Australian Feminist Studies

Culturally Situated Feminist Bioethics and Biohumanities: Contexts, Cultures, and Critique

The proposed special issue on Culturally Situated Feminist Bioethics and Biohumanities responds to profound transformations in global health, bioscience, and material life that demand renewed feminist and biohumanistic engagement with bioethical questions. Feminist bioethics has been a crucial force in challenging androcentrism, racial bias, top-down hierarchical planning, commercial pressures, and colonial legacies in medical and ethical reasoning. Yet, much of its development has been concentrated in Euro-American contexts, often universalizing Western epistemologies and moral frameworks and only minimally engaging other biohumanistic fields. This special issue aims to trouble such arrangements, foregrounding the rich plurality of feminist bioethical thought emerging from diverse cultural, social, historical, public health, literary and theological settings across the globe.

Including, but not predominantly focusing on reproductive health - long a key focus of feminist bioethics - the issue opens to a wider array of topics, including disability, aging, environmental health, workplace health, health policy, mental health, end-of-life care, and the gendered implications of new medical technologies. Importantly, it also includes critical attention to all genders’ experiences in bioethical contexts, recognising that gender justice in health demands richer inclusivity and the gender inequality is detrimental to all of society.

This issue will ask how feminist analyses can inform more globally inclusive, culturally grounded forms of ethical reflection that contribute to equitable health and scientific practices and to more a responsive and translational biohumanities in Australia.

Guiding questions may include:

• How can feminist bioethics engage with local moral worlds and non-Western epistemologies without reproducing colonial patterns of knowledge extraction?
• How could the dominant theories or methodologies of bioethics and the biohumanities be nuanced, expanded, or challenged via insights from or application of feminist theories?
• In what ways do feminist approaches to bioethics differ across cultural, religious, epistemological and political contexts, and what can they learn from each other?
• How do historical and sociopolitical conditions shape contemporary bioethical debates across global contexts?
• How might health-related fields such as public health, environmental humanities, mental health and medical humanities be nuanced via a feminist bioethical lens?
• How do the feminist ethical dimensions of queer or straight, cis-men’s health, gendered aging, and care for older populations differ across cultures?
• How do the gendered moral and emotional landscapes of disability differ across cultures and political systems?
• How can feminist analyses of new biotechnologies (e.g., AI in medicine, genomics) be nuanced to reflect diverse, globally-distributed ethical priorities and inclusive values?
• What intellectual and methodological innovations arise when feminist bioethics incorporates historical, anthropological, literary, public health, sociological, or queer studies perspectives?