An interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres.
FEMSPEC is an academic, peer-reviewed journal focused on the study of gender in science fiction, fantasy, and speculative genres. We believe in non-hierarchical community and operate in a space of cooperation. All members of the collective are valued, heard, and respected without regards to age, experience, or professional position
Editors
Editor
Merry Byrd
Book and Film Review Editor
Merry Byrd
Social Media Editor
Merry Byrd and Monique Attrux
Production Editor and Creative Writing Editor
Anna Walters
Blog Editor
Letícia Bergamini
Subscription Editor
Esther Odukomaiya
Peer Reviewer, Digital Distributor, and Newsletter Editor
Nolan Boyd
Book Review Editor
Monique Attrux
Peer Review Editor
Sydney Paluch
Batya Weinbaum edited Femspec from the 1990s till her death in 2026.
Nolan Boyd is currently Term Assistant Professor of English at Virginia State University. He holds a PhD in English Literature and a Graduate Certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Miami University. His scholarship analyzes the cultural work performed by cinema, particularly with regard to representations of queerness and disability.
Omotoyosi Odukomaiya specializes in Black science fiction and women’s literature. At Hope College, she teaches courses on American ethnic literature, Black speculative fiction, and women’s literature. Her research explores how Black science fiction authors address historical trauma, envision future possibilities, and depict the experiences of Black people across global diasporas. She also studies marginalized groups and investigates how dominant power structures influence, restrict, and occasionally transform their experiences.
Merry Byrd is Full Professor of English at Virginia State University. She teaches general education and literature courses, environmental humanities, and film. Her original areas of research were women’s studies and memoir; however, she cultivated additional research interests in dystopian, fantasy, and sci-fi genres after Hurricane Katrina and the levee break. She has contributed to Femspec since 2015 and has served as book review editor since 2018.
Monique Attrux is currently a Ph.D candidate in English literature at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her doctoral project, Writing Chinese, generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), examines the literary multilingual practices of Chinese Canadian prose fiction writers in their depictions of the Chinese Canadian identity entangled between the national frameworks of homeland and new home country. Her official academic research areas are Canadian literature, Asian Canadian studies, postcolonial studies, and prose narrative. Her interest in speculative fiction comes from her academic work in studying how dominant racist frameworks have historically dehumanized Asian (im)migrants by rendering them discursively as prosthetic, machine-like individuals; speculative fiction, she believes, is an important realm to understand and contest existing boundaries of humanity. She has also served as a book review editor for Great Lakes Review since 2024.
Anna Walters is a creative writer working toward a Ph.D. in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University, where she studies systems of power, intersectional representation and resistance, social justice, and feminist/womanist interventions through creative and spiritual activism. Her research investigates transformative practices of creative writing and other artistic forms of expression. She works as a graduate instructor and has taught composition, introductory literature, and women’s and gender studies courses to undergraduate level students. Besides writing and teaching, she is also a multimodal artist with a background in music and photography.
Katierose Friel Keenan is a writer, professor of literature, and literary critic living in the greater Philadelphia area. A multilingual educator, she has held instructional appointments in Anglophone literature alongside French and Spanish language pedagogy at both the secondary and post-secondary levels. During her time as a journalist, her news writing was featured widely across several Philadelphia-area publications. Professor Keenan has been invited to present her scholarship nationally and internationally on figures including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Shakespeare, and James Joyce, and she has served as a panel chair for both the American Literature Association and the Sylvia Plath Symposium. Her essayistic work on Plath appears in the interdisciplinary journal Plath Profiles (published under Katierose Keenan), and her chapter, "The Witch and The Death Cult Priestess," is featured in Critical Insights: Shirley Jackson (Salem Press). Her broader research investigates the political economy of world literature, specifically focusing on the aesthetics of the female grotesque, the pathologization of non-compliance within Mad Studies, and the translation fault lines where gendered archetypes encounter global Anglophone markets.
Sydney Paluch (They/Them) interrogates the affective attachments of queer kinship stitched together at sites of craft, care, and kink. Working on contemporary queer fiction and performance, their research questions how queer kin are made through traumatisms held in embodied archives, forms of violent intimacy, and stitching together community. They are currently focused on curating figurations of kinky kinship, masochistic paraontology, and (un)visible mending as trans textile epistemology. They also serve as Peer Review Editor for the FemSpec Journal, and a Peer Reviewer for English Journal (NCTE). Public scholarship can be found at Femme and Dandy Literary Journal, Anarchist Princess, and others. In the undercommons they are a Sanctuary Keeper for the School of Radical Attention, run the Queer Craft Club Hous, International Queer Craft Club for Femme and Dandy, Hous of Seam Rip and Queer Stitch for gender affirming alterations, and the Queer Community Fund for trans comrades in crisis. In the community, they organize with the Queer Anarchy Collective, Ithaca Food Not Bombs, and various direct actions for our unhoused humans.
Letícia Bergamini is a Brazilian researcher, musician, poet, translator, and teacher. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Literary Theory and History at Unicamp (Campinas/Sao Paulo - Brazil), where her research focuses on feminist dystopias. Her interests include literature by women and authors marginalized by the literary canon.