Event registration can be found here including tickets for Workshops and the Networking Event.
Speaker abstract and bios can be found here.
Keynotes and this year’s Reading List can be found here.
Workshops and Roundtable information can be found here.
The Crafting Your Queer Fantasy TBR post can be found here.
Our post on How to Join the Discord can be found here.
This programme is updated as needed. All times listed are BST, British Summer Time.
| 12:30-12:45 Platform Wide Welcome and explanation of the mechanics with Will Tattersdill | |||
| 12:45-13:45 Opening Roundtable: Queering the Fantastic in 2025 with Anna Oleszczuk, Emma Tueller Stone, Sam Tegtmeyer, and Sydney Brouillard-Coyle Chair: Rebecca Gault Deputy Chair: Lily Golich | |||
| 13:45-14:00 Break | |||
| Panels 1 14:00 – 15:15 | |||
| Panel 1A Queering Medieval Retellings Chair: Lorna Ross Deputy Chair: Makayla Widger 14:00 Gabriella Fryer “Marvellous wound”: a medieval-queer reading of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber 14:20 Tam Moules Armour, Body Parts, and Queer Masculinity in Arthurian Retellings 14:40 Cheryl Myfanwy Morgan The Fourth Branch – Past and Future 15:00 Discussion | Panel 1B Fairy Stories Chair: Lea Warren Deputy Chair: Meganne Rizk 14:00 Silvia E. Storti Queering villainy: disruptive storytelling in contemporary fairy-tale narratives 14:20 Paula Rivera Donoso The queer/crip fantasy journey in ‘Las flores crecerán sobre mi cuerpo’, by TopoPanda 14:40 Catherine Olver Family (of) Trees? More-Than-Human Families in Queer Fairytales 15:00 Discussion | Panel 1C Magic and Liminality Chair: Hollie Willis Deputy Chair: Rachel England 14:00 Harry Rollison “She’d be both, or none at all […] a witch and a wizard too”: Queering the Gendered Magical Binary in Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites 14:20 Orla Davey ‘Reweave the Threads of Fate’: Femslash Fantasy and Queering the Classical Myth Canon 14:40 Elisa Pesce Transcending Life, Death, and Magic: The Falt Lines of Identity in Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys 15:00 Discussion | |
| 15:15– 15:30 Break | |||
15:30 – 16:30 Keynote Kirsty Logan Chairs: Grace A.T. Worm and Lorna Ross Deputy Chair: Rachel England | |||
| 16:30-16:35 Short Break | |||
16:35 –17:30 Seminar – Here, There, and Elsewhere: Editing for Inclusion and Access in a Fantasy Periodical with Saige Severin, Stephen Welsh, Méganne Yasmeen Rizk, and Caleb Berk Fantasy MLitt Fiction Journal Elsewhere in the Discord Deputy Chair: Will Tattersdill (Limited spaces, Zoom links only available via Eventbrite ticketing) | |||
| 17:30-17:35 Short Break | |||
| Panels 2 17:35-18:50 | |||
| Panel 2A Cooperative Identity Explorations Chair: Lea Warren Deputy Chair: Caleb Berk 17:35 Caighlan Smith Challenging Chronos: Re-Queering Classical Mythology in Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical 17:55 Emma French “They hate to see a girlboss winning”: the reinvisioning of race and sexuality within D&D’s drow elves 18:15 Alexis Lothian “White Men, Otherwise? Slash Fanfiction, Race, and the Persistence of Slavefic” 18:35 Discussion | Panel 2B Lud-in-the-Mist Chair: Mercury Natis Deputy Chair: Sam Tegtmeyer 17:35 Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad One With the Silent People: Queerness and Fairy Fruit in Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist 17:55 Saige Severin The Erotic as Magic: Fantasy and Lasting Political Action 18:15 Amy Richmond “The blood of the tree spreading over her tongue”: Drinking the Juices of Queer Power 18:35 Discussion | ||
| 19:00– 19:45 The University of Glasgow Fantasy Master’s in Literature 10 Year Anniversary Event with Dr. Robert Maslen | |||
Day 2: Thursday May 8, 2025
| Panels 3 9:30 – 11:10 | |||
| Panel 3A Monstrosity and Queer Narrative Chair: Joseph Paolantonacci Deputy Chair: Stephen Welsh 9:30 Frankie Bradley Monstrous Love & Queer Identity 9:50 María de la O Ruiz Rodríguez The Vampire Revolution: Gothic, Queerness, and Subversion in V. E. Schwab’s First Kill (2022) 10:10 Faarih Gothic Sanguinities: Reimagining Vampiric Metaphors in the Post-AIDS Era 10:30 Discussion | Panel 3B Explorations of Normativity Chair: Sam Tegtmeyer Deputy Chair: Saige Severin 9:30 Taylor Driggers ‘All people are glyphs’: Queer Kinship and the Politics of Reading in Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Annals of the Western Shore 9:50 Nike Sulway “To meet once more as aliens”: exploring the relevance of fantastic literature for queer studies 10:10 Sarah Courtis Write my way out (of the closet): challenging the compulsory heterosexual narrative of fantasy musicals 10:30 Zvonimir Prtenjača Destabilizing Homonormativity: Wiccan from Marvel Comics’ Young Avengers and The Children’s Crusade to Disney+’s Agatha All Along 10:50 Discussion | ||
| 11:10 – 11:20 Break | |||
| 11:20-12:20 GIFCon 2025 Networking Event with Grace A.T. Worm Deputy Chair: Lea Warren Ticketed attendees only, see Eventbrite for tickets and information (currently sold-out with waiting list) | |||
12:20–13:20 Lunch Break Research Spotlight in the Discord with Mercury Natis | |||
| 13:20-13:30 Break | |||
