Saturday 21 February 2026, 9.45am - 4.30pm
Seminar Room 4 & 5, Wadham College
All welcome
If you wish to attend online, kindly email dorothee.boulanger@humanities.ox.ac.uk and she will send you a Teams invitation.
Join us on Saturday 21st February for the annual Feminist Thinking Graduate Conference!
The conference is part of the Feminist Thinking Seminar Series, organised by graduate students on the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). The goal of the day, and of this series, is not to decide what feminist thinking is but rather to ask what it could be.
At this event, graduates of the WGSS 2024-2025 programme will present and discuss their richly diverse research, offering insights on feminist literary studies, trans/queer embodiment, constructions of nation and geography, and activist pasts and futures.
Light vegetarian and vegan refreshments will be provided throughout the day.
Feminist Thinking Graduate Conference 2026 Schedule
Welcome
9:45–10:00
Panel 1: 10:00–11:50
TITLE: Borders, Boundaries and (Re)Mappings
10:00–10:15 – Zeyang: Subordinated Privilege: Transcending Intersectional Maleness, Gayness, and Chineseness through an Autoethnographic Lens
10:15–10:30 – Viliam Miklovic: Czech-ing Out Euro-Orientalism: The East/West Relationship in Contemporary All-Male Pornography
10:30–10:45 – Susanna Demelas: Border Intimacies: Contemporary Perspectives on Lesbian-Genderqueer Relationality
10:45–11:00 – Kitty Henderson: Challenging the ‘Bathroom Binary’: Spatial Resistance and Transfuturism in the Public Bathroom
11:00–11:15 – Dita: Sacrificing Sons, Defying the State: Return Migration as Refusal of Britain’s Prison Industrial Complex
11:15–11:50 – Panel Discussion (25 mins)
Break: 11:50–12:00
Panel 2: 12:00–13:20
TITLE: Discipline and Waywardness: Encountering Troublesome Bodies
12:00–12:15 – Sorcha Finan: Smothering Love: The ‘Irish Mammy’ Archetype as an Impediment to Authentic Love
12:15–12:30 – Grace Hind: Scrumming Like a Girl: The Significance of the Body in Professional Women’s Rugby
12:30–12:45 – Megan Harley-Martin: ‘Can Women Freely Consent to Doing Sex Work?’
12:45–13:00 – Alex Avgust: Our Flesh Speaks True: On the Uneasy Pleasures of Feminine Relationality in the “Pro-ED” Spaces of 2000s and 2010s
13:00–13:20 – Panel Discussion (20 mins)
Lunch: 13:20–13:50
Break: 13:50–14:00
Panel 3: 14:00–15:05
TITLE: Feminist Storytelling: Method, Collaboration and Honouring Legacies
14:00–14:15 – Clem Scott: Touched by the Black Tarantula: Plagiarism, Relational Ethics, and Kathy Acker’s Posthumous Auto-theoretical Legacy
14:15–14:30 – Soleil Doering: The Creepy as a Feminist Storytelling Method: Negotiating National and Personal Trauma through a Collaborative Reading Practice of Mariana Enriquez’s Short Stories
14:30–14:45 – Josie Rosman: An Abundance of Absence: Female Friendships in Mrs Dalloway and NW
14:45–15:05 – Panel Discussion (20 mins)
Break: 15:05–15:15
Panel 4: 15:15–16:20
TITLE: Touching Traces: Liberation Through Archive Work
15:15–15:30 – Avik Sarkar: “Theory Mutilates, Surgery Liberates”: Transsexual Women’s Zines and Queer Theory’s Myopias
15:30–15:45 – Izzy Hardin: ‘Be Not All These Men?’: Student Theatre and Self-Actualisation at the Oxford Women’s Colleges, 1892–1927
15:45–16:00 – Jasmine Baten: Amader Kotha (Our Voices, Our Stories): Bangladeshi Immigrant Women’s Resistance During the 1971 Liberation War
16:00–16:20 – Panel Discussion (20 mins)
Closing / Buffer / Informal Discussion
16:20–16:30
(Space for overruns, final questions, or a relaxed close)
End: 16:30
Intersectional Humanities, Research Hubs
