Special Issue: Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies "Gender and Journalism" (4/7/2014)

CFP: Special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

“Gender and journalism: Women and/in the news in the nineteenth century”

Deadline: April 7, 2014

The recent surge in scholarly interest in the nineteenth-century periodical press, hand in hand with ambitious digitization projects allowing us ever-expanding access to primary materials, has increased our ability to analyse and discuss the dynamic parameters of women’s involvement with the industry.  As the nineteenth century dawned, women reporters were rarities, although celebrity journalists such as the poet and novelist Mary Robinson found a home in the daily press.  In the second half of the century, an increasing number of women found employment in the press often limited to the more or less cosy corners of journalism, particularly women’s pages, fashion and society columns, and the children’s corners of weekly and monthly periodicals.  By century’s end, a fully fledged women’s political press had emerged, and papers like the Women’s Penny Paper/Woman’s Journal devoted extensive space to reporting news of women’s advances.  Despite their long-persisting exclusion from the ‘masculine’ domain of news reporting (and limits on the social acceptability of their news reading), women had also been making, breaking, and shaping the news throughout the nineteenth century.  

Barbara Onslow’s Women of the Press in the Nineteenth Century (2000) offered a significant early guide to the breadth of nineteenth-century women’s involvement with the periodical industry, and re-introduced many once-feted but long-forgotten names.  Subsequent studies have delved into the riches and many facets of that involvement; for example, Alexis Easley’s recent Literary Celebrity (2013) analyses the gendering of authorship and fame in the second half of the nineteenth century.  This special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies will concentrate on women as contributors to, consumers of, and subjects of the multi-faceted construction of news and news reporting across the nineteenth century.  The editors wish to preserve a focus on news production, as distinct from women’s more general involvement in magazine writing and the creation of miscellanies, but the editors welcome broad interpretations on ‘news production’.  

Possible avenues for exploration might include:

• Early and little known women reporters
• Pioneering women correspondents: Flora Shaw; Emily Crawford; Florence Dixie
• Women in the news: Princess Caroline; Mrs Maybrick; other causes célèbres.
• The reporting of divorce cases and its impact on social attitudes and matrimonial law
• Women as readers and consumers of news
• Women and censorship
• Newspapers and the working class woman
• Changing definitions of news: Women and celebrity news; women and sensationalism
• Early papers targeted at women (such as The Lady’s Newspaper and The Queen)
• Women’s involvement with mainstream papers (such as theTimes and the Illustrated London News)

Articles presenting international perspectives on women and/in the news are warmly welcomed.

Please send articles of 5-8,000 words to both the guest editors, by April 7, 2014 (earlier submission is encouraged). Please confine all identifying and contact information to a coversheet, for the purposes of double-blind reviewing.  Please also adhere to MLA style, and use endnotes rather than footnotes. Finally, please include a short (150 word) bio with your article submission.

CFP: Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies Summer 2013 (3/1/2013)

'Writing Bodies: Gender and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century'

Scholars are invited to submit articles for the Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies special issue 'Writing Bodies: Gender and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century'. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal endorses a broad definition of gender studies and welcomes submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality. This special issue aims to situate nineteenth-century gender studies within a wider conversation that is taking place regarding health, medicine, and embodiment across the humanities and social sciences, to address a critical gap in the conversations about the intersection of nineteenth-century gender politics and medicine.

Critical discussion of gender and medicine in the nineteenth century has often relied on a dichotomy in which 'male medical discourse' (Vertinsky, 1994) stands in opposition to the image of the female patient. Furthermore, most feminist research on gender and medicine in the nineteenth century has been done on the medicalisation or, in the fin de siècle, 'hysterisation' of women. This special issue proposes to problematise this dichotomy and expand the notion of gender and medicine to include topics which have previously been overlooked. Medical technologies, institutionalisation, and more complex approaches to the practitioner/patient relationship tend to be excluded from discussions of gender and embodiment in the nineteenth century, but they are essential to a comprehensive exploration of medicine as it evolved throughout the century.

Building off of works such as Catherine Judd's Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830-1880 (1998), Kristine Swenson's Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (2005), Miriam Bailin's The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (2007), and Tabitha Sparks's The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (2009), this issue will seek to reformulate an approach to gender and medicine, which has traditionally been more interested in the role of women in the medical sphere. As well as discussing women in medicine, this issue will extend its reach to consider masculinity, sexualities, gender and the non-human, and the way that notions of gender influence medical narratives just as medicine influences constructions of gender.

