SOLETRAS

Dossier: Class, race, ethnicity and gender: representations of social inequalities in contemporary fiction

Organizers:

Diana Trindade Drumond (University of Georgia – UGA)

Luiz Manoel da Silva Oliveira (UFSJ)

Shirley de Souza Gomes Carreira (UERJ, CNPq/FAPERJ)

Contemporary literature is undoubtedly committed to themes related to social issues of the modern world, establishing itself as a privileged space for symbolic dispute and aesthetic elaboration of the tensions of collective life. In a scenario marked by the expansion of social asymmetries and by the persistence of historical hierarchies, fiction thematizes conflicts, violences and exclusions as well as intervenes in the way one perceives, names, imagines and subverts them. Through choices of language, focalization, narrative structure, character composition, among other strategies, literature can make visible socially produced experiences stemming from inequalities, creating tensions in power regimes and questioning the meaning of belonging, recognition and citizenship.

By problematizing, through fiction, the inequalities derived from racism and the processes of racialization, from normativities of gender and sexualities, from social class and work dynamics, among other markers, literature can operate as a tool for denunciation, critique and resistance, without disregarding the formal procedures and the aesthetic criteria which ensure quality to the literary text.

Grounded in this premise, the organizers of this dossier invite the submission of original articles which, from various perspectives, theoretical approaches and methodologies, including comparative analysis, examine literary works that prioritize the fictionalization of social inequalities.

Submissions within the scope of the following themes will be welcome:

1. Intersectional approaches to social inequality.
2. Migration, displacement and border experiences permeated by social inequality.
3. Peripheries, socio-espacial segregation and unequal access to the city.
4. Social class, work and precarious employment.
5. Social inequalities in historical novels.
6. Structural racism and processes of racialization as instruments for maintaining inequalities.
7. Gender, sexualities and sexual dissidence as axes of social hierarchy and disputes.
8. Revisionist strategies of canonical literary works produced under the aegis of intersectional discrimination markers.

Thus, this dossier expects to assemble contributions which enlighten how contemporary fictions feature inequality and, thereby, produce sensitive and critical knowledge about the social world, opening up new possibilities of reading the historically marginalized experiences.

Submission deadline: October 5^th, 2026.