Call for Papers: Trans Studies and the Tomboy
For the 2025 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference
Philadelphia, November 6–9, 2025
This Legacy-sponsored, guaranteed panel invites papers examining how trans studies shifts, expands, or complicates scholarship on tomboy representations in nineteenth-century American literature. Existing influential monographs—such as Beverly Lyon Clark’s Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys (1996), Michelle Ann Abate’s Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History (2008), and Renée M. Sentilles’ American Tomboys, 1850–1914 (2018)—largely approach their subjects through feminist and queer theoretical frameworks. More recently, perspectives informed by trans studies and trans historiography are beginning to suggest new possibilities. For instance, Peyton Thomas’s work on Louisa May Alcott and frequent references to the tomboy in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) highlight how trans studies can generate fresh insights into tomboy figures and their cultural implications. Such approaches encourage us to revisit nineteenth-century literary tomboys not only as sites of resistance to the naturalizing logic of cisness but also as potential embodiments of trans masculine identities.
We welcome papers that approach this topic from diverse perspectives, including but not limited to:
• Representations of tomboys in nineteenth-century American literature by writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Pauline Hopkins, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Wilson, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, and others.
• Comparisons of the nineteenth century’s social understanding of trans masculine and trans feminine children.
• The racialization of tomboys and masculinity.
• Differences in tomboy representations across genres, from sentimental novels to adventure stories.
• The tomboy and the American frontier myth, potentially including links between white trans masculinity and “playing Indian.”
• Intersections with disability studies.
• Comparative transatlantic perspectives.
• The nineteenth-century tomboy in relation to evolving understandings of trans identities.
By bringing trans studies to bear on the scholarship of tomboys, this panel seeks to uncover new dimensions of these literary figures and to explore how their cultural resonance continues to evolve.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief bio (100 words) to travis.foster@villanova.edu by February 20, 2025.