gender forum

We would like to invite scholars to contribute essays and reviews to the forthcoming issues of gender forum:

We also would like to invite you to contribute to our common research goals as readers and contributors. Please inform us about your recent publications and ask your publisher to send review copies to gender forum. Added links to on-line bookshops will facilitate orders of requested titles.

Target articles should conform to the MLA style sheet (Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 5th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999) and should not exceed 8,000 words. Please include a bio-blurb and an abstract of 10 to 15 lines. Use endnotes and fully documented references at the end of the article. Files should be sent as email attachments in a PC-readable format (WordPerfect, Word, HTML or RTF).

Literature and Medicine: Women in the Medical Profession
(guest editor Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle, University of Marburg)

This special issue of gender forum focuses on the intersections between medicine, literature, and gender, also taking into account the relevance of ethnicity and class. The interest in the interface of literature and medicine from the specific point of view of gender is triggered by the intriguing similarities between the medical and literary disciplines. The doctor, like the literary scholar, is faced with a text, a narrative voiced by the patient either through language or bodily symptoms. In order to understand this narrative, the doctor, like the scholar, needs to listen closely, to examine the constituents of the narrative carefully, to consider the subjectivity of the narrative, to read between the lines, and to interpret ambiguities coded in metaphorical language. The relationship between reader and text – on both levels – is embedded in the gender matrix of a given context. Furthermore, Sontag’s analysis of the ways in which illnesses are used as metaphors to express social, political, moral, or cultural crises offers fruitful ground for discussion.

We invite papers that discuss both the situation and positions of women in the medical world – for example, as patients, doctors, nurses – and the representation of these situations in literature.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, discussions of
— patient narratives
— women doctors
— doctor-patient relationships
— nursing the nation
— engendering the hospital
— women and madness
— illness as a metaphor
— the female body as subject to discourses of health, in regard to
      pregnancy and birth
      (cosmetic) surgery
      breast cancer
      food and eating habits affecting women (e.g. bulimia, anorexia, weight
      reduction)

Contributions by medical practitioners, scholars of medical history as well as by scholars of literature, culture, media, history, and related disciplines are invited.

Submission of 200-word proposal as well as a 200-word CV by March 1, 2009
Submission of finished papers by April 30, 2009.
The issue is scheduled to appear in the summer of 2009.

direct submissions to birkle@staff.uni-marburg.de

Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender
(Guest editors Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (English Department)
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Gropper (Department for Scandinavian Studies)
University of Tübingen)
For a special issue of gender forum, submissions addressing questions of gender and eccentricity are invited.

The marginal, the liminal, the subordinate, the peripheral, the fringe: contemporary theories and practices of literary and cultural studies know many terms by which areas which appear outside a given or assumed centre – of social or political power, of normativity, of definition – may be named, discussed, given a voice. But these terms tend to be curiously static, describing fixed positions which appear, despite the turbulent and conflicted nature of these allocations, pre-given sites rather than options of choice, spaces for experimentation or techniques of interrogation.

The editors of the proposed special issue of gender forum believe that one possible and as yet untested way of thinking about those not in the centre without allocating them a fixed location on the margin, a given identity, a clear location in a gird of social and cultural interactions would be an approach which focuses on the eccentric and its cognates, the singular, the odd, the “off”. We see eccentricity as a textual technique in the realm of literature and as a specific form of performativity in the field of human behaviours: a technique which is geared towards the establishment of positions outside a centre – a centre identified by the technique or performance itself. Its aims may be manifold: the revalidation of a marginal location as an individual choice, the interrogation of the centre from a position that is neither located elsewhere nor anticipated by the choices offered in a centre-periphery binarity, a questioning of the very dynamic of the centre and its outside. In every case, it will be a technique of self-positioning which seeks out, strains towards an option beyond the mutually constitutive locations of centre and periphery, centre and margin, power and subordination.

As yet, the phenomena of the eccentric have been hardly investigated or researched and are only very sketchily theorized. Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender seeks to remedy this by assembling a varied and multifaceted collection of contributions focusing on any area of literary and cultural production and / or contributing towards the development of theoretical tools for thinking the eccentric. Gender as one of the dominant techniques for the establishment, enforcing and policing of any set of ‘centric’ systems of value and signification is here a particularly suitable field of investigation as we seek to know if the interactions of the centre and its discontents may be thought as a field of eccentric techniques and performances.

Possible areas of investigation:
Theories of eccentricity
Gender performativity and eccentricity
The dynamics of the eccentric and its normalization
The commodification or containment of eccentricity
The odd, the singular, the specific as tools of theory and literary practice
Eccentricity and resistance

Submission of 1 to 2-page proposals: 1 February 2009
Submission of finished papers: 1 July 2009

Direct submissions to:
ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de
and
stefanie.gropper@uni-tuebingen.de

Always ConnActed: Gender and Performance
Prevailing notions of sex, gender, and sexuality are closely linked to the ways in which they are enacted. This issue of gender forum explores the relationship between gender and performance and addresses theories of performance and identity in relation to a range of practices in which the body is the primary subject of representation.