We invite submissions that explore topics such as:

• Medical narratives
• Practitioners/patients
• Nursing
• The culture of medical journals
• Literary and artistic constructions of medicine and the body
• Medical technologies
• Institutionalisation of medicine
• The gendered body
• Emotive embodiment
• Illness narratives
• Constructions of disability
• Medicalisation of the body
• Anatomical texts
• Reproductive technologies and the rise of obstetrics
• Performativity and modes of looking
• Medical museums
• Sexology

We welcome articles of 5,000-8,000 words, and in MLA format. Please use US spelling and citations. With the submission you should also include a 250-300 word abstract and a 50 word biographical note, the latter which will be posted if accepted for publication. Please send an electronic version of your submission, in Word or .doc format, to both editors: Lena Wånggren (lena.wanggren@ed.ac.uk) and Ally Crockford (a.crockford@ed.ac.uk). The deadline for submissions is 1st March 2013.

We also welcome book reviews and review essays, especially on the themes of gender, the body, and medicine, but also on wider issues regarding gender in the nineteenth century. If you want to submit a book review, please contact the reviews editor Susan David Bernstein (sdbernst@wisc.edu).

CFP: NCGS Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England" (5/15/2012)

Nineteenth-Century 

Gender Studies

http://www.ncgsjournal.com/

Special Issue "Gender and the Law in Nineteenth-Century England" (Summer 2012)

The nineteenth century was a period rife with watershed moments in the history of law and gender in England. It is also a period marked by contradictions: legislation that granted women greater rights under the law took place in fits and starts, and was never unaccompanied by cultural and social backlash. The period began, in 1801, with a national census that revealed women outnumbered men by 400,000, and ended with the repeal of the discriminatory Contagious Diseases Acts (1866) and the passage of the First Married Woman's Property Act (1870).  Debates about the relationship between women and the law, and their attendant questions (e.g. Were women legal persons? Could they be?), permeated the legislation, court cases, newspapers, serials, and novels of the day. The roles, and legal power, of English men were also in flux during the period. The rise of industrialism, as well as the middle class, challenged the masculinity of the landed and leisured male aristocrat. Laws that granted women greater rights in marriage, divorce, and ownership of earnings and property served to challenge the centrality of the male patriarch in traditional family structures. In turn, masculinity became increasingly defined by both state-sponsored and independent imperial ventures in the colonies. And by the end of the nineteenth century, a new version of manhood came into being. The rise of the aesthetes, as represented by the publicity surrounding Oscar Wilde, and the criticism of the aesthetes, as symbolized by his rather public trial, serve as the most infamous example of events that brought to light growing anxieties about masculinity, sexuality, and the law.

This special issue of NCGS invites scholars from across the arts and humanities to contribute their work on the intersections between law, gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. Topics that might be addressed include:

• Queen Victoria
• Marriage, Motherhood, and/or Families (including the Child Custody Act, the Matrimonial Causes Act, and the Married Woman's Property Act)
• Governesses and their relationship to legal families
• Property and inheritance
• Authorship and the International Copyright Act
• Education (including the establishment of Queen’s College, London; Bedford College; and Girton College)
• The “odd” women (singletons)
• Women and reform movements (including the Voting Act and the Equal Franchise Act)
• Labor laws (including the Ashley’s Mines Act and the Factory Acts)
• Health Care and the Contagious Diseases Act
• Criminal Justice (including Prostitution, Sodomy Trials, and Prisons)
• Imperialism, colonialism, and gender
• Masculinities
• Performance

Please send complete papers (of between 5,000 and 8,000 words) electronically for consideration to the guest editors of the special issue (Prof. Katherine Gilbert and Prof. Julia Chavez) at the following email addresses: kgilbert@drury.edu and JChavez@stmartin.edu

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. The journal is a collaborative effort that brings together scholars from a variety of universities to create a unique voice in the field. We endorse a broad definition of gender studies and welcome submissions that consider gender and sexuality in conjunction with race, class, place and nationality. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies publishes two regular issues a year, in addition to a specially-themed summer issue, and accepts submissions year-round.