Over the past decade, 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, concepts such as petro-feminism and petro-precarity 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.
Taking Cara Daggett's concept of petro-masculinity as a point of departure, 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 literarature 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