Possible areas of investigation:
Gender and the Theatrical, Gender on Stage
Performances of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality on Screen
Gender Performance and Everyday "Reality"
Constructing and Deconstructing Gender through Performances
Subversive Performances? Gender benders, Drag Queens and Kings
Different Genre, Different Gender
Sports and Gender: Athletic Performances
Performance and Sexual Identity
Body Culture and Body Modification

Furthermore, we would be pleased to include your reviews of recent publications with gender concerns. Reviews should not exceed 1,500 words. Please use endnotes and include fully documented references at the end of the review.

~ Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman (Eds.). Material Feminisms. Indiana UP (2008).
~ Andermahr, Sonya (ed.). Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. London: Continuum, 2007.
~ Arneil, Barbara, Monique Deveaux, and Rita Dhamoon (eds.). Sexual Justice/Cultural Justice: Critical Perspectives in Political Theory and Practice. Routledge (2006).
~ Bhattacharya, Nandini. Slavery, Colonialism, and Connoisseurship: Gender and Eighteenth-century Literary Transnationalism. Ashgate (2006).
~ Blamires, Alcuin. Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender. Oxford UP (2006).
~ Bose, Brinda (ed.). The Phobic and the Erotic. The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India. Seagull Books London Ltd (March 2007).
~ Bradley, Harriet. Gender. Polity Press (April 2007).
~ Breger, Claudia, Krüger-Fürhoff, Irmela and Tanja Nusser, eds. Engineering Life: Narrationen vom Menschen in Biomedizin, Kunst und Literatur. Kulturverlag Katmos (2008).
~ Burfoot, Annette and Susan Lord (eds.). Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender And Violence. Laurier (Wilfrid) UP (2006).
~ Chanter, Tina. The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference. Indiana UP (2007).
~ Cheu, Hoi F. Cinematic Howling: Women's Films, Women's Film Theories. U of British Columbia P (2007).
~ Cliff, Michelle. If I Could Write This in Fire. U of Minnesota P (2008).
~ Davies, Bronwyn (ed.). Judith Butler in Conversation: Analyzing the Texts and Talk of Everyday Life. Routledge (April 2007)
~ Egginton, William. Perversity and Ethics. Stanford UP (2006).
~ Ekins, Richard and Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. Sage (2006).
~ Gazsi, Judit, Andrea Petö and Zsuzsanna Toronyi (eds.). Gender, Memory and Judaism. Gabriele Schäfer Verlag (2007).
~ Gerstner, David A. Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema. Duke UP (2006).
~ Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Polity Press (2006).
~ Godiwala, Dimple (ed.).Alternative Within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres. Cambridge Scholars Press (2006).
~ Halwani, Raja (ed.). Sex And Ethics: Essays on Sexuality, Virtue And the Good Life. Palgrave Macmillan (March 2007).
~ Hartung, Heike and Roberta Maierhofer (eds.). Narratives of Life: Aging and Identity - Introduction. Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts, special issue. Routledge (2007).
~ Joy, Morny. Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion. Manchester UP (March 2007)
~ Klein, Stacy S. Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature. U of Notre Dame P (2006).
~ Komporaly, Jozefina. Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan (February 2007).
~ Luke, Brian. Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals. U of Illinois P (2006).
~ Murphy, Patricia. In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women. U of Missouri P (2006).
~ Philips, Deborah. Women's Fiction 1945-2005: Writing Romance. London: Continuum, 2006.
~ Raschke, Debrah. Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality. Susquehanna UP (2006).
~ Sanders, Lise Shapiro. Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920. Ohio State UP (2006).
~ Sauntson, Helen and Sakis Kyratzis (ed.). Language, Sexualities And Desires: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan (February 2007).
~ Scott, Bonnie Kime (ed.). Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. U of Illinois P (March 2007).
~ Sexton, Jared Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. U of Minnesota P (2008).
~ Styles, John and Amanda Vickery (eds.). Gender, Taste, & Material Culture in Britain & North America, 1700-1830. Yale UP (2006).
~ Walby, Sylvia, Heidi Gottfried, Karin Gottschall, and Mari Osawa (eds.). Gendering the New Economy: Comparative Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan (2006).
~ Wayne, Tiffany K. Women's Roles in Nineteenth-Century America. Greenwood Press (2006).
~ Weedon, Chris. Gender, Feminism, and Fiction in Germany, 1840-1914. Peter Lang (2006).