[IGALA] Call for Chapters - Sex, Gender and Biopolitics

[Brian Walter King]

Hello everyone. I would like to make you aware of the recent call for chapters for a proposaed edited volume of mine. The information follows.

Sincerely,

Brian King

Edited volume: Sex, gender and biopolitics: Discourses of normativity and governance in everyday life

Series: Proposal will be made to “Advances in Sociolinguistics” (Bloomsbury)
Editor: Brian W. King (The University of Hong Kong)
________________________________
Volume focus
This edited collection explores how language mediates, sustains, and contests the biopolitical governance of sexed and gendered life. Bringing together sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse and conversation analysis, and queer/trans and feminist scholarship, the volume asks how linguistic practices, interactional orders, and language ideologies shape contemporary regimes of sex/gender, embodiment, and population management.​
We invite contributions that are:

  *   Grounded in empirical data (e.g. interactional, ethnographic, corpus, archival, policy/medico‑legal, digital/multimodal)
  *   Explicitly engage with biopolitics (and related concepts such as governmentality, necropolitics, debility, datafication)
  *   Make a clear sociolinguistic or discourse-analytic contribution (methods, concepts, or theoretical integration)​

________________________________
Thematic Foci
Proposed chapters should connect to one or more of the following strands. Topics within the strands are just suggestions, and there is scope for many more:

  1.
Sexuality as a pivot of biopower

  *
Contributions might examine confessional and disclosure genres, sexual 'truth-telling' and institutional authority, or media and public health discourses of sexual respectability, risk, and citizenship.

  1.
Gender as biopolitical apparatus

  *
Relevant work might address the genealogies and circulations of sex/gender lexicons and discourses, administrative and bureaucratic gender categories as instantiated in forms, databases, and surveys, or language policies and debates around pronouns and grammatical gender.

  1.
Reproduction, family, and demographic governance

  *
Chapters in this strand might explore discourses of fertility, population 'crisis', and national futurity, interaction in reproductive health, counselling, consent, and clinical encounters, or public debates over abortion, assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and kinship.

  1.
Queer, trans, and intersex biopolitics

  *
This strand welcomes work on naming, pronouns, self-labelling, and legibility in queer, trans, and intersex communities, clinical, medico-legal, and policy discourses on trans and intersex lives, and activist, artistic, and community practices of refusal, reworlding, or escape.

  1.
Race, necropolitics, and datafied sex/gender

  *
Contributions might analyse policing, borders, welfare, and other institutional sites where racialised and gendered subjects are differentially exposed to harm, the role of sex/gender and race in datasets, algorithms, and platforms, or digital platforms as sites of biopolitical sorting and disposability.

 **Work focusing on the Global South, minoritised languages, and under-represented communities is particularly welcome.
________________________________
Sociolinguistic orientation
Submissions should use clearly articulated  discourse-analytic methods grounded in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, applied linguistics or critical discourse studies:

  *   Conversation Analysis
  *   Interactional Sociolinguistics
  *   Ethnography
  *   Critical Discourse Analysis
  *   Corpus-based or corpus-assisted discourse studies
  *   Multimodal and digital discourse analysis

Chapters should make explicit how their analytical approach helps theorize biopolitics and its linguistic/discursive mediation.​
________________________________
Practical details

  *   Chapter length: maximum 9,000 words (including references)
  *   Language of publication: English

Timeline (provisional):

  *   Abstracts due: 31 March 2026
  *   Notification of decisions: late April 2026
  *   First full drafts due: March 2027
  *   Revised chapters due: later 2027

These dates will be finalised in consultation with contributors and aligned with the schedule agreed with the publisher.
________________________________
Abstract submission
Please submit:

  1.  Chapter abstract (250–400 words), outlining:
     *   Empirical context and data
     *   Methods/analytic framework
     *   How the chapter speaks to biopolitics and to at least one of the strands above
  2.  Short author bio (up to 150 words) including affiliation and up to five key publications.

Send submissions and queries to: Brian King (The University of Hong Kong) at bwking at hku.hk<mailto:bwking at hku.hk> with the subject line: “Chapter proposal – Sex, Gender and Biopolitics”

I particularly encourage proposals from early‑career researchers and scholars from under‑represented regions and communities.
All chapters will be peer-reviewed and closely edited to ensure coherence across the volume.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gala-l/attachments/20260305/a1653539/attachment-0001.htm>