Since its inception more than 30 years ago, the Feminist Theory & Music conference has served as a gathering place to share perspectives on music, gender, and sexuality. With the theme “Movement, Musicking and Migrations” for the upcoming 2026 conference, we hope that this event will continue to function as a meeting point where we can spark collective action and change in and beyond our respective disciplines.
Movement, in this context, takes on layered meanings reflecting not only the literal actualization of the body but also the mass mobilization of individuals and communities under the banner of social change, seeking justice for those marginalized by race and/or gender. Musicking, meanwhile, reframes music from an object–which, in turn, invites logocentric analyses–into an ongoing process charged with possibilities for change. These keywords pick up on the traditions of feminist thought in refusing stasis: people, sound, and ideas migrate, which in turn produce a potentiality inherent to the displacement, non-belonging, and unsettlement of migration. In this way, we pay critical attention–that is, we indulge a certain feminist attunement–to musicking’s praxis. Together, we might ask: where would we feel for fugitive and undisciplined sound; what if we imagined musical practice within the soft gesture of a lover’s embrace; how can we care for dissonance, skips, glitches, and breaks; and, can feminist theory help us approach musicking with more tenderness, sensuality, and playfulness?
To honor the conference location––Dayton, Ohio––our theme also speaks to the history of this place as a crossroads for many movements and bodies, such as Indigenous tribes (e.g. Miami, Shawnee, Seneca, and Lenape peoples) that migrated to Ohio and were later displaced, the Underground Railroad, and the Great Migration as well as funk, jazz, and alt rock scenes. The conference will feature a keynote address by Juliet Formholt, Music Director of 91.3FM WYSO and co-host of the podcast, Rediscovered Radio: Women’s Voices, Women’s Music in the WYSO Archives. Project Spectrum will also host a grad-student hour with programming during the conference.
The program committee welcomes proposals for presentations that explore topics including (but not limited to): geographical migration or displacement of peoples, ideas, archives, and sounds; the movement of bodies in dance and choreographic memory; musicking in/as social and political movement; and other forms of boundary/border crossing, evasion, and elision. We invite work that is experimental, experiential, and genre-bending as we push the limits of feminist music studies. In a similar vein, we aim to consider feminist theory capaciously, deprivileging traditionally-feminist intellectual genealogies in favor of a broad spectrum approach encompassing Marxism, critical race studies, sex work and porn, trans studies, theory from the Global South, and queer materialism. We think alongside the spatial reference in the Social Text special issue “Left of Queer” (Eng and Puar 2020), not only in the wake of ongoing global fascist attacks on feminism, the performing arts, and humanistic thought broadly, but also to signify what traces remain of the utopian promise of our work. In thinking with movement, musicking, and migration, what is left of feminist theory and music? Perhaps in a moment where precarity, scarcity, and worry loom over our convening, we might come together in this conference setting to develop strategies for collective action as feminists, theorists, and musickers.
Proposal Guidelines:
We invite submissions from artists, activists, and scholars at any stage of their careers, including undergraduate and graduate students, and especially encourage submissions from people working outside of the academy. We welcome proposals for a range of presentation formats, including (but not limited to):
• Individual Papers (20 minutes)
• 250-word abstract
• Themed Panels of Papers (90 to 120 minutes)
• 250-word abstract plus ~150-word abstracts from each proposed participant
• Performances or Lecture-Demonstrations (45 minutes)
• 250-word abstract
• Workshops (45 or 90 minutes)
• 250-word abstracts
• Roundtable Conversations (90 minutes)
• 250-word roundtable abstract plus ~150-word abstracts from each proposed participant
• Seminars with Pre-Conference Circulation of Materials (90 minutes)
• 250-word seminar abstract
Preference will be given to those who can attend in person. However, we are happy to consider proposals for remote presentations to allow for those unable to travel to Ohio to participate. Decisions will be communicated by early February.
Submit your proposals here: https://forms.gle/F2T4uhXGZkEEbrX2A