Call for Papers: Embodied Resistance, Second Volume
Nov 10, 2015 → Mar 16, 2016
We are excited to solicit submissions for the second volume of Embodied Resistance. In 2011, we published Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules First Volume. This collection, comprised of sixteen original ethnographic research pieces and eight personal narratives, provides a window into the everyday lives of those who violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.
The second volume continues this tradition to examine the lives of contemporary body outlaws. We invite scholarly yet accessibly written works that describe and analyze the many ways humans subvert the social constraints that deem certain behaviors and bodily presentations as inappropriate, disgusting, or forbidden in various cultural and historical contexts. The volume aims to deepen our understanding of the motivations, experiences, and consequences associated with the bodies that break the rules through the intersecting lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, culture, religiosity, and nation, among others. The second volume will retain the same format as the first. Thus, we welcome from scholars and writers in all disciplines empirical research-based pieces, as well as narrative contribution (essays that explore embodied resistance from a first person perspective). We especially encourage scholarship that focuses on areas outside the United States and the global North.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, practices that challenge: attire norms (e.g., women who go topless, fat women who “show skin,” or individuals who cross-dress); conventional hair and body norms (e.g., men who shave their body hair or women who grow out and dye their armpit hair); the binary construction of gender (e.g., practices and performances by individuals who identify as bisexual, transgender, or queer); biological processes considered contextually taboo (e.g., mothers who conspicuously breastfeed in public or women who do not conceal menstruation); physical conditions that carry stigma (e.g., individuals with HIV/AIDS who openly discuss their infections status or cancer patients who do not wear wigs); and cultural, religion, and/or ethnic norms (e.g., Muslim women who wear the hijab in spite of cultural sanction/policies that forbid veiling).
SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Submissions must be received by March 15, 2016. Please keep in mind our undergraduate audience as you prepare your submission. Research papers should be informative, engaging, and accessible. They should be approximately 6,000 words. Narratives should be approximately 1000 words. We welcome queries and dialogue.
Direct all correspondence, as well as your submission, to both editors at: Bobel and Kwan.