International Conference “Pleasure and Pain in Women’s Writing”
9-11 September 2026.
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Pescara
This in-person conference of the International Women’s Writing Association (IWWA), organized in collaboration with the L&GEND (Literature & Gender Identity) International Research Group, will be held at G. d’Annunzio University in the Pescara Campus, offering an interdisciplinary and cross-period investigation of women’s writing in all its forms, mediums, and expressions.
The conference explores sensations of pleasure and pain in women’s writing, examining how these experiences are shaped, interpreted and endowed with meaning in texts produced by women across different cultures and historical periods. As theorized by Henri Bergson, pleasure and pain provide crucial insights into the past, present and future; they belong to complex sensory systems that resist automatic responses to the world and contribute to the formation of consciousness. In this sense, they function as vehicles of resistance, freedom, and awareness (Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 2006). By investigating representations of pleasure and pain, the conference aims to foster critical reflection on how women narrate intense, gendered sensory experiences, how they foreground the social consequences of women’s emotional vulnerability, and how they articulate forms of strategic restraint alongside assertions of individual freedom to experience pleasure or suffering with intensity.
Speakers are invited to examine these dynamics in a variety of genres, forms of cultural production and media, including written literature and the digital, poetry and prose, the popular and the canonical, creative and factual writing, life-writing and biographies, theories and histories, screen and script, films and television. We encourage the exploration of collaborative and individual works, of imaginative practices and women’s realities, of representation of personal and public issues, across a wide range of disciplines, time periods, cultures and texts.
We welcome submissions for individual twenty-minute papers as well as for full panels and workshops. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
● Women’s writing on page, stage, and screen
● The portrayal and evolution of pleasures and pains across different periods and genres
● Cultural, historical, and social contexts for pleasure and pain
● Trauma in women’s writing
● Representations of physical and psychological pain
● Solidarity and difference
● Views of forbidden and conventional pleasure
● Women’s sexual pleasures and pains
● Intellectual pleasure/pain
● Technologies and pleasure/pain
● Women writing love and romance
● Narratives of abuse
● Consent and intimacy on the page and screen
● Performing pleasures and/or pain
● Love and loss
● Writing the pleasure and pain of women’s lives
● The portrayal of pleasure and pain in global fictions and narratives
● The ways in which pleasure and pain challenge or reinforce social norms
● The pleasure of the text
● Bestsellers, blockbusters, and popular writing
● Representing the pleasures and pains of women’s authorship
● The Gothic’s fascination with pleasures and pains
● Reclaiming and resisting pain
● Pleasure, pain, and power
Keynote speakers of the conference will be Marilena Parlati (University of Padua, Italy), Joanne Ella Parsons (Falmouth University, UK) and Jennifer Schnabel (Ohio State University, US).
Submissions:
Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250-300 words, a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), and contact details. Panel and workshop proposals are very welcome. Please submit your proposals in a Word document to the team at iwwaitaly@gmail.com by 24th April 2026 making it clear that you are submitting for the Pescara conference.
We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including early career researchers, independent scholars, and postgraduate students. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies are welcome.
All participants will be given free membership of the International Women’s Writing Association for 2026.
Deadline for submissions:
April 24, 2026
Contact email: iwwaitaly@gmail.com