Tendon Magazine

Tendon is the literary and visual arts journal published by the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. Our masthead can be found here, and previous issues can be found on our website. Our current call for submissions is below. 

Call for Submissions | Issue 07: Rest

A verb as well as a noun, “rest” invokes both activity and motivation as well as pause and contemplation. As a concept, rest touches many aspects of our lives: we recover from illness, injury, and burnout; we look for respite from overwork; we try to get a good night’s sleep; we convalesce. 

Rest’s social, biological, and political associations are important but often invisible, threaded into the everyday rhythms of structural forms of harm. For many of us, resting comes along with feelings of guilt or shame. A brief history of the concept and practice of rest reveals that it has often been instrumentalized to enable more labor to take place. Cohorts of artists and authors have sought to invoke the radical potential of rest and link it to resistance by pointing to rest as a racialized and gendered concept. Projects like Rest for Resistance and Nap Ministry highlight who gets to rest, how, for how long, and in what ways, showing that rest always already speaks to structural inequalities and forms of oppression.

For patients—whether living with a disability, recovering from illness, or navigating surveillance and interventions—practices of resting are linked concretely to healing. For caregivers whose companions’ well-being depends on their labor, rest can be essential but hard to come by. Meanwhile, for healthcare workers, conversations about rest revolve around the ways in which overwork affects the quality of care. 

Within late capitalist institutions in the United States, rest is accrued as a ‘benefit’ after a certain amount of time spent at work through PTO and FMLA. Rest is framed as a privilege rather than a right, interrupting or undercutting the value of a worker. While on the job in healthcare, clinicians and trainees are on their feet for long hours, deprived of sleep, and expected to operate at a high caliber throughout burnout. Rest is not built into these infrastructures of care. 

In this issue, we invite submissions around the theme of rest, its bodily politics, and its role in medicine and care. Who gets to rest, when, and how might we rest better, more nourishingly, together? Tendon invites submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, critical perspectives, and visual arts through December 20, 2024, or until our submission cap is reached in each genre.