy and queer history: how queer creative practitioners in the past have used fantasy as means of queer expression through different figures (e.g. the fairy to explore androgynous identities).
Fantastical monsters as queer Others/Icons, Horror and Gothic Studies.
Queer readings of liminal fantastical creatures: cyborgs, hybrids, human/non-human entanglements, specifically to explore trans and/or non-binary experiences.
Queer celebration as resistance: fantastic narratives of hope, vulnerabilities, queer futurities, utopias, hopepunk.
Processes of self-discovery and transformation: queer coming-of-age, YA fantasies.
Intersectional approaches to queer fantastika: race, (dis)abilities, class, age, other marginalised identities.
Queer embodiment and corporeality: body-swapping, body dysphoria narratives, particularly trans readings of fantasy characters.
Fantasy texts and media by creative practitioners from marginalised backgrounds, and from beyond the anglophone and Anglocentric fantasy media and queer epistemologies.
How scholars recreate, reinterpret, and validate queer approaches to fantasy in academia.
Journal Promotion
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| Acta Koreana (Acta Koreana) |
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| Acta Via Serica (AVS) |
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| Journal of Information Processing Systems (JIPS) |
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| Journal of Internet Computing and Services (KSII - JICS) |
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| Journal of Smart Tourism (Smart Tourism) |
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| Membrane and Water Treatment (MWT) |
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| Wind and Structures, An International Journal (Wind and Structures) |
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