Dear all,

I hope that this Call for Papers may be of interest to some of you!  
Apologies for crossposting.

Lena

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Call for Papers for Special Issue: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies  
Summer 2013

'Writing Bodies: Gender and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century'

Scholars are invited to submit articles for the Nineteenth-Century  
Gender Studies special issue 'Writing Bodies: Gender and Medicine in  
the Nineteenth Century'. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a  
peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and  
innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century  
British literature, art and culture. The journal endorses a broad  
definition of gender studies and welcomes submissions that consider  
gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and  
nationality. This special issue aims to situate nineteenth-century  
gender studies within a wider conversation that is taking place  
regarding health, medicine, and embodiment across the humanities and  
social sciences, to address a critical gap in the conversations about  
the intersection of nineteenth-century gender politics and medicine.

Critical discussion of gender and medicine in the nineteenth century  
has often relied on a dichotomy in which 'male medical discourse'  
(Vertinsky, 1994) stands in opposition to the image of the female  
patient. Furthermore, most feminist research on gender and medicine in  
the nineteenth century has been done on the medicalisation or, in the  
fin de siècle, 'hysterisation' of women. This special issue proposes  
to problematise this dichotomy and expand the notion of gender and  
medicine to include topics which have previously been overlooked.  
Medical technologies, institutionalisation, and more complex  
approaches to the practitioner/patient relationship tend to be  
excluded from discussions of gender and embodiment in the nineteenth  
century, but they are essential to a comprehensive exploration of  
medicine as it evolved throughout the century.

Building off of works such as Catherine Judd's Bedside Seductions:  
Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880 (1998), Kristine  
Swenson's Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (2005), Miriam Bailin's  
The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (2007), and  
Tabitha Sparks's The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices  
(2009), this issue will seek to reformulate an approach to gender and  
medicine, which has traditionally been more interested in the role of  
women in the medical sphere. As well as discussing women in medicine,  
this issue will extend its reach to consider masculinity, sexualities,  
gender and the non-human, and the way that notions of gender influence  
medical narratives just as medicine influences constructions of gender.

We invite submissions that explore topics such as:

Medical narratives
Practitioners/patients
Nursing
The culture of medical journals
Literary and artistic constructions of medicine and the body
Medical technologies
Institutionalisation of medicine
The gendered body
Emotive embodiment
Illness narratives
Constructions of disability
Medicalisation of the body
Anatomical texts
Reproductive technologies and the rise of obstetrics
Performativity and modes of looking
Medical museums
Sexology

We welcome articles of 5,000-8,000 words, and in MLA format. Please  
use US spelling and citations. With the submission you should also  
include a 250-300 word abstract and a 50 word biographical note, the  
latter which will be posted if accepted for publication. Please send  
an electronic version of your submission, in Word or .doc format, to  
both editors: Lena Wånggren ([log in to unmask]) and Ally  
Crockford ([log in to unmask]). The deadline for submissions is 1st  
March 2013.

We also welcome book reviews and review essays, especially on the  
themes of gender, the body, and medicine, but also on wider issues  
regarding gender in the nineteenth century. If you want to submit a  
book review, please contact the reviews editor Susan David Bernstein  
([log in to unmask]).

We look forward to receiving your work!
Lena and Ally

-- 
Lena Wånggren
Research Fellow
Department of English Literature
University of Edinburgh

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The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.