CFP: Smart Women in Current Popular Culture

(Courtesy of Virginia Blum)

Smart Women in Current Popular Culture: Call for Contributors to a New Forthcoming Anthology

For a new anthology on the depiction of intelligent women in the contemporary U. S. popular media (1980)-present), I am seeking essays that explore the complex and sometimes contradictory depictions of smart women in popular media. How are women's real lives influenced and shaped by depictions of smart women (or their opposites)? How do different popular genres depict intelligent women? Are these new depictions
progressive? How does popular culture depict smart women from different races, classes, and ethnic backgrounds? How is intelligence in women constituted differently than in men? The range of materials that could be addressed is vast: television shows, films, toys, video games, and comic books, to name just a few. Essays that adopt an interdisciplinary approach to their material are welcome, as are ones that discuss race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. Essays should be lively, vibrant, and engaging; they should also be of broad interest to scholars in many academic disciplines from the humanities, including history, women's studies, English, American studies, Asian-American studies, and African-American studies. Articles should be 8,000 to 10,000 words (including notes and references); accompanying photographs are welcome. Inquiries are welcome. Please send completed article and curriculum vita by September 15, 2005, to Dr. Sherrie A. Inness, Department of English, 1601 University Boulevard, Miami University, Hamilton, Ohio 45011 (inness@muohio.edu).

This anthology will be edited by Sherrie A. Inness, Professor of English at Miami University. Inness is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls' Cultures (New York University Press, 1998); Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Dinner Roles: American Women and
Culinary Culture (University of Iowa Press, 2001); and Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2004).