Call for chapter contributions: My body, my choice: transnational visual activism for women’s reproductive rights

Basia Sliwinska Discussion
Type: 
Call for Papers
Date: 
July 24, 2022
Location: 
Portugal
Subject Fields: 
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies, Human Rights, Health and Health Care, Fine Arts

Call for chapter contributions to the edited book (to be submitted for consideration with Routledge) provisionally entitled My body, my choice: transnational visual activism for women’s reproductive rights.

The book expands some of the issues raised in my recent edited volume Feminist Visual Activism and the Body. It will be edited by myself, and it is envisaged to be published in 2024. The deadline for manuscripts will be confirmed once the contract is signed.

Please send proposals to: bsliwinska@fcsh.unl.pt by July 24th 2022, including:

  • a title of the proposed contribution

  • an abstract (up to 250 words) outlining the proposed chapter 

  • and a bio (up to 80 words). 

Please indicate if you have a sample chapter ready at this stage.

Blurb:

Freedom to make choices about one’s body, the fundamental Human and Constitutional right to autonomy, is continuously abused and violated by multiple governments across the globe. Ideologies promoted by the rising nationalist, fascist and racist politics worldwide are founded on anti-democratic separatist discourses prioritising some bodies over others. Often, the anti-reproductive rights movement is rooted in religious ideology, such as the Catholic Church doctrine that drives anti-reproductive rights campaigns in Poland or the USA, which manufacture gender equality as a synonym for deviations and pathologies and a threat to traditional nuclear family values. The unequal distribution of rights deepens crisis of vulnerability and care and emphasises the urgency for living with the living in solidarity and in recognition of grievability.

This book interrogates how contemporary feminist visual activist and artivist practice enables the United Nations’ and European Union’s values and goals concerning gender equality and women’s reproductive rights to be achieved while acknowledging and respecting women’s agency, active citizenship and democracy. Feminist visual activism cultivates forms of creativity that emerge from embodied, lived, performative and ethical orientations, welcoming practices of ontological re-viewing and re-doing otherwise for social justice. The book focuses on feminist care as instrumental for democracy and social justice while examining ways in which the visual can articulate, advocate and enable women’s reproductive rights via specific methods, strategies, tactics and methodologies employed locally and transnationally.

I invite contributions that analyse case studies and/ or compare and contrast contemporary feminist visual activist and artivist practices and interventions that address the above issues in the global framework. I am interested in perspectives on feminist visual activism and artivism for women’s reproductive rights in Eastern & Central Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, East Asia, India and the United States. Contributions proposing a transnational approach are particularly welcome. I am open to discussing alternative writing formats and I encourage collaborative approaches. 

Contact Info: 

Dr. Basia Sliwinska

 

Contact Email: