Abstract
As this issue goes to print, we are starting our sixth month of sheltering at home in Chicago. This pandemic has been a bizarre, surreal, and terrifying global experience. We are continuing to live through an event few of us could have imagined possible just months ago. Our children are learning at home or not at all. Those of us with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home. The necessary care work has contracted to within the walls of our homes, without the help of teachers, child care workers, or restaurants. And labor is, no doubt, falling disproportionately on the shoulders of women.
While some of us are sheltering at home, others are braving infection every day: health care providers and essential workers in the industries we all depend upon to survive, from food service to transportation of goods and services. The already striking inequalities in our society have grown even wider, with unemployment hitting harder among those who earned low wages before the pandemic, and mortality rates showing stark racial disparities. Once again, the unemployment statistics show that women are more likely than men to have lost their jobs. These are all just journalistic guesses for now, and the data cries out for serious scholarly analysis in the future. Although Gender & Society does not have the capacity for quick turnaround for COVID-19 research, we are publishing blogs that directly address issues the politics of gender in this crisis.
With the help of Sage Publishers, we are publishing nearly as effectively as before the pandemic. But we are not publishing as quickly. The global scale of this disease means that it is affecting our reviewers and our authors. Since the pandemic began, our reviewers, like most academics, are overwhelmed, moving classes online and often becoming their children’s homeschooling teachers. I have to ask far more reviewers to review each paper in order to find three who will do so. And it is now common for reviewers to be two or more months late with their reviews. All of this is understandable, yet still hard on the authors waiting to hear the editorial decision. We hope that this is a temporary situation, and we will do our very best to return to our speedy review process as soon as possible. Additionally, authors who have an article under revision require more time to revise and resubmit. What that means for the journal is that we may have fewer articles ready to go for publication. And so in this issue, we have five articles instead of our usual six. I expect this to be a temporary slowdown as we are still receiving as many submissions as we did last time this year. While we only have five articles, what a set of articles they are! In this moment when a virus has reminded us just how small a world we live in, so too these articles remind us that feminist analysis and feminist activism are also global.
This issue, on “Global Feminist Analysis,” grew organically. We are pleased to publish an issue whose articles are all written by women of color from across the world, all of which highlight both enduring inequalities and attempts at feminist empowerment. The first article, “Engendering Global Capital: How Homoerotic Triangles Facilitate Foreign Investments into Risky Markets,” by Kimberly Kay Hoang, shows how women’s bodies are used to lubricate economic deals in Vietnam, while also providing evidence that there are feminist disrupters trying to change these practices. Amrita Pande’s article, “Visa Stamps for Injections: Traveling Biolabor and South African Egg Provision,” shows how some women in South Africa choose to sell their eggs in a strategic attempt to escape provincial patriarchal families and communities. Here too, the author shows us both the existence of an industry built on sexism and the women attempting to improve their own lives by maneuvering within it. In “Women Left Behind: Migration, Agency, and the Pakistani Woman,” Sarah Ahmed shows how a patriarchal family system prevents women left behind from achieving autonomy, but also shows how they attempt to empower themselves within the constraints they face. Liz Mount’s article, “‘I am not a Hijra’: Class, Respectability, and the Emergence of the “New” Transgender Woman in India,” shows how women holding a transgender identity strategically distance themselves from the traditional Indian “hijras” in their quest for upward social mobility. Once again, this article demonstrates how women use whatever power is available to them to improve their conditions but in this case their behavior furthers the stigma of gender-nonconforming groups without their class status. In “The Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia: Muslim Women’s Repression and Resistance,” Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson focuses on Muslim social justice activists to illustrate the diversity of political opinions within the Muslim community in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the power of women trying to change their own communities.
In this moment of crisis, the whole team at Gender & Society is pleased to offer an issue of feminist global analysis. May we come out of this pandemic into a world in which feminists across the globe wrestle power to create a more just world.