Call for papers

While the study of language, gender and sexuality has become a central research topic in linguistics in past decades, the vast majority of the research has focused on the Anglosphere. In Romance linguistics, the interplay of language, gender and sexuality has received less attention. At the same time, there is a growing interest in phenomena like gender-neutral or inclusive language and the connection between grammatical and societal gender.  

The conference Sex in Romance: Perspectives to Gender and Sexuality in Romance Languages (SiR2025) is organized by the research project  funded by the Kone Foundation and carried out at the University of Helsinki, and other researchers of Romance languages working on topics related to gender and sexuality. The purpose of the conference is to provide an international discussion forum for scholars interested in different aspects of gender and sexuality in Romance languages. We include all theoretical and methodological approaches, including but not limited to the following:  

• sociolinguistics of language, gender and sexuality  
• interfaces between morphological and social gender  
• pragmatics of gender and/or sexuality 
• social psychology of language and gender  
• corpus linguistic approaches to studying language and gender/sexuality 
• ethnographic approaches to studying language and gender/sexuality 
• construction of gender and sexual identities in discourse 
• queer and trans linguistics  

The lingua franca of the conference is English, but we welcome submissions and presentations in Romance languages as well. The planned length of presentations is 20 minutes + 10 minutes for questions and comments.  

The keynote speakers of the conference are Julie Abbou (University of Turin), Virginia Acuña Ferreira (University of Vigo) and Fabio Fasoli (Surrey University). 

Submission of abstracts opened in February 2025 and the deadline has been extended to the 23rd of April 2025. Abstracts should be 250 words in length (excluding references and examples) and they can be written in English or any major Romance language. However, to facilitate reviewing, please include a translation into English if submitting in another language.  

Abstracts must be sent as an email attachment to .  Don’t include author details in the abstract, but include your full name and title, affiliation, language in which you will deliver the presentation, and contact email in the body of the email.  

Please use the to format your abstract.

Notification of acceptance has been sent to accepted participants (corresponding authors).  

The conference fee is 120 euros for all participants. We will open the registration form soon.