Dear Colleagues,

Please forward to anyone who might be interested in contributing.
Please address enquiries to the guest editors.

http://www.ijfab.org/cfp.html

Best,
Sophia

Sophia Wong
www.sophiawong.info

Vol. 4, No. 1: IJFAB Special Issue: Feminist Perspectives on Ethics in
Psychiatry
Guest Editors: Jennifer Hansen, Nancy Potter and Jennifer Radden

In the last 10-12 years, bioethicists and scholars working in the
intersection of philosophy
and psychiatry have turned their attention to the unique ethical
questions that emerge out
of the practice of psychiatry. A brief perusal of bioethics journals
yields quite a number of
essays dedicated to applied ethics questions in psychiatry, grappling
with the unique
problems of patient competency, informed consent, and paternalism that
arise when
dealing with psychotic or dementia patients.

Research has focused on “gendered” diagnostic categories as well, and
on prevalence
rates showing gender patterns. From clinical portraits of personality
traits such as
borderline and multiple personality disorder or anti-social behavior,
other theorists have
reasoned that we need to radically rethink our intuitions about
personhood. Finally, the
explosion of activity in neuroscience has precipitated with it the new field of
‘neuroethics,’ wherein ethicists contemplate the social and ethical
consequences of
technological innovations such as brain imaging and psychotropic drugs.

Central to the focus of this issue is the question: how do feminist
psychiatric ethics differ
from mainstream psychiatric ethics? Part of the answer to this
question involves making
explicit the commitments and challenges that feminist analyses pose to
mainstream
psychiatric practice. For example, what sort of power differentials
play out in the doctor-
patient relationship?; what sexist (classist and racist) assumptions
play out in psychiatric
diagnoses as well as more fundamentally in psychiatric nosology?; how
equal is access
among women of color and of working class women to mental health
services?; and how
do ethnocentric assumptions underpin the medical model and thereby fail many
non-Western communities?: The primary concern of feminist analyses
also fundamentally
implicates the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in
the access to and
delivery of mental health services.

Possible topics for this volume include:
• The degree that classification and conceptualization of mental
illnesses in psychiatry
challenge or reaffirm pervasive gender binaries, (e.g., the
characterization of Gender
Identity Disorder as involving discordant sexual and gender traits)
• Historical and cultural tropes and associations that align women and
the feminine with
disorder and deficiency
•  How oppressive conditions, including social roles and expectations,
shape explanations
of certain disorders such as depression
• Sexual exploitation by male practitioners of female patients
• Postmodernist challenges to gender informing feminist therapeutic
treatment for
disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder
• Possible social correlates, such as the rise in single mother
managed households with
the rise in the medicalization of children
• Explorations about why unequal access to mental health care
disproportionately affects
women of color and immigrant communities
• Analyses of why evidence suggests middle class and upper middle
class women are
over diagnosed, while working class women and women of color are under treated
• The social consequences of failing to take account of the gendered
and racialized
aspects of mental illness

Deadline for Submission: March 1, 2010