Call for chapters:
We are soliciting essays and original research submissions to be included in Aging Men: Masculinities and Modern Medicine. The proposed anthology is a collection about the multiple socio-historical contexts surrounding men’s aging bodies in modern medicine in global perspective. The collection will be the first of its kind to explore the interrelated aspects of aging, masculinities and biomedicine, offering a multidisciplinary dialogue between sociology of health and illness, anthropology of the body and gender studies. Foregrounding material practices of aging men’s bodies will yield new ways of understanding knowledge production and subjectivity of aging processes. The collection allows for a timely and reconsideration of the conceptualisation of aging men within the recent explosion of science studies on men’s health and biotechnologies including anti-aging perspectives. The intention is to steer current thinking about masculinities beyond conceptualising inherited power status and hegemony to include current feminist inspired scholarship on the relational processes and practices of materiality and embodiment of masculinities. Reflecting current most important thoughts on the interplay of aging, masculinities and modern medicine, it will query the permeability and instability of definitions of aging and gender boundaries within current politics of health and aging.

About the editors:
Antje Kampf is Associate Professor for gender aspects of the history, philosophy and ethics of medicine at the School of Medicine at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. She is the author of Mapping Out the Venereal Wilderness: STD and Public Health in New Zealand, 1920-1980 (LIT-Verlag, 2007), and has published on the history of public health, race, and gender in Medical History, Health. An Interdisciplinary Journal, and The Journal for the History of Sexuality. Her current research focuses on the historical ontology of male reproduction in Germany, and on the concepts of risk and prevention of prostate cancer, including medical culture and representation of older men's bodies and lives. Recent publications include Kampf, A. The absence of Adam: prostate cancer and male identity, in Jason Powell and Tony Gilbert, eds. Aging and Identity: A Postmodern Dialogue. Nova Science Publishers: New York (2009), 29-43 and Kampf, A. "The risk of age"? Early detection test, prostate cancer and technologies of self, Journal of Aging Studies 25,1 (2010).

Barbara Marshall is Professor of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, where she teaches in the areas of sexuality, gender, the body, and social theory. Her books include Engendering Modernity (Polity, 1994); Configuring Gender (Broadview, 2000), Engendering the Social (ed. with Anne Witz, Open University Press, 2004) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory (with Austin Harrington and Hans Peter Mueller, Routledge, 2006). She has written extensively on the medicalization of sexuality, the pharmaceutical reconfiguration of sexual lifecourses, and the emergence of sexual functionality as an indicator of successful aging. Her current research continues to explore the ways gender and sexuality are embedded in accounts of aging bodies across a range of different contexts, including sexual medicine, hormone therapies, anti-aging treatments, and public health promotion, and is opening up new questions about the sexualization of the third age. Alan Petersen is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria. He is also an Honorary Visiting Professor at Centre for Biomedicine and Society, King's College, London. He also holds honorary visiting professorships at University of Plymouth and City University, London. He has researched and written extensively in the sociology of health and illness, the constructions of sex/gender, sociology of the body, sociology of risk, and studies of new and emergent biomedical technologies. His book and journal publications have focused on a diverse array of topics, including news media constructions of genetics and medicine and nanotechnologies; the construction of sex differences in medical anatomy texts and in the psychology of aggression; carers' experiences of caring for people with mental illnesses, particularly within minority ethnic and linguistic communities; gender and emotion; and the sociology of bioethics. His recent books include: The Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural Approach (Routledge, 2007); Nanotechnologies, Risk and Communication (Palgrave, 2009) (with Alison Anderson, Clare Wilkinson and Stuart Allan) and The Politics of Bioethics (Routledge, 2011).

In order to enable such exploration, original contributions (7,000-9,000 words incl. bibliography and footnotes) from social science studies broadly conceived (history, philosophy of science, medicine and technology, sociology of the body, health and illness and anthropology) are sought that will canvass current and key research methodologies, theoretical and empirical studies. We solicit diverse strands of academic thinking, querying both the epistemologies and ontologies of aging male bodies and medicine at the crossroads of illness and health.

Submissions Topics Include:

· Historical Epistemology of Aging

· Classifying Aging Bodies

· Functionality/Medicalisation: Defining Normative Bodies

· Theorizing Stage of Life Third-Fourth Age/Impairment theory

· Cartographies/Mapping Aging Bodies

· Clinical Trials/Health Technology

· Anti-aging/Hybrid Bodies/Future Bodies

· Men’s emotion and aging

· Knowledge systems

· Care Work

The deadline for the abstract (max. 500 words, affiliation and address) is December 15th, 2010. The deadline for original contributions is June 30th, 2011. Please send the requested information per email to Antje Kampf (antje.kampf@uni-mainz.de)