“The Body in Breast Cancer”

Call For Papers:
For a Special Issue of Social Semiotics
THE BODY IN BREAST CANCER
Edited by Nadine Ehlers and Shiloh Krupar

Social Semiotics invites submissions to a special issue “The Body in
Breast Cancer” in order to mobilize new critical interventions into
the materiality of breast cancer.

The body, at the level of the breast, is the terrain on and through
which breast cancer registers. This body, as understood through
poststructuralist theory, is always already constructed and negotiated
in relation to technology. This body, then, is a technologized body.
The experience of breast cancer at once compels particular interfaces
of body and machine in detection, treatment, and “recovery,” and the
necessity for corporeal reworking in relation to the machine.
Stressing the material breast as a technologized terrain necessitates
grappling with the myriad of troubled relations of/to the breast, such
as the prosthetic breast, the absent breast, fear of the lost breast,
refusal of the breast, the scrutinized fleshy breast. In order to
enable such exploration, we solicit papers in the fields of science
and technology studies, queer studies, cultural studies, performance
studies, and disability studies that enter into dialogue with
scholarship on (bio)technologies and/or the posthuman. Foregrounding
the technologized materiality in breast cancer will yield new ways of
understanding subjectivity and somatic resistance, crafting
corporeality, and practicing critique/politics in order to extend
“livable lives.”

We are especially interested in accounts of queer, non-white, crip,
male, classed bodies, and other particularities of subjecthood, that
explore the practices of the technologized body in breast cancer at
the level of machine and science, and imagined through biotech, the
cyborg, cybernetics, prostheses, biometrics, and so forth.

We welcome articles that investigate:
• Excavations of the breast that foreground the policing, containment,
mutilation, resignification, and crafting of the breast
• Bodies in breast cancer surveillance
• Bodies and breast reconstruction
• Bodies in treatment (radiation, the chemotherapy ward, detection,
ultrasound, MRI, biopsy, mammogram, the breast clinic)
• Bodies and traces of military technologies; marks of cancer treatment
• Body-erotics/sexuality and breast cancer
• Visual economies of the breast and legalities of breastlessness
• The body and prognosis in breast cancer
• Altered notions of bodily capacity in relation to breast cancer
• Breasted aesthetics as self-crafting/disciplining
• Renegotiations of subjectivity at the interface with machines
• Unstable assemblages between flesh and machine in detection, risk
assessment, prognosis
• Cancer and matter
• Regeneration and illness

We invite traditional essays as well as a variety of alternative
forms: short performative pieces, short critical etymologies, visual
essays, case studies. We are hoping to put together a range of
different submissions for this issue in order to encourage unorthodox
approaches to breast cancer.

If submitting a traditional paper, the word count should be no more
than 8000, including notes and bibliography. Alternative formats
should be between 1 and 15 pages (maximum). For all submissions,
please note that one image is equivalent to 250 words (half page).

The journal citation style is Chicago Author-Date. For style
guidelines and further information about figures and formatting,
please see the journal website instructions for authors:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/csosauth.asp

Articles should be prepared for anonymous review. Please provide a
separate short author biography and an abstract of no more than 150
words.

The deadline for submissions is 1 October 2010, with a final
publication date scheduled for January 2012. Papers should be
submitted by electronic attachment as a Word document (.doc or .txt)
or pdf. The subject line of your email should state the special issue
title “The Body in Breast Cancer” and be addressed to:
specialissuebreast@gmail.com