Call for Paper
The Politics of Ableism: Gender, Sexuality, and Disability in Literature and Media
Edited by Habib Tekin & Nizara Hazarika

Critical essays are invited for a book on Disability and Gender that explores the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality across literary texts, cultural practices, and media representations. It particularly focuses on the representation, construction, and negotiation of gendered experiences and sexuality in the lives of the people with disabilities. Across literary texts, cinema, television, digital media, and other cultural forms, disabled bodies are frequently framed through restrictive gendered and sexualized discourses. Disabled characters are often depicted as asexual, hypersexual, morally suspect, infantilised, or as symbolic figures onto which broader anxieties about normativity, reproduction, and social order are projected. Such representations intersect with constructions of masculinity, femininity, queerness, race, class, age, and migration, raising urgent questions about power, agency, and cultural imagination. Rooted in the interdisciplinary frameworks of Disability Studies, Gender Studies, and Cultural Theory, the proposed book aims to bring together critical voices that challenge normative constructions of the body, identity, and subjectivity.
This book seeks to examine how sexuality and gendered identities are negotiated within disability narratives and visual cultures. It aims to move beyond reductive tropes and explore the complexity of embodied experience, intimacy, desire, consent, reproduction, care, vulnerability, and relationality. Contributions may address historical or contemporary materials and are welcome from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, including but not limited to Disability Studies, Gender Studies, Crip Queer Studies, Feminist Crip theory, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, Medical Humanities, Media Studies, and Cultural Studies.
The proposed book seeks to examine the literary and media representation of disability with a gendered perspective that include but are not limited to the following areas
 Compulsory able-bodiedness and its cultural manifestations
 Constructions of sexuality in disability narratives
 Gendered moral coding of disabled bodies and minds
 Disabled and queer bodies in literature and media
 Crip and queer readings of canonical and contemporary literary texts
 Reproductive politics and the regulation of disabled bodies
 Intimacy, care, and relational ethics in literary and visual texts
 Sexual violence, vulnerability, and narrative framing in disability studies
 Representation of disabled masculinity and femininity in media
 Gender, the medical gaze, and the pathologized female body and its representation in literature and media
 Disability autobiography, memoir, and life writing from gendered perspectives
 Crip futurity: imagining disability beyond tragedy and cure
 Disability and trans identity: intersections and convergences in cultural texts
 Disability and gender in digital cultures, social media, and activism
 Historical shifts in the representation of disability and sexuality in literature and media
 Posthuman, transhuman, or biopolitical perspectives on embodied difference
The book particularly encourages contributions that offer close readings of literary works, films, television series, graphic novels, or other media, as well as theoretically grounded analyses that advance current debates on (Literary) Disability Studies. We look forward to receiving proposals that critically engage with the intersections of disability, gender, and sexuality across literary and media cultures that contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussions within Disability Studies and related fields.

Submission Guidelines
 Abstracts of 200–250 words with 5 keywords
 A short biographical note (not more than 150 words), including institutional affiliation and key publications.
 Please include full contact details.
 The subject line of the email should state: Submission of Abstracts for the Edited Volume on “Disability and Gender.”
 Authors selected for inclusion will be invited to submit full chapters (approximately 6,000–7,000 words, including references) following acceptance of the proposal by the publisher.

Abstract Submission Deadline: 01 June 2026

Eligibility
Contributors are required to hold a PhD. Alternatively, submissions may be co-authored, provided that at least one co-author holds a PhD. In addition, PhD candidates are welcome to submit contributions within their own field of research, particularly if the proposed chapter is directly related to their doctoral project and falls within the thematic and conceptual parameters of this book

Publisher
We are presently engaged in discussions with international publishing houses and will communicate the relevant decisions to contributors upon the completion of the abstract selection process.
Abstracts and inquiries should be sent to: disability.gender@gmail.com