Call for Proposals: Gender and Health: Histories

Proposals for papers are invited for an edited collection and symposium on Gender and Health in History in the 19th and 20th centuries. In recent years, regular and accurate reporting on the health status of men and women has enabled us to see the extent to which gender patterns how and why people become ill, and how differently they are judged and judge themselves in those processes.

But how, one might ask, has gender been an historical variable itself, one among several elements at play in the formation of technologies of the body? Can we determine, for example, how gender shaped the experience of health and sickness for individuals in the 19th and 20th centuries? Contributors to the collection will interrogate the gendered meanings of the wider national trends of disease, accident, and death with the aim of producing a collection that provides a richer understanding of gender and health in history and helps us to better appreciate gender as a variable in understanding health today.

We seek papers that address the historically-specific health experiences of women and men and analyse the impact of gender on health throughout the lifecycle. For example, how might childhood disability have been experienced differently by boys and girls? When health education was delivered to adolescents, did the messages for girls and boys differ, and if so, in what ways? What dangers were adult women and men exposed to in the workplace, and how did they differ? How common was Marie Stopes? view that men, as well as women, experienced a change of life? How have views of appropriate body weight played out differently for women and men? Were impotence in men and frigidity in women regarded as similar or completely different conditions? Has dementia had a gendered dimension in the past? By seeking answers to these and other questions, this collection and symposium will seek to understand the gendered vocabulary of illness of the past.

The editors will review all proposals and make a selection based on quality and relevance to the project’s themes. Emerging scholars are encouraged to submit proposals. Authors of accepted proposals will be invited to contribute to the collection and to participate in the Gender and Health: Histories symposium.

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract, working title, and brief CV by January 30, 2010. Authors will be notified of acceptance before April 30, 2010, and completed manuscripts (6000-8000 words) will be due on Sep 15, 2010. The symposium will take place in May 2011.

Queries and/or completed proposals (in a Word document) should be sent to

Tracy Penny Light
Sexuality, Marriage, and Family Studies/History
St. Jerome’s University/University of Waterloo
tplight@uwaterloo.ca

The Co-Editors for the collection are:
Wendy Mitchinson
Department of History
University of Waterloo

Barbara Brookes
Department of History
University of Otago, New Zealand

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