From Margaret Cavendish’s satirical “Animal Parliament” to Chi Zijian's novel Blue Sky above Clouds,  women across cultures wrote with striking insight about non-human animals in all genres. These literary engagements reveal more than mere metaphor—they interrogate the boundaries of species, gender, race, and power. Over the past three decades, ecofeminism and human-animal studies have demonstrated how feminist theory and animal ethics intersect, generating new methodologies and diverse critical perspectives.

This panel invites interdisciplinary conversations on how women’s literary representations of animals complicate dominant frameworks and offer fresh approaches to understanding women’s creative expression. By examining texts from varied cultural and historical contexts, we seek to explore how animals function not only as symbolic devices but as embodied presences, agents, and interlocutors within women’s writing. These representations often challenge anthropocentrism, resist allegorical reduction, and foreground the politics of vulnerability, care, and autonomy.

We welcome papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• How do animal figures in women’s writing reflect or resist the intersecting oppressions of speciesism, sexism, and racism?
• How do literary animals conform to or defy the “absent referent” in human language and metaphor?
• In what ways do animal representations challenge anthropocentrism and contribute to non-normative subjectivity?
• How do animals in women’s texts critique bodily autonomy, vulnerability, and the ethics of care?
• How are animals’ embodied experiences portrayed, and how do these depictions resist symbolic or allegorical reduction?
• How do authors represent animal agency without appropriating or distorting it—and what ethical tensions arise?
• What literary innovations emerge when women center animals as subjects rather than symbols?

By foregrounding the role of animals in women’s literature, this panel seeks to rethink the boundaries of subjectivity, authorship, and representation. It invites scholars from literary studies, feminist theory, animal studies, and cultural history to explore how women’s writing reimagines the human-animal relationship and contributes to broader discourses of embodiment, ethics, and creative agency.