Critical Femininities Conference
General Committee 2026
If you are interested in joining the Critical Femininities Conference Committee, please see the call for members here.
Hannah Maitland
2026 Committee Chair
London, Ontario, Canada
(Traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron)
Hannah Maitland (she/her) completed her PhD in the Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies Department at York University. She is a feminist researcher who studies girl activists, their politics, and their relationships with their mothers and mother figures. Her other research areas include sex education controversies and pregnant Barbie dolls. Beyond her research, Hannah co-founded the Open Digital Literacy and Access Network (ODLAN). She currently serves as the Recording Secretary for the Sexuality Studies Association and the Women, Gender, and Social Justice Association. You can find some of her writing in Atlantis, The Conversation, and #Barbie and Social Media: Digital Discourses and Mattel’s Celebrity Doll.
Languages: English
Email: hannahjanemaitland@gmail.com
Social media: LinkedIn
Ramanpreet Annie Bahra
Brampton/Waterloo, Canada
Ramanpreet Annie Bahra (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University. She is interested in the areas of fat studies, disability studies, social theory, particularly feminist new materialism, and race and racism. Her doctoral work explores how fat South Asians in Canada navigate the entwined experiences of ‘feeling fat’ and ‘feeling brown.’ As an educator, Bahra advocates for a posthumanist fat pedagogy rooted in bodymind-centered, relational, and emotionally attuned teaching. Her most recent works examine the uncaring logics of medicine and access to health/care for fat, brown, and otherwise-racialized communities, envisioning a collective fat politics of care. Ramanpreet is co-founder of the Canadian Sociological Association’s Fat Studies Research Cluster and co-manager of Excessive Bodies: A Journal of Artistic and Critical Fat Praxis and Worldmaking.
Languages: English, Punjabi (oral only)
Email: rbahra@wlu.ca
Social media: Instagram
Dr Laura Brightwell
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
Dr Laura Brightwell (she/her) holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist, & Women's Studies from York University and is interested in many things feminine and feminist, including queer mothering, femme theory, connections between cis and trans femmes, and Indigenous rights. You can find her writing at the Journal of Lesbian Studies, feral feminisms journal, and a few other places. She lives on Treaty 13 territory in Tkaronto, Canada. Please feel free to connect via LinkedIn or Instagram.
Languages: English, French
Email: lauraannebrightwell@gmail.com
Social media: LinkedIn, Instagram
Dr Lindsay Cavanaugh
Turtle Island (so-called Canada)
Lindsay Cavanaugh (she/her) currently lectures at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT) in disability, gender, and curriculum studies. Her research focuses on softness, femme pedagogy, queer and trans futurities in education, and disability art methods. Her recently defended PhD documented the desires of a group of Indigenous, Racialized, white, dis/abled, femme* 2S/LGBTQIA+ educational advocates about how the time/space, pedagogy, and curriculum of schools could be soft/ened through an arts-based and participatory-informed method called dream-mapping. Lindsay is also a former high school teacher and a published poet. She lives on Dish with One Spoon treaty land in Tkaranto (so-called Toronto) with her partner. You read more about her here.
Languages: English
Email: lindsay.cavanaugh@torontomu.ca
Johnathan Clancy
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
Johnathan Clancy (he/him) is a PhD student in the Gender, Feminist, and Women's studies program at York University. His research uses qualitative, material culture, and arts-based approaches to examine how fashion objects interact with the performance and production of gendered, classed and racialized hierarchies. His current studies examine the intersections of masculinity, fashion, and studies in the history of men's fat fashion.
Languages: English
Email: jclancy@yorku.ca
Dr Minakshi Das
Canada
I am Dr. Minakshi Das (she/her), a Professor of Practice. My research areas are health governance, Feminist advocacy on Reproductive Health and Gender and Peace building. I am affiliated with Global Peace and Security Center of Melbourne University and LSE.
Languages: English, Urdu and French
Email: minakshid35@gmail.com
Social media: LinkedIn
Mackenzie Edwards
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
Mackenzie Edwards (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her research uses queer, anti-capitalist, and disability influenced approaches to study fatness, resistance, and representation in social and popular media. She is an editor and social media manager of Excessive Bodies. Mackenzie’s work has been published in Canadian Woman Studies, Fat Studies, Feral Feminisms, Screen Bodies, (Un)Disturbed, and elsewhere.
Languages: English, French
Shiva Hemmati
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
I have Ph.D. of feminist Literature from UM, Malaysia. My research interests are feminist studies through psychological and philosophical theories of Irigaray. My studies connect Western and Eastern approaches on feminine divininity, intersubjectivity, sexual difference, breath and spirituality.
Languages: English
Email: hemati2003@yahoo.com
Bree Kromah
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
originally North Carolina, United States
Bree Kromah (she/her) is a PhD student in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her research is focused in Black feminist studies with particular interests in cute studies, girlhood studies, critical femininity studies, Black beauty studies, and the sensorium (especially the olfactory). She received her B.A in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and International & Global Studies (Human Rights) as well as her M.A. in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research explores Black beauty (rituals) as a radical tool toward liberatory expression and ‘way-making,’ through addressing legacies of antiblackness. She is fascinated by linkages between Black creative resistance, self-fashioning, and spirituality to address the relationships between (Black) beauty, capitalism, and hyperconsumerism.
