Call for Papers

Call For Papers

Literature and Medicine: Women in the Medical Profession
(guest editor Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle, University of Marburg)

This special issue of gender forum focuses on the intersections between medicine, literature, and gender, also taking into account the relevance of ethnicity and class. The interest in the interface of literature and medicine from the specific point of view of gender is triggered by the intriguing similarities between the medical and literary disciplines. The doctor, like the literary scholar, is faced with a text, a narrative voiced by the patient either through language or bodily symptoms. In order to understand this narrative, the doctor, like the scholar, needs to listen closely, to examine the constituents of the narrative carefully, to consider the subjectivity of the narrative, to read between the lines, and to interpret ambiguities coded in metaphorical language. The relationship between reader and text – on both levels – is embedded in the gender matrix of a given context. Furthermore, Sontag’s analysis of the ways in which illnesses are used as metaphors to express social, political, moral, or cultural crises offers fruitful ground for discussion.

We invite papers that discuss both the situation and positions of women in the medical world – for example, as patients, doctors, nurses – and the representation of these situations in literature.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, discussions of
— patient narratives
— women doctors
— doctor-patient relationships
— nursing the nation
— engendering the hospital
— women and madness
— illness as a metaphor
— the female body as subject to discourses of health, in regard to
pregnancy and birth
(cosmetic) surgery
breast cancer
food and eating habits affecting women (e.g. bulimia, anorexia, weight
reduction)


Contributions by medical practitioners, scholars of medical history as well as by scholars of literature, culture, media, history, and related disciplines are invited.

Submission of 200-word proposal as well as a 200-word CV by March 1, 2009
Submission of finished papers by April 30, 2009.
The issue is scheduled to appear in the summer of 2009.


For more information, click here.