Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics: Just Food: Bioethics, Gender, and the Ethics of Eating
Vol 8, No. 2: Just Food: Bioethics, gender, and the ethics of eating
The deadline for submission for this issue is April 1, 2014.
Editor: Mary C. Rawlinson
Western ethics rarely makes eating a main theme. Food belongs to the often invisible domain of women’s labor. While obesity, malnourishment, and lack of access to clean water are regularly cited as global factors in mortality and morbidity, bioethics, even feminist bioethics, gives little attention to culinary practices, water rights, or agricultural policy or to their effects on the status of women and the health of communities.
What and how we eat determines not only our health, but also our relation to other animals, the forms of social life, the gender division of labor, and the integrity of the environment. If hunger is the hallmark of poverty, obesity and obesity-related diseases are ironically afflicting the poor at alarming rates. Hunger also attends war, violence, and catastrophic environmental events; thus, thinking ethically about food engages issues of war and peace, as well as calling into question the global dependence on fossil fuels. Food can reflect social inequity or economic independence and social justice. It can preserve cultural integrity or yield to the homogenizing force of global capital. Food encompasses the full range of issues arising at the intersection of health and justice.
The Editorial Office of IJFAB invites submissions for Just Food: bioethics, gender, and the ethics of eating, vol. 8.2. Essays may investigate any aspect of the ethics of eating, particularly as it relates to health and gender.
Women are disproportionately responsible for food around the world, yet they are globally underrepresented in the ownership of property or decisions about land use or in determining environmental or food policy. As the spike in obesity among women and children in “low-income” countries under the shift to global food indicates, women, like other vulnerable and underrepresented populations, are disproportionately affected by the globalization of food, as well as by environmental degradation and climate change.
Research suggests, however, that women are also “key drivers of change,” necessary to improving food production and consumption, as well as environmental health in any community. “If you pull women out, there will be no sustainable development.” (Report of Regional Implementation Meeting for Asia and Pacific Rim, Jakarta, 2007.)
IJFAB 8.2 will investigate the bioethical problems that result from the industrialization and globalization of agriculture, as well as the role of feminist bioethics in reimaging agriculture and our culinary practices to be more life-sustaining and to better promote justice, community health, and agency for each and all. Only very recently have large populations been able to eat without any knowledge of how their food is produced. This issue explores the question of our responsibility for what and how we eat, as well as global responsibilities for hunger and diet-related disease.
Possible areas of research include:
hunger and poverty
hunger and violence
consumption and health
immobility, obesity, and agency
animal rights
environmental ethics
ethics of land and water policies
agricultural policy and economic independence
scale in farming
food security
sustainability
local vs. global food
geopolitics of food
food as commodity
biotechnology
food and labor
eating and culture
the aesthetics of food
food and community.
All papers must be submitted in IJFAB style. Authors who plan to submit are encouraged to contact the Editor ahead of time.
IJFAB also welcomes proposals for future special issues.
Instructions for authors are available at www.ijfab.org. Papers should be submitted in Microsoft Word, as email attachments to IJFAB@sunysb.edu.
