Reproduction without Bodies, Bodies without Reproduction
CFP: SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Themed Issue (64.1, Winter 2026): “Reproduction without Bodies, Bodies without Reproduction”
This themed issue of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (64.1, Winter 2026) will focus on reproductive rights and sexual agency across four centuries of literary history. In this unprecedented transhistorical issue, timed to commemorate both the 65th anniversary of SEL and Women’s History Month in March 2026, the editors aim to bring together scholars to reflect on their research after the fall of Roe in the United States and during ongoing challenges to trans and queer rights globally. “Reproduction without Bodies, Bodies without Reproduction” has capacious definitions and involves several interconnected ideas that authors may tackle together or individually as they wish.
Reproductive and sexual freedoms, once won, are neither static nor guaranteed. Revisiting the complex and uneven history of reproductive politics and sexual cultures allows scholars to contextualize their own experience of precarity and, perhaps, rethink temporalities of progress and retrenchment. For example, contributions could offer answers to the question of how scholars approach the history of reproductive and sexual rights—and to what end precisely? What are the benefits of historicist approaches; what benefits do presentist methods afford? How does the increasing gender conservatism in U.S. politics and in nations globally shape scholarly methods, ambitions, and aims? Is such research by default defensive in how it narrativizes past and present? Can the archive satisfy scholarly desires for historical continuity or closure? We’d be particularly interested in hearing from scholars who find themselves limited—in any number of ways, by political or academic landscapes, or by the limits of the archive, for instance—in the issues they can explore.
We are also interested in historical contextualizations of the non-reproductive body broadly understood, including, for example, queer and straight, trans and cis, adoptive or surrogate contexts. As influential voices clamor for increasing white women’s birth rates, we wonder how the current politicization of people’s decisions to have children (or not) mirrors historical anxieties about population control and/or decline. In societies with ethnic hierarchies, debates about reproduction are never racially neutral; we welcome reflections on the historical origins and interconnections of demographic racism, homophobia, and transphobia.
Finally, English literature has long imagined human/animal reproduction without the maternal body, with many texts building on classical antecedents. Submissions to this themed issue might explore how, when, and why this trope arises and how it responds to changing ideas about sex, women, pregnancy, demographics, and evolution.
Overall, this issue will explore the political and literary affordances of texts that unsettle the relationship between biological reproduction and the maternal body.
Proposals of 250-500 words with a one-page CV are due by October 1, 2024. Full essays of 7,000- 8,000 words (inclusive of notes) will be due February 1, 2025 and should conform to SEL submission guidelines. Inquiries and submissions should be sent to the themed issue’s editors: Ashley Miller ([email protected]), Doreen Thierauf ([email protected]), and Livia Woods ([email protected]).