Call for Papers – Edited Book: Reframing Reproduction

Call for Papers – Edited Book

Reframing reproduction: Sociological perspectives on gender, sexuality and reproduction in late modernity 

Abstract submission deadline: 30 November, 2011

Editor: Meredith Nash

SCOPE

This edited collection will argue that reproduction should be ‘reframed’ within sociology to acknowledge the new ‘choices’, anxieties and challenges that come alongside life in late modernity for both women and men. The central aim of this collection is to extend sociological scholarship by focusing on reproduction as a field of research in its own right. The content of the monograph will engage with all aspects of reproduction, inclusive of the experiences and views of women and men, and health practitioners in increasingly globalised societies.

I am looking for suitable chapter proposals that explore the themes of risk, contested ‘choices’, ‘empowerment’, embodied experiences, medicalisation or the commodification of reproduction as some of the key nodes connecting sociology and feminist scholarship in terms of both theory building and empirical research.

THEMES

Potential authors are invited to develop a chapter that addresses one or more of the themes listed below:

1) Defining and understanding contemporary reproduction

Key question: How do sociology and feminist theory help us to understand and define contemporary reproduction?

How do rapid social and technological change, inequalities, contemporary cultures and social structures shape reproductive realms? What is at stake? What problems does it raise? What solutions does it offer? Papers that address this question might consider the social aspects of how women and men feel, think, and act in relation to their reproductive ‘choices’ and increased uncertainty in late modernity.

2) The interface between reproduction, feminism, gender and health.

Key question: How can we extend sociological scholarship to more closely examine the interface between reproduction, feminism, gender and health?

What would  a ‘sociology of reproduction’ look like if it were clearly located in sociology but also informed by feminist scholarship and applied research on reproduction and health from cognate disciplines such as nursing, medicine, anthropology, gender studies and public health?

3) Gendered and cross-cultural experiences of reproduction

Key question: How have contemporary cultural ideals, values, and technologies concerning reproduction been utilized/reconfigured by women and men?

Sociology would benefit from deeper engagement with both gender and cross-cultural scholarship on reproduction. For example, although contemporary gendered experiences of reproduction are often viewed to have originated in the ‘West’, these experiences are by no means limited to the ‘West’. I would like to see the papers that address this theme explore reproduction cross-culturally and to challenge Eurocentric, universalised accounts.

SUBTHEMES

Potential authors are invited to address one or more of the following subthemes:

Contested ‘choices’ and ‘empowerment’

• Negotiating reproductive ‘choices’
• Experiences of reproduction through the lenses of age, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality (e.g. ‘older’, gay/lesbian/queer, teen, and single parenthood, childlessness)
• How is risk imbricated within contemporary western and increasingly ‘global’ socio-cultural practices and ideologies related to reproduction? 

Experience and practice of reproductive health care

• Health care during pregnancy and birth
• Reproductive science/technology and the new relationships it creates and challenges for men and women
• Responses to identifying and managing risk
• Embodied experiences 

The reproductive market place and technology

• Buying or borrowing any aspect of reproduction (e.g. sperm banks/banking, surrogacy, egg donation, selective reduction, multiple births)
• Reproduction and the internet (e.g. preconception care, fertility phone apps, tracking technology).
• Reproduction tourism (infertility/IVF, surrogacy, post-birth plastic surgery, etc.)
• Commodification of pregnancy and parenthood (e.g. maternity fashion, exercise classes, websites, ‘entertainment’ ultrasounds, surrogacy)

Interested authors are invited to submit abstracts/chapter proposals (approx. 300 words) and a biographical sketch by 30 November, 2011. If accepted, final submissions of no more than 6,500 words (including notes and references) must be submitted by mid-July 2012.

 Please send abstracts or queries directly to meredith.nash@utas.edu.au