Center for Disability Studies (Web)

Domesticity – “The quality or condition of being domestic;” “Home life or devotion to it;” “Household affairs.” Vital work has been done within disability studies to reimagine sex, sexuality, and disabled bodies and scholars in a number of fields, including for example, feminist and queer theorists and women’s historians, have worked to deconstruct dominant heteronormative notions of domesticity and show the broad force with which domesticity and domestic life get deployed in various cultural and political settings. In this edited collection of new and original scholarship, contributors will focus on the varied “domestic” sites where intimate human relations are formed and maintained. Sites that are at once private and racially, economically, and politically inflected and make up the social, cultural, ideological, and physical spaces where families, friends, workers, and lovers come together and form the bonds that ultimately sustain and in some cases destroy our variegated existence.

When we analyze “domesticity” through the lens of disability, it forces us to think in new ways about family and household forms, care work, an ethics of care, reproductive labor, gendered and generational conflicts and cooperation, local and global economies and political systems. Disabling Domesticity will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students, specialists, and general academic readers in a broad range of fields. It seeks to model the interdisciplinary strengths of disability studies. Potential contributors may propose work that focuses on any temporal or geographic location. Proposals from all (disability studies) fields of study, as well as the work of activists and artists are welcome.

Some chapter details:

• Chapter length – 5,000-7,000 words (20-25 pages – excluding footnotes/endnotes)
• Essays may have more than one author
• Disability and Domesticity may be broadly defined
• All temporal and geographic contexts are welcome.
• Essays must be new and original scholarship (no reprints will be accepted)

Prospective Authors:

• Please send CV or Resume and a brief (300-500 word) abstract of your project by Friday, 3 January 2014.
• Full chapter drafts of the project will be due by February 2015.
• You can reach me at marembis@buffalo.edu

Michael Rembis, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Disability Studies
Assistant Professor, Department of History
University at Buffalo

Contact Information:
Department of History
552 Park Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-4130
phone: (716) 480-6156
fax: (716) 645-5954
email: marembis@buffalo.edu
UBCDS Website: http://disabilitystudies.buffalo.edu/index.php

Source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU