Call for Contributions for a Special Issue: “Health Feminism and Anti-Gender Politics: Knowledge, Body Politics and Reactions in a Historical Perspective” (Deadline: May 10, 2026)

Within the frame of WG 1, we aim at compiling a special issue on

Health Feminism and Anti-Gender Politics: Knowledge, Body Politics and Reactions in a Historical Perspective

Starting in the late 1960s, health books and other publications written ‘by women for women’, the practice of self-examination and the concept of women’s health centres stimulated demands for better and women-centred health care. This new focus on women’s health emerged as a transnational phenomenon from “Western” women’s movements to socialist feminism beyond the Iron Curtain, Hence, health issues stand at the core of feminist mobilization as well as they stand at the core of anti-gender mobilizations as the current refusals of gender-related medicine by antiliberal actors show. This issue wants to historicize and discuss these observations from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Contributions may address questions such as:

• The role of the state, medical experts, and clergy as gatekeepers
• Which aspects have played a role in these discourses, and why and when?
• Target groups and audiences of both feminist and anti-gender mobilizations
• Health knowledge and expertise: How was knowledge about the body, reproduction, contraception and sexuality produced, mediated and legitimized? Which counterreactions did this knowledge provoke?
• Which persons were considered experts? Who was mobilized and allowed to become a broker of such knowledge and broker of related anti-gender moblizations?
• The counter-reactions, for example anti-abortion movements.

The special issue will be submitted to an internationally renowned journal with a double blind peer review process. If we receive more than eight well-written abstracts, we may consider compiling an edited volume in an outstanding international publishing house. Editors of the issue will be Ewelina Wozniak-Wrzesinska, Heidi Hein-Kircher and Isabel Heinemann.

We like to invite CA23149 members to contribute from their discipline’s perspective. We expect your abstracts of 500 words and a brief CV until May 10, 2026.

We expect abstracts and CVs of 300 words max. until May 10, 2026, the editors will give feedback until the end of May. We expect the submission of selected articles until the end of September 2026.

Please submit your proposal to ewelina.wozniak-wrzesinska@herder-institut.de