Bad Feelings: Sadness and Gender in Contemporary Culture
In 2015, i-D magazine declared the year of the ‘sad girl’ (Thelandersson 2022: 157). In the decade since, portrayals of depressed, anxious, and mentally burdened women have scarcely abated, from the breakout success of Sally Rooney to the emergence of Sad Girl BookTok to Gen Z’s recent rediscovery of Lana Del Rey. Meanwhile, in the academy, subfields such as Affect Theory, Disability Studies, and Madness Studies represent growing areas of interest for increasing numbers of researchers and students. Read alongside a generational decline in living standards and prospects, these conjoined cultural and scholarly phenomena suggest that we inhabit a contemporary moment in which non-normative ways of surviving – emotionally, mentally, affectively – assume ever greater importance. In this milieu, sadness, anhedonia, malaise, lethargy, and melancholy all emerge as specifically gendered iterations of a broader, generational ‘structure of feeling’, figuring, perhaps, as a feminised counterpart to the ‘angry young man’ who continues to animate New York Times Op-Eds (Bernstein 2024; Kang 2024), internet culture (Andrew Tate), and popular discourse on the reinvigoration of the ‘gender wars’ (Tolentino 2024).
This timely conference takes contemporary representations of female sadness as its critical object, asking how we might read the ‘sad girl’ as an artefact of the historic – late capitalist and neoconservative – present. While mental health remains largely the preserve of Biomedical and/or Psychology departments, this conference will foreground interdisciplinary and intersectional humanities perspectives on gendered emotion, thereby widening the scope of what counts as knowledge, and who count as experts, on mental health and wellbeing.
A non-exhaustive list of questions to consider includes:
How do cultures and representations of sadness extend or challenge the dominant biomedical paradigm?
What lies after trauma theory?
What is the trajectory from feminism to heteropessimism (Seresin 2019) to hetero-nostalgia?
To what degree is the contemporary ‘sad girl’ a Western phenomenon, and what are her non-Western equivalents or counterexamples?
What accounts for the current fetishisation of female passivity (the ‘Trad Wife’, etc.)?
When is sadness collective and historical, and when is it personal and pathological?
To what extent can ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’ (Peter Kramer) be considered a response to late-stage capitalism rather than a cure for illness or abnormality, and how does this response affect ‘sad’ women?
How have psychosurgeries like electroshock therapy (ECT) and lobotomy historically contributed to the medicalisation of emotions, specifically among women and minorities?
When does sadness become madness? Social responses to ‘disproportionate’ sadness, self-harm narratives, etc.
How do emotions and affects like sadness, depression, anomie, ennui, or inertia challenge cultures of optimisation and productivity?
What strategies have individuals, communities, minority groups, and textual characters developed to cope with everyday stressors of life? How can these strategies be used to affirmatively reconceptualise Disability or Madness?
In what ways are Disabled, Mad, or neurodiverse individuals expected to ‘perform’ sadness or happiness in a way that violates their own sense of an authentic self?
How can contemporary representations of disability challenge the glorification of the illness-to-cure narrative that excludes many Disabled individuals?
What are some of the changes in public and moral evaluations of sadness in contemporary cultural history – from acedia to self-care, hysteria to wellness?
How are ideas of left melancholia (Walter Benjamin), working class melancholia (Cynthia Cruz), or middle-class melancholia (Sanford F. Schram) present in contemporary culture?
In what ways might we reconsider sadness as a rational rather than hysterical,and moral rather than disordered, response to certain historical, social conditions? When is sadness a political feeling?
How can literary close reading and other humanities methodologies problematize the symptomatic focus of medical approaches centred on pathology, individual brain chemistry, and an understanding of trauma as a discrete rather than diffuse ‘event’?
The conference will take place from 8-9 June 2026 in Dublin and will feature keynotes Professor Anne Whitehead (University of Newcastle) and Professor David James (University of Birmingham). It will also feature a Disability Studies Roundtable with guest speakers Dr Veronica Heney (University of Durham), Dr Lucy Burke (Manchester Metropolitan University), and Ruairí Kennedy (University of Galway). We are hoping to offer a limited number of travel bursaries to graduate students and unaffiliated researchers. These will be awarded on a competitive basis, with more details to follow.
deadline for submissions:
January 30, 2026
full name / name of organization:
University College Dublin & Museum of Literature Ireland
contact email: