Call for Submissions: Pink and Blue: The Gendered Culture of Pediatrics
From its influence on everything from growth charts to vaccine recommendations, gender not only matters to pediatric practice—it serves as an organizing principle of the specialty. Gender norms frame how practitioners interpret patients’ bodies, development, and psychological well-being. At the same time, pediatric assessments about gender, at both the individual and population level, carry a level of authority in society that makes pediatrics a powerful player in how the categories of girl and boy are culturally understood.
Pink and Blue is a groundbreaking edited volume that will illuminate the complex relationship between cultural notions of gender and pediatrics. Its editors are currently seeking contributions that investigate the reciprocity between cultural expectations and gendered therapeutics in depth. The editors also invite contributions that consider how gender is fluid and dynamic as it relates to race, class, sexuality, and ability. Essays may address such topics as gendered therapeutic recommendations, pediatrics’ role in defining gender, gender and disease diagnosis, and more. Taken together, the essays in Pink and Blue will demonstrate that gender is a powerful driving force behind the medical specialty of pediatrics.
Pink and Blue is co-edited by Elena Conis, Department of History, Emory University and Aimee Medeiros, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. Contributors are invited to send abstracts of approximately 500 words and a short biography toAimee.Medeiros@ucsf.edu and econis@emory.edu by January 31, 2015. Selected contributors will be notified in March and asked to submit essays of 7,000-8,000 words in length (including references) by August 31, 2015.