Call For Chapter Proposals – New Edited Volume on The Gender of Secrecy

 

 

Call for Chapter proposals: Deadline 1 March 2025

 

Working title: The Gender of Secrecy

 

 

Contributions to an Edited Volume

 

Women and femininity have a troubled relationship with secrecy. Historically, and yet still today, women are considered poor and/or dangerous secret-keepers – the gossip, the witch, and the honey trap remain common tropes.  Yet, paradoxically, women have also been burdened with the secrets of those around them, whether husbands, families or employers; often reproducing their role as subordinate and passive listeners, silent and uncomplaining; and especially in keeping with roles as ‘honour-keepers’.

 

Women also have underexplored histories as improbable state ‘secret agents’ and have used secrecy as resistance, coming together to plan, strategize and to effect change. For example, women’s rights activists have returned to the use of ‘underground’ networks to support the delivery of safe, yet now illegal, abortions.  In Afghanistan, young women gather in secret to learn, despite government prohibitions.  In the UK and elsewhere, women (and men) continue to step forward to challenge the powerful perpetrators of sexual violence and the institutions whose wilful ignorance perpetuated these abuses as ‘open secrets’ for so many years.  At the same time, trans women and those queered must constantly negotiate the challenges of the interplay of secrecy and ignorance within oppressive sexual and gender orders.

 

In summary, secrecy and ignorance as social practices have many-sided implications for how gender and sexuality are (re)constructed, and how this is enfolded within structures of violence: yet this conceptual terrain is still to be fully mapped, historically and in the present.

 

This edited volume will bring together contributors who explore how secrecy and gender are entangled, and how lives – everyday and exceptional – are shaped by secrecy, and how secrecy is itself gendered.

 

We therefore seek contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following:

• The construction of gender and/or sexuality in relation to secrecy and/or ignorance;
• Histories of gender/sexuality in relation to secrecy;
• The creation of fictional worlds and cultures where secrecy and gender/sexuality are co-produced;
• The relationship between the gendering of public/private spaces, and secrecy;
• Embodiment, secrecy, sexuality and gender;
• Political economy of gendered secrecy or ignorance;
• Crime and harm in relation to gender/sexuality, secrecy and/or ignorance;
• Surveillance in relation to secrecy/ignorance and gender/sexuality;
• Analysis of conspiracy theories that focus on secrecy and ignorance in relation to gender and/or sexuality; and
• Methodological considerations and challenges in researching gender and/or sexuality and secrecy.

 

We welcome chapter proposals from across disciplines and from across the world, written in English.

 

 

To propose a chapter contribution to the edited volume, please submit the following to secrecyresearch@gmail.com by 1 March 2025:

• A provisional title and chapter abstract of no more than 250 words
• A brief bio for each author
• 3-5 suggested keywords for your chapter

 

Submissions will then be worked into a proposal for an edited collection for Oxford University Press, in the first instance.  Once a book contract is in place, contributors will be invited to an online meeting in September 2025 to learn more about the shape of the volume overall and the publication timeline.

 

A pdf version of this call is also available.

 

 

For further information, please contact:

 

Elspeth Van Veeren, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, e.vanveeren@bristol.ac.uk

 

Natasha Mulvihill, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, natasha.mulvihill@bristol.ac.uk