CALL FOR CHAPTER CONTRIBUTIONS

Gender and Health in South Asia

An Edited Volume

Edited by Dr. Sakshi Srivastava & Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Assistant Professors Chandigarh University

Call for Papers

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan has expressed interest in this book project.

Gender and Health in South Asia invites chapters that treat gender not as one variable among many, but as the connecting tissue running through every dimension of health and illness in the region—from the colonial clinic to the biometric present, from ritual and indigenous healing to reproductive law, from life-writing and cinema to public health policy. Every contribution, regardless of discipline or method, is asked to make gender central to its analysis rather than incidental to it. Health and illness in South Asia are never merely biomedical events. They are shaped by caste, religion, colonial legacy, state policy, and the structures of the joint family, and they are lived, narrated, and governed differently across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and their diasporas. This volume brings together historical, ethnographic, literary, policy, and narrative approaches to build a genuinely interdisciplinary account of how gender organizes health in the region—across its past, present, and emerging futures. We welcome contributions from scholars at all career stages working in gender studies, medical humanities, public health, sociology, history, literature, media studies, law, and allied fields, as well as practitioners and policy researchers with relevant scholarly or applied expertise. The volume will comprise a tightly curated selection of up to 20 high-impact chapters.

We invite abstracts and chapter proposals that address, but are not limited to, the following core subthemes

1. Epistemologies, Genealogies, and Frameworks

a. Historical intersections of medical institutions, colonial pathologization, and humanistic inquiry.

b. The genealogy of the postcolonial clinic and the modern patient-subject in the subcontinent.

c. The integration, marginalization, or hybridization of indigenous knowledge systems like Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha.

2. Bodily Technologies and Biopolitics

a. Institutional, legal, and biological management of the gendered body across its life course.

b. The political economy of contraception, abortion, and commercialized assisted reproduction.

c. Pathologization of non-binary/third-gender identities and state enforcement of reproductive norms.

3. Textualities, Aesthetics, and Narratives of Illness

a. Literary and artistic representations of somatic trauma, disability, and chronic illness.

b. Regional traditions of autopathography, graphic medicine, zines, and vernacular life-writing.

c. Neurodivergent and crip narratives that actively resist the clinical model of cure.

4. The Political Economy and Geographies of Care

a. Spatial, emotional, and structural exploitation of community health workers and nurses.

b. The invisible economy of domestic care labor within the dynamics of the joint-family system.

c. Transnational migration pathways of South Asian healthcare and domestic care labor.

5. Structural Violence, Institutions, and Publics

a. The manifestation of caste discrimination, poverty, and religious marginalization as clinical bias.

b. State healthcare interventions as systemic sites of obstetric, psychiatric, or institutional violence.

c. The gendered impacts of public health crises, epidemics, and environmental hazards.

6. Media, Mediation, and Digital Cultures

a. Cultural representations of illness, madness, and body politics in cinema and streaming platforms.

b. Digital health communities, anonymous online forums, and social media as alternative spaces for care.

c. The democratization or further stratification of medical discourse within digital publics.

7. Emerging Futures—Technology, Ecology, and the Next Decade

a. Biometric health infrastructure, AI-driven diagnostics, and the datafied body in the Global South.

b. The impact of climate-induced displacement and ecological precarity on gendered health outcomes.

c. Evolving analytical vocabularies and methodologies required for the next decade of health humanities.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of 300–500 words, along with a brief bio (150 words) and institutional affiliation, as a single Word/PDF document to gendermedhums@gmail.com by September 15, 2026.

Please include "CFP Submission: Gender and Health in South Asia" in the subject line. Inquiries regarding potential chapter topics are welcome before the final submission deadline.

• Deadline for Abstracts: September 15, 2026

• Notification of Acceptance: October 15, 2026

• Full Chapters Due (6,000–8,000 words): March 15, 2027