37.680, FYI: Call for Book Chapters - "Sex, Gender and Biopolitics: Discourses of Normativity and Governance in Everyday Life"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-680. Wed Feb 18 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.680, FYI: Call for Book Chapters - "Sex, Gender and Biopolitics: Discourses of Normativity and Governance in Everyday Life"

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Date: 18-Feb-2026
From: Brian W. King [bwking at hku.hk]
Subject: Call for Book Chapters - "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.
I 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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, minoritized 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 must 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 with the
subject line: “Chapter proposal – Sex, Gender and Biopolitics”
I most definitely 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.

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Applied Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics




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