Call for Papers | Bad Feelings: sadness + gender in contemporary culture | 8-9 June 2026
In 2015, i-D magazine declared the year of the ‘sad girl’. In the decade since, portrayals of depressed, anxious, and mentally burdened women have scarcely abated, from the breakout success of Sally Rooney to the emergence of Sad Girl BookTok to Gen Z’s recent rediscovery of Lana Del Rey.
This conference takes contemporary representations of female sadness as its critical object, asking how we might read the ‘sad girl’ as an artefact of the historic – late capitalist and neoconservative – present. While mental health remains largely the preserve of Biomedical and/or Psychology departments, this conference will foreground interdisciplinary and intersectional humanities perspectives on gendered emotion, thereby widening the scope of what counts as knowledge, and who count as experts, on mental health and wellbeing.
Keynotes
Prof. Anne Whitehead (Newcastle)
Prof. David James (Birmingham)
Disability + Sadness Roundtable
Dr Veronica Heney (Durham)
Dr Lucy Burke (Manchester Met.)
Ruairí Kennedy (Galway)
A non-exhaustive list of topics includes:
- Representations of sadness beyond the biomedical paradigm
- Heteropessimism + hetero-nostalgia
- The contemporary fetishisation of female passivity (the ‘Trad Wife’, etc.)
- The pathologisation of sadness
- ‘Cosmetic psychopharmacology’ (Peter Kramer)
- Psychosurgeries + the medicalisation of emotions
- Sadness + collectivity
- Hustle culture vs. depression, anomie, ennui, inertia
- Sadness + Disability Studies: from illness-to-cure narratives to neurodiversity
- Moral evaluation of sadness from self-care to wellness
- Sadness + Left melancholia
- Sadness and/as political feeling
Please email abstracts of 250 words and brief author bios to Dr Orlaith Darling and Dr Fionnula
Simpson at (opens in a new window)sadnessandgender2026@gmail.com by 1 Jan. 2026.