Bad Feelings: Sadness and Gender in Contemporary Culture’
The ‘sad girl’ is a distinctly contemporary phenomenon, dominating such distinct cultural arenas as the Booker Prize list (Sally Rooney, 2018), social media (‘Sad Girl BookTok’), and pop music (‘Lana Del Rey’). From a rise in heteropessimism attributed to the growth in gendered political polarisation, to the mainstreaming of therapy talk and what Lauren Berlant calls ‘complaint culture’ (2008) in online spaces, the ‘sad girl’ has come to symbolise disappointment, exhaustion, and burnout in the conditions of late twenty-first century capitalism and its increasingly authoritarian sexual politics. Yet, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the ‘girl’ symbolised a future-oriented optimism in the Global North (Harris 2004). How did we go from ‘Girl Power’ to ‘the Great Resignation’, from ‘future girl’ to trad wifedom? What accounts for the ‘sad’ turn in contemporary women’s culture?
To facilitate scholarly consideration of these important issues, we are organising a two-day conference, titled ‘Bad Feelings: Sadness and Gender in Contemporary Culture’, at UCD and the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). Our aim is to enable an interdisciplinary, critical conversation about the relation between gender and negative emotions in our current cultural and historical moment - one that is all the more important in light of the continued dominance of ‘crisis of masculinity’ discourse in discussions of mental health. By inviting contributions from interdisciplinary, international experts in fields ranging from literature to affect theory, the politics of emotion to bibliotherapy, our conference will redress the persistent tendency to neglect women’s emotional responses to the same social and historical conditions that yield those destructive affects which, in men, garner so much critical attention.
(opens in a new window)Please find our Call for Papers here.
Conference Organisers: Dr Orlaith Darling and Dr Fionnula Simpson
Dates: 8-9 June, 2026
Location: Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI)
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Anne Whitehead (Newcastle) and Prof. David James (Birmingham)
