Keeping in mind the theme of MMLA 2024, “Health in/of the Humanities,” the Women in Literature panels seek ways to explore the intersection of Medical Humanities and women in literature. Particularly, it aims to highlight the variety of representations and embodiedness of queer and women’s health, dis/abilities, illness, and motherhood in multiple sites and through various forms of media, including popular magazines, newspapers, television and film, fiction, advertisements, and medical records. In terms of temporal and geographic scope, the panel solicits contributions focusing on the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with no geographical restrictions.

Some of the questions that this panel seeks to respond to, but are not limited to, are:

• How can an interdisciplinary approach help explore the ideas of agency in conjunction with power relations and social hierarchies?
• How is the framework of care interlaced with power matrices?
• How can a postcolonial, Marxist, feminist, and queer critique contribute to the reframing/contesting of dominant narratives of modern medicine?  
• What is the politics of visualization, narrativization, and stigmatization of bodies of illness? Who determines whose body is to be stigmatized and how?
• What is the future of Medical Humanities and Graphic Medicine within Humanities?

Please send a 400-word abstract to Sayanti Mondal (smondal@ithaca.edu) by 20 April 2024.