13:30—14:30: Keynote Anna McFarlane Chair: Will Tattersdill Deputy Chair: Reese Reynolds | |||
| 14:30 – 14:45 Break | |||
| 14:45 –16:00 Panels 4: Workshops (Limited spaces, Zoom links only available via Eventbrite ticketing) 4A: Together We Write Private Cathedrals: A Collaborative Epistolary Game about Queer Community and History with Stephen Welsh Deputy Chair: Lorna Ross 4B: Family (of) Trees: An Ecoqueer Fairytale & Fantasy Workshop with Catherine Olver Deputy Chair: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui 4C: Publishing WITHOUT Perishing: Mapping The Impossible’s Survival Guide to Student-led Publishing with Brianna Best and Rachel Milne Deputy Chair: Grace A.T. Worm | |||
| 16:00-16:15 Break | |||
| Panels 5 16:15 – 17:30 | |||
| Panel 5A Interrogating Foundations Chair: Lea Warren Deputy Chair: Rachel England 16:15 Eleanor Patterson Outside the Box: Form and Gender in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman 16:35 Robin Anne Reid An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies 16:55 Mercury Natis Against Correct and Sober Taste: Tolkien and Sontag on Faërie and Camp 17:15 Discussion | Panel 5B Reimagining Queer Representations Chair: Lorna Ross Deputy Chair: Reese Reynolds 16:15 C.T. Power House of the Dragon: Making Things Perfectly Queer 16:35 Makayla Wigder “Is My Hair Out?”: The Queer-Coding of Hercules’ Hades 16:55 Katarina Dulude What if I Choose the Dream?: Exploring Fantastic Otherworlds in Queer Neo-Victorian Texts 17:15 Discussion | Panel 5C Fanfiction and Fandom Chair: Hollie Willis Deputy Chair: Lilly Golich 16:15 Anna Bark Persson “Sword Lesbians: Fantastic Fantasies in Fantasy Fiction and Fandom” 16:35 Alexandra Davies “Are we too heteronormative?”: Mpreg and transgression in Teen Wolf fanfiction 16:55 Kashish Gera “From Ships to Shifts: Exploring Queer Transformations and Reader Biases Across Fanfiction Platforms” 17:15 Discussion | |
| 17:30-Later Gaming Expo and Play in the Discord—Hades II & Jackbox Games | |||
Day 3: Friday May 9, 2024
| Panel 6 10:00 – 11:40 | |||
| Panel 6A Borderlines and Marginalization Chair: Will Tattersdill Deputy Chair: Caleb Berk 10:00 Elizabeth Elliott Early modern Scottish fantasy: Queer embodiment and practices of social exclusion in The Gyre Carling 10:20 Alex Henderson The Queer Trickster in Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves 10:40 Rheanna Mathews Queer Temporality and Disenfranchised Grief in Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne 11:00 Nathaniel Harrington “Fully male and hold-bred”: Sexuality, class, and the construction of gender in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern 11:20 Discussion | Panel 6B Worldbuilding and Queer Identity Chair: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui Deputy Chair: Lilly Golich 10:00 Stephanie Rincon Ramos Reimagining Resistance: Postcolonial and Environmental Visions in She-Ra and The Owl House 10:20 Şevval Tufan Queering the Weird: Rethinking Ecology and Nonhuman Entanglements in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) 10:40 Laura García Soria “Boy Island’: Trans Creationism and a New Materialist Approach to Gender” 11:00 Laura Ciriza Martín Just because something has always been done…”: Gender, Sexuality, and Binaries in Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree 11:20 Discussion | ||
| 11:40 – 12:45 Lunch Break | |||
12:45-13:45 Keynote Alice Chapman-Kelly Chair: Matthew Sangster Deputy Chair: Saige Severin | |||
| 13:45-14:00 Break | |||
| Panels 7 14:00 – 15:15 | |||
| Panel 7A Gaming and Queerness Chair: Grace A.T. Worm Deputy Chair: Saige Severin 14:00 Stephen Welsh Playing with queerness in Monsterhearts 2 and Thirsty Sword Lesbians 14:20 Reese Reynolds “Coming Full Circle: Cozy Gaming and Capitalist Narrativity” 14:40 Jamie Nicholas, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, &Catherine Flick ‘From where I stand, you’re all legs’. Expectation, Desire and Queerness in Dragon Age: Veilguard 15:00 Discussion | Panel 7B Family Dynamics and Children’s Media Chair: Joseph Paolantonacci Deputy Chair: Makayla Widger 14:00 Isabelle Hanshue Monsters Who Inspire Love: Monstrosity and the Queer Family Dynamic in Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Novel Monstrilio 14:20 Inês Guedes Vaz Us Princesses Have to Stick Together: Uses and Representations of Queerness in Contemporary YA Fantasy Animation 14:40 Madeline Wahl “I think we ought to live happily ever after”: Chosen Family and Family Representation in Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones 15:00 Discussion | Panel 7C Queer Utopias Chair: Ane B. Ruiz-Lejarcegui Deputy Chair: Caleb Berk 14:00 Rebecca Gault Dystopic Queer Futures in Seth Dickinson’s Masquerade Series 14:20 Meg Horridge Stepping Out of Time: Towards a Queer Utopia 14:40 Rebecca Jones Queer Communities as Utopias of Potentiality in the Graphic Novels of Kay O’Neill 15:00 Discussion | |
| 15:15-15:30 Break | |||
| 15:30 – 16:30 Roundtable: Omegaverse Fanfiction and the Politics of Fantasy with Ann Alex, Kristina Busse, Tanvi Chowdhury, and Alexis Lothian Chair: Alexis Lothian Deputy Chair: Meganne Rizk | |||
| 16:45-17:45 Artist Spotlight in the Discord with Elisabeth (Essa) Flett | |||