Appel à contribution - Aging Men: Masculinities and Modern Medicine


Jointly edited by Antje Kampf, Barbara Marshall and Alan Petersen

Call for Papers - Edited Volume

 We are soliciting essays and original research submissions to be included in Aging Men: Masculinities and Modern Medicine. The proposed 
anthology is a collection about the multiple socio-historical contexts surrounding men’s aging bodies in modern medicine in global perspective. 
The collection will be the first of its kind to explore the interrelated aspects of aging, masculinities and biomedicine, offering a 
multidisciplinary dialogue between sociology of health and illness, anthropology of the body and gender studies. Foregrounding material 
practices of aging men’s bodies will yield new ways of understanding knowledge production and subjectivity of aging processes. The collection 
allows for a timely and reconsideration of the conceptualisation of aging men within the recent explosion of science studies on men’s health 
and biotechnologies including anti-aging perspectives. The intention is to steer current thinking about masculinities beyond conceptualising 
inherited power status and hegemony to include current feminist inspired scholarship on the relational processes and practices of materiality and 
embodiment of masculinities. Reflecting current most important thoughts on the interplay of aging, masculinities and modern medicine, it will 
query the permeability and instability of definitions of aging and gender boundaries within current politics of health and aging.


 At the intersection of historical and contemporary scholarship, the chapters in this collection investigate both healthy and diseased states 
of aging men in medical practices. Bridging theoretical with empirical conceptualisations, the collection discusses these issues in three 
principal parts: Part One “Rethinking – Concepts” focuses on the historical epistemology of aging, bodies and masculinity and the way in 
which social science perspectives have theorised the aging body and gender. Part Two “Materialities – Practices and Processes” explores 
material practices and processes by which biotechnology, medical assemblages and men’s aging bodies produce and are produced, relate to, 
negotiate and define health and illness. Part Three “Identities – Ontologies” traces aging experience and individual life impacting upon 
men’s roles and identity in biomedical assemblages, which in turn affects societal systems.


In order to enable such exploration, original contributions (7,000-9,000 words incl. bibliography and footnotes) from social science studies 
broadly conceived (history, philosophy of science, medicine and technology, sociology of the body, health and illness and anthropology) 
are sought that will canvass current and key research methodologies, theoretical and empirical studies. We solicit diverse strands of 
academic thinking, querying both the epistemologies and ontologies of aging male bodies and medicine at the crossroads of illness and health.


Submissions Topics Include:



·         Historical Epistemology of Aging

·         Classifying Aging Bodies

·         Functionality/Medicalisation: Defining Normative Bodies

·         Theorizing Stage of Life Third-Fourth Age/Impairment theory

·         Cartographies/Mapping Aging Bodies

·         Clinical Trials/Health Technology

·         Anti-aging/Hybrid Bodies/Future Bodies

·         Men’s emotion and aging

·         Knowledge systems

·         Care Work


The deadline for the abstract (max. 500 words, affiliation and address) is December 15th, 2010. The deadline for original contributions is June 
30th, 2011. Please send the requested information per email to Antje Kampf antje.kampf@uni-mainz.de<mailto:antje.kampf@uni-mainz.de>


Editors:
Antje Kampf, (PhD Auckland, M.A. Cincinnati) is Associate Professor for gender aspects of the history, philosophy and ethics of medicine at the 
Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. She is the author of Mapping Out the Venereal Wilderness: STD and Public Health in New 
Zealand, 1920-1980 (LIT-Verlag, 2007), and has published on the history of public health, race, and gender in Medical History, Health. An 
Interdisciplinary Journal, and The Journal for the History of Sexuality. Her current research focuses on the historical ontology of male 
reproduction in Germany, and on the concepts of risk and prevention of prostate cancer, including medical culture and representation of older 
men’s bodies and lives. Recent publications include Kampf, A. The absence of Adam: prostate cancer and male identity, in Jason Powell and 
Tony Gilbert, eds. Aging and Identity: A Postmodern Dialogue. Nova Science Publishers: New York (2009), 29-43 and  Kampf, A. "The risk of 
age"? Early detection test, prostate cancer and technologies of self, Journal of Aging Studies 25,1 (2010).

Barb Marshall is Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, where she teaches in the areas of 
sexuality, gender, the body, and social theory.   Her books include Engendering Modernity (Polity, 1994); Configuring Gender (Broadview, 
2000), Engendering the Social (ed. with Anne Witz, Open University Press, 2004) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory (with 
Austin Harrington and Hans Peter Mueller, Routledge, 2006).  She has written extensively on the medicalization of sexuality, the 
pharmaceutical reconfiguration of sexual lifecourses, and the emergence of sexual functionality as an indicator of successful aging.  Her 
current research continues to explore the ways gender and sexuality are embedded in accounts of aging bodies across a range of different 
contexts, including sexual medicine, hormone therapies, anti-aging treatments, and public health promotion, and is opening up new questions 
about the sexualization of the third age

Alan Petersen is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria. He is also an 
Honorary Visiting Professor at Centre for Biomedicine and Society, King’s College, London. He also holds honorary visiting professorships 
at University of Plymouth and City University, London. He has researched and written extensively in the sociology of health and illness, the 
constructions of sex/gender, sociology of the body, sociology of risk, and studies of new and emergent biomedical technologies. His book and 
journal publications have focused on a diverse array of topics, including news media constructions of genetics and medicine and 
nanotechnologies; the construction of sex differences in medical anatomy texts and in the psychology of aggression; carers’ experiences of caring 
for people with mental illnesses, particularly within minority ethnic and linguistic communities; gender and emotion; and the sociology of 
bioethics. His recent books include: The Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural Approach (Routledge, 2007); Nanotechnologies, Risk and 
Communication (Palgrave, 2009) (with Alison Anderson, Clare Wilkinson and Stuart Allan) and The Politics of Bioethics (Routledge, 2011).