CfP: Gender & History Special Issue on Health, Healing and Caring
Women's
& Gender History / Studies, Health and Health Care, History of
Science, Medicine, and Technology, Research and Methodology
Gender & History is
an international journal for research and writing on the history of
femininity, masculinity and gender relations. This Call for Papers is
aimed at scholars studying any country or region, and any temporal
period, including the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and
contemporary periods.
This
Special Issue will explore the gendered history of healing and caring
from the perspective of the sick and suffering, and various types of
healers and caregivers. It aims to move beyond institutional histories
of biomedicine, canonical medical knowledge, and allopathic approaches
to health. We seek to showcase research that reflects upon the gendered
dynamics of palliative care and the formation of diverse communities and
economies of health and healing. We recognize that historical
reckonings of health and bodily knowledge in many locales have been
dominated by sources maintained in state, colonial, and missionary
archives, and by notions of medicine shaped in white settler
institutions. In an effort to destabilize these reckonings and to
uncover marginalized forms of knowledge and practice, we encourage
research informed by diverse methodologies and an imaginative approach
to source material.
In
recent years, medical anthropologists have shed light on the complex
and unequal co-production of biomedical knowledge and “traditional”
forms of medicine while feminist sociologists have illuminated the
gendered dynamics of caregiving and the devaluation of its everyday and
emotional labor. How might historians engage these cross-disciplinary
methods and insights to reconstruct more nuanced and more expansive
histories of healing and caring? What happens to our gendered histories
of illness and medicine when we de-naturalize biomedical formations and
examine palliative care in addition to therapeutic treatment? How has
gender shaped which forms of healing and caring are recognized and
institutionalized, and how has such privileging changed over time?
We
understand that historically a wide array of people have provided
healing and caring including family members, shamans, spirit mediums,
healers, Elders, herbalists, diviners, faith healers, and wise-women and
men as well as midwives, nurses, aids, and doctors. Their practices
have ranged from diagnosing illnesses, administering medicines, and
performing procedures to offering spiritual and psychological counsel.
They have also included forms of body work such as grooming, feeding,
bathing, massage and manipulation, and handling the dead.
Papers
are invited from established scholars as well as new, emerging, and
unaffiliated scholars who consider a variety of historical moments and
locations, or transnational and even global processes related to themes
such as the following:
- Intersectional approaches that examine how social identities and inequalities rooted in gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, religion, and nationality have long shaped people’s access to health resources and care and, in turn, given rise to disparate patterns and experiences of well-being and illness.
- Reconstruction of deep histories of gendered healing and caring, extending back well before the twentieth century, that reveal how healing and caring practices have been central concerns for both individuals and societies and how those concerns have often animated and reconfigured cultural institutions, political ideologies, and economic relations and markets.
- Consideration of the connections and tensions between various modes of healing and palliation, and how those relations have informed the frequently gendered and racialized separation of “professional” and “modern” medicine from modes designated as “traditional,” “informal,” “alternative,” or “home-based.”
- Examination of how people have transmitted healing and caring epistemologies and practices across generations and geographic distances, including how women have sought to maintain or assert control over their health and how various archives have worked both to represent and obscure those efforts.
- Engagement with concepts from disability studies, queer theory, and crip theory to better understand the history of illnesses and diseases that have often been both gendered and stigmatized such as depression, hysteria, reproductive maladies, infertility, and sexually transmitted infections.
Interested
individuals are asked to submit 500-word abstracts, a brief biography
(250 words), and a cv by 31 August 2019 at 5pm PDT for consideration.
Abstracts
will be reviewed by the guest editors and successful proponents will
participate in a symposium at Vancouver Island University in British
Columbia, Canada, on 8 May 2020. Papers must be submitted six weeks
prior to the symposium. Papers should be 6000-8000 words in length.
After the symposium, papers will go through the journal’s peer review
system. As with any article, there is no guarantee of publication.
The
editors are in the process of applying for funding to defray the cost
of the travel to the symposium for new, emerging, and unaffiliated
scholars.
Please send abstracts, biographies, and CVs by email to genderhistory@viu.ca or by mail to The Editors, Gender & History, Vancouver Island University, 900 Fifth Street, Nanaimo, BC V9R 5S5.
Contact Info:
Gender & History North American Editors - Katharine Rollwagen, Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, and Cathryn Spence
Special Issue Editors - Kristin Burnett, Sara Ritchey, and Lynn M. Thomas
Contact Email: genderhistory@viu.ca