Call for contributions

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO A SPECIAL ISSUE OF INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FEMINIST APPROACHES TO BIOETHICS (IJFAB)

Vol. 3, no. 2, Spring, 2010

From the Margins to the Center: Feminist Disability Studies and/in Feminist Bioethics

Guest Editor, Shelley Tremain

In recent years, work done in mainstream bioethics has been challenged by the emerging field of disability studies.

A growing number of disability theorists and activists point out that the views about disability and disabled people that mainstream bioethicists have articulated on matters such as prenatal testing, stem cell research, and physician-assisted suicide incorporate significant misunderstandings about them and amount to an institutionalized form of their oppression.

While some feminist bioethicists have paid greater attention to the perspectives and arguments of disabled people than other bioethicists, these perspectives and arguments are rarely made central. Feminist disability theory remains marginalized even within feminist bioethics.

This issue of IJFAB will go some distance to move feminist disability studies from the margins to the center of feminist bioethics by highlighting the contributions to and interventions in bioethics that feminist disability studies is uniquely situated to make.

The guest editor seeks contributions to the issue on any topic related to feminist disability studies and bioethics, including (but not limited to):

• Critiques of bioethics by feminist disability theorists from within feminist bioethics

• The relevance of feminist disability studies in developing countries

• What’s still missing from feminist arguments in the debates about stem cell research and other forms of biotechnology

• The importance of perspectives of disabled embodiment in feminist bioethics

• How the critiques of bioethics advanced in disability studies are gendered

• The integration of political analyses of disability into feminist bioethics

• The critique of notions of normalcy embedded in (feminist) bioethics

• The reevaluation of feminist approaches to care from a feminist disability studies perspective


Articles should be 3,000 - 8,000 words in length. Shorter pieces written for the Commentaries section of the issue should be 2,000-3,000 words in length.

All submissions should be double-spaced, prepared for anonymous review (no identifying references in the body of the text or bibliography), accompanied by an abstract of 150 words, and prepared in accordance with the journal’s style guidelines which are posted on the IJFAB website (http://www.ijfab.org/ .).

Contact information – email address, street address, and affiliation (if applicable) – should appear on a separate page which also includes a statement verifying that the work has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Submissions should be sent as email attachments in Microsoft Word or rtf to Shelley Tremain at s.tremain@yahoo.ca

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2009. The guest editor strongly encourages authors to contact her before completing their submissions.