2025 Spring Conference Call for Papers
Techno-Feminisms: Illness, Dependency, and the Labors of Care

The technological imagination of our present moment speaks incessantly of liberation; of bodies unshackled from biological constraint, minds augmented beyond the frailties of flesh, care itself automated and rendered frictionless. Yet beneath this gleaming rhetoric of transcendence persists an older story, one that feminist thought has long refused to forget. The story of who tends to the sick and the dying; of whose exhaustion underwrites the seamless functioning of systems; of
those bodies deemed too slow, porous, or dependent to merit inclusion in visions of optimized futurity.

This conference seeks papers that dwell in the productive tension between technology and vulnerability, the promise of enhancement and the irreducible fact of corporeal finitude. We are interested in scholarship that refuses the false choice between technophilic acceleration and pastoral retreat, asking instead what it might mean to think technology through illness rather than against it; to imagine digital and biotechnological futures capacious enough to accommodate dependency, slowness, and the unglamorous necessities of care. Feminist theory has never been innocent of technology, from Shulamith Firestone's radical reimagining of reproduction to the cyborg figurations that have shaped decades of subsequent
thought. Nor has it been innocent of the body in its suffering and fragility, as the rich traditions of illness narrative, disability scholarship, and care ethics attest. What this conference proposes is an encounter between these inheritances at a moment when algorithmic systems increasingly mediate health, platforms extract value from care work while rendering it invisible, pandemic and environmental catastrophe have made undeniable what was always true: that autonomy is a fantasy, and interdependence the condition of all life. 

We welcome submissions that engage literature, film, media, and cultural production; that move between theoretical inquiry and close reading; that find in the feminist and crip archive resources for thinking otherwise about technology and the laboring, ailing, interdependent body. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

 Feminist critiques of AI, automation, and algorithmic governance
 Illness narratives and biotechnological imaginaries in literature and media
 Care labor, platform capitalism, and the gig economy
 Disability, prosthesis, and the limits of enhancement discourse
 Reproductive technologies and biopolitical control
 Pandemic literatures and the politics of contagion
 Ecofeminism, environmental illness, and technological mediation
 Crip technoscience and alternative technological futures
 The gendered labor of health and care work in digital environments
 Feminist science fiction and speculative approaches to technology and care

Submission Guidelines:
Please submit an abstract of 250–300 words along with a brief biographical note to fselconference@gmail.com by 8th Feb 2026. 

Presentations should be approximately 15–20 minutes in length.

Conference Date: 9th May 2025
Venue: Korea University, Media Hall
We welcome submissions in both English and Korean.