Over the past decade, Cara Daggett's notion of petro-masculinity has emerged as one of the central concepts for understanding the entanglement of fossil-fuel cultures, authoritarian politics, and climate denial. Yet the conceptual vocabulary available for analyzing the gendered and uneven dimensions of fossil modernity remains limited. While petro- masculinity has become an influential framework, petro-feminism (e.g. Sheena Wilson, Helen Kaptstein) and petro-precarity (e.g. Irma Kinga Allen) have received far less sustained theoretical attention and remain insufficiently connected. This seminar argues that comparative literature can contribute to developing a richer conceptual vocabulary for understanding the consequences of fossil modernity.

The seminar asks how petro-masculinity, petro-feminism, and petro-precarity might be understood as intersecting analytical frameworks. What forms of power, affect, labor, embodiment, and environmental injustice become visible through each? How do literary, cinematic, and other cultural texts—including videogames—reproduce, challenge, or reimagine the gendered structures of fossil-fuel modernity? And how might approaches in comparative literature refine, historicize, complicate, or expand these concepts across different cultural and medial contexts?

We particularly welcome theoretically informed contributions that develop, challenge, or rethink these conceptual frameworks, as well as close, distant, or surface readings that demonstrate their analytical potential across literary and non-literary texts.

Possible topics include:

• conceptual genealogies of petro-masculinity, petro-feminism, and petro-precarity
• petro-masculinity, authoritarianism, populism, and climate politics
• feminist and queer engagements with extractivism and fossil modernity
• intersections of gender, energy, labor, and extractivism
• petro-precarity, environmental justice, toxic embodiment, and displacement
• literature, film, media, and videogames of oil and extraction
• comparative theories of energy, gender, and infrastructure
• methodologies for Comparative Literature and the Environmental/Energy Humanities
• imaginaries of post-petroleum futures, energy justice, and just transitions