Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Web); A special issue slated for publication in spring 2018

Abstracts by September 15, 2016

The current refugee crisis gives new urgency to questions of gendered displacement. The United Nations’ most recent statistics place the number of registered Syrian refugees at 4.7 million, 50.7 percent of whom are women and over half of whom are children under eighteen. During the same period, tens of thousands of Central American women and children have crossed the Rio Grande into the United States.

Feminists have already responded to concerns about sexual violence in refugee camps and during refugees’ journeys and to the gendered response to the crisis on the part of receiving states (i.e., demographic concerns surrounding gender ratios of migrants admitted). What are the larger questions of “displacement” that require an interdisciplinary and transnational feminist lens? Read more and source … (Web)

Girlhood Studies (Web); Guest Editor Ann Smith

Abstracts by 31 July 2016

Since the appearance of Stieg Larsson’s three novels all of which feature “The Girl” in its title, we have seen a plethora of books with similar titles. These range from Heidi Durrow’s award winning novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2010), whose protagonist’s search for racial identity is complicated by her being a blue-eyed black girl thanks to her African American and white Danish parentage to The Girl With Three Legs: A Memoir (2011) by human rights activist and female genital mutilation survivor, Soraya Miré, in which this third leg is the soon to be amputated clitoris of a 13-year-old Somali girl, and from the controversial 2012 self e-published young adult novel by Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King, about two super-powered teenagers, one good and one evil, to the 2015 bestseller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins’s thriller with its strange mixture of feminist sensibility and (seemingly unrecognized) misogyny in the depiction of its protagonist, Rachel.

For this themed issue of Girlhood Studies we welcome articles that explore how the representations of girls in written or graphic texts invite us to think about girlhood(s) from new and/or different perspectives. We have in mind such exploration in novels, novellas, short stories, and poems (whether canonically approved or not, whether traditional or contemporary, and whether or not subversive and/or experimental) picture books, comics and graphic novels, and so on. Read more and source … (Web)

Edited volume to be published with Lexington Books.

Proposals due May 10, 2016

This volume will explore the intersection of religion/spirituality with childbirth and midwifery. In the Late Modern period (1800 to the present day) in large parts of the world, midwives were overshadowed and undermined by the growing professionalism of medicine, hospitalization and ultimately the medicalization of the birthing process itself.

Due to these changes the meaning of childbirth has shifted, often becoming more private and more medical. The volume will examine the way in which spirituality has either been brought back to childbirth, often through alternative spiritualities or in which it has remained in certain traditions, often in conflict with prevailing scientific attitudes.

• Confirmed chapters already include the following topics: Sister midwives in 19th century France; Singaporean Malay mothers in the 20th c.; Holistic natural childbirth in contemporary francophone contexts;

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