Proposed submissions are requested for an edited collection of chapters, tentatively titled Illness and Dis/ability in Southern Women’s Literature.

In “The Curious Case of Carson McCullers: Appropriation, Allyship, and the Problem of Speaking for Others,” (Disability Studies Quarterly. Vol. 42 No. 3-4, 2023), Alexander Steele concludes that Carson McCullers’s “lived experience as a queer disabled woman became a key lens through which she both identified and put to work in her fiction, including her many portraits of impairment.” McCullers is not alone among southern women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many of whom experienced illness or disability in their own lives and depict such experiences in their work; for example, Flannery O’Connor’s experience with lupus informs her representation of disability in her short stories and novels, and critics such as Rebecca L. Harrison, Annette Trefzer, and Keri Watson have used disability studies as a lens to read Eudora Welty’s work. Depictions of illness, disability, and difference have been identified in the work of southern women of color such as Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Jesmyn Ward, while their work also grapples with the debilitating (disabling) violence of white, patriarchal power structures and the legacy of American enslavement.

This collection explores how health, illness, dis/ability, and difference shape the lives and writing of southern women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We seek essays that consider how illness, health, medicine, and dis/ability have impacted the lives of such writers, and we are interested in discussion and analysis of characters with disabilities and differences, depictions of medical and social systems as they relate to illness and/or dis/ability, and overall themes related to these issues in southern women’s writing. We welcome essays that explore illness, dis/ability, and difference through interesting, relevant critical lenses and approaches, such as feminism, intersectional theory, disability studies, cripistemology, and queer and crip theory. 

Potential topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• Psychiatric, medical encounters

• Injury, dis/ability, and physical or sensory impairment

• Invisible dis/abilities

• The intersection of dis/ability and race/gender/sex, queer identity, etc.

• Violence and damage incurred from white, patriarchal power structures in medicine, when treating (or ignoring) illness, or in literature featuring dis/ability

• Crip theory/Cripistemology

• Spiritual isolation/pain

• Underdogs and outcasts

• Institutionalization, criminalization, sterilization, eugenics

• Invalidism and hypochondria

• Dis/ability and industrialism

• Dis/ability and labor and/or ideas about productive citizenship

• Embodiment 

• Trauma

• Dis/ability and empowerment

• Healing/reparations

Article abstracts (~500 words) and a brief CV should be submitted by September 10 to Dr. Alison Bertolini (alison.bertolini@ndsu.edu) and Dr. Casey Kayser (ckayser@uark.edu). Longer outlines or drafts are also welcome at this time.  

Selected authors will be notified by ~October 1. For those invited to contribute to the collection, chapters should be 5,000-7,000 words (MLA format, minimal footnotes or endnotes please), and completed essays should be submitted by January 15. Queries are welcome concerning submission topics.  A contract for this book through a peer-reviewed academic press is pending a review of proposed chapters.

a.       Projectedtimeline 

 ·         Circulate call for paper abstracts/bios: July 2024

·         Abstracts/bios due Sept 2024

·         Contact approved contributors: Oct 2024

·         Send project proposal w. chapter abstracts to press for review: Oct 31, 2024

·         Draft of chapters due: Jan 15, 2024

·         Edited chapters returned to authors for revisions: June 1, 2025

        ·Revised chapters due from contributors: July 15, 2025

·         Compile revisions, send complete mss August 15, 2025

·         Revise according to peer-reviewed feedback: Fall 2025

·         Compile revisions, send revised draft to press: Sp 2026

·         Edit page proofs: Sp 2026

·         Estimated Date of Final Book Publication: Summer 2026.