Call for Papers - Medicalised Intimacies and Masculinities - KKF 2019/4

This special issue of Women, Gender & Research invites papers to investigate the medicalization of bodies from many different vantage points, disciplines, and theoretical and empirical settings. We are especially interested in understanding how medicalization can be theorized and analyzed as both a biotechnological and a cultural development that does not unequivocally disturb the body, but rather modifies it. This resembles the bodily extension of prostheses in a somatechnical or feminist posthumanist perspective, where bodies and technologies do not exist outside of, or separate from, one another; as Sullivan (2009, 7) states: bodily-being “is always already technologized, and technologies are always already enfleshed”.

The special issue aims to challenge and expand already ready categorizations and assessments (healthy vs. ill, necessary vs. un- necessary, artificial vs. natural, body vs. culture, etc.) through empirical and theoretical investigations. More specifically, we are interested in the investigation of the intimate issue of medicalization in relation to masculinities and what is perceived as male bodies.

Different gendered bodies have traditionally been the subject of medical interventions and beauty-enhancing treatments of an intimate kind, not least female bodies in the reproductive age, young male bodies perceived as in need of regulation/discipline, or trans and intersex bodies perceived to challenge gendered norms of embodiment. In contrast, the (white) middle-aged (cis-)male body has largely escaped regulatory intervention from medical regimes. However, today the middle-aged male body is increasingly subjected to treatments and modifications, e.g. rejuvenating products and treatments, medicine and performance enhancing substances; thus still more gendered bodies are increasingly becoming medicalized.

Deadline for abstracts (max 300-word + up to 100 word author bio): October 1, 2018
Deadline for articles: February 14, 2019

Read the full call for papers
Download the call as pdf