Languages: English
Email: bnkromah@yorku.ca
Dr Hannah McCann
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
Dr Hannah McCann (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, based at the University of Melbourne. Her work in Critical Femininity Studies focuses on topics including queer femme identity, beauty culture, queer fandom, and romantic crushes. Her most recent book is Emotions, Bodies, and Identities in the Hair and Beauty Salon: Caring Beyond Skin Deep (2026), and she is also co-author of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (2nd Ed. 2026).
Languages: English
Email: hannah.mccann@unimelb.edu.au
Social media: Bluesky
Allegra Morgado
Turtle Island/Canada
Allegra (she/her) is a second-year PhD student in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University in Tkaronto, colonially known as Toronto. She is an editor for the open-access fat studies journal, Excessive Bodies, and the former co-chair of the Critical Femininities Research Cluster at York. Her research focuses on arts-based interventions to improve the well-being of fat and queer communities. She also practices ceramic arts, writes poetry, and plays tabletop roleplaying games outside of—and occasionally within—her research. She is passionate about community-building, food justice, reproductive justice, and knowledge mobilization to support research dissemination beyond the academy.
Languages: English
Email: allegram@yorku.ca
Social media: Instagram, Substack
Aino Pihlak
Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
Aino Pihlak (she/her) is a trans woman, PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, and social historian of trans femininity. In addition to her work on histories of trans feminine porn, she is a scholar of twentieth-century, Anglophone trans feminine subcultures. Her work can be found in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Xtra, Gender & History, Intersections, The Abusable Past, and Sexualities.
Languages: English
Email: aino.pihlak@mail.utoronto.ca
Social media: Bluesky
Sascha Tanuja Samlal
Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
Sascha Tanuja Samlal (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research project looks at the dynamic of shame in feminine subcultures, investigating how shame is regulatory and punishing, as well as energising and productive. Looking specifically at popular music fangirls online, her research spans critical femininity studies, fandom studies, social media studies, feminist and queer theory. You can find some of her writing in The Conversation and Transformative Works and Culture (forthcoming).
Languages: English
Email: ssamlal@student.unimelb.edu.au
Social media: Instagram
Dr Andi Schwartz
Chi Sippi (Rogue River)/Scarborough & Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada
Andi Schwartz (she/her) is Co-Investigator on the SSHRC-funded project, “On Our Own Terms: An Oral History and Archive of Femme Cultural Production in Toronto, 1990-2000.” Her research interests include femme identities, cultures, and histories; digital and popular cultures; and intersectional approaches to the study of femininity. Her academic work has been published in Sexualities, Feminist Media Studies, Punk and Post Punk, Social Media and Society, and others. She is the co-founder of the annual Critical Femininities conference and sat on the organizing committee for Excess (2021), Liminal (2022), Irreverence (2023), and Connection (2025). Andi is the creator of the podcast Still Brazen and the zine series Soft Femme. She has held faculty and research appointments at York University and St. Francis Xavier University and is currently a Research Associate at York’s Institute for Research on Digital Literacy. You can find out more about her work here.
Languages: English
Email: aschwar@yorku.ca
Social media: Instagram
Andi hosts a writing group via Zoom - a weekly, online, drop-in writing group for femmes and anyone working on critical femininities projects (broadly defined!) Please register here.
Jennifer Jolie
The traditional lands of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabek, and Haudenosaunee peoples, and on the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, known as Guelph
Jennifer Jolie (she/her) is a 3rd year Interdisciplinary PhD Candidate in the Social Practice and Transformational Change program at the University of Guelph. Her research interests are tied to fat studies and activism, affect studies, fashion theory, and disability studies.
Languages: English
Email: jjolie@uoguelph.ca
Anna McWebb
Kitchener, Ontario (traditional lands of the Chonnonton, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee)
Anna McWebb (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her doctoral work investigates how constructions of gender, specifically femininity, are mobilized across digital media platforms to both reinforce intensifying far right backlash, and intervene as queer and feminist resistance. Her most recent work maps how these polarizing rhetorical formations of femininity show up across social media networks via aesthetics, cultural vernacular, and humour. She is the managing editor for (Un)Disturbed: A Journal of Feminist Voices, a project that operates as part of the research collective Feminist Think Tank at the University of Waterloo. She is also involved in broader research projects with other scholar-activists related to technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) and the weaponization of femininity in contemporary politics.
Languages: English
Email: amcwebb@uwaterloo.ca
Carly-Ann Franceschi
Sikóóhkotok, Turtle Island (Canada)
Dr Carly-Ann Franceschi (she/they) is an Assistant Professor (Teaching) and Director of the BSW Online Program in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary. Her scholarship is grounded in critical, feminist, and queer approaches to social work, with a focus on fat studies, embodiment, and the transformation of health and social care through justice-oriented, participatory research. Her interdisciplinary work spans qualitative, arts-based, and multisensory methodologies and has appeared in journals including Fat Studies and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. She serves as Journal Editor for Excessive Bodies: A Journal of Artistic and Critical Fat Praxis and Worldmaking and has received multiple teaching awards, including the Faculty of Social Work Teaching Excellence Award.
Languages: English
Email: carlyann.franceschi@ucalgary.ca
Social media: LinkedIn