Abstract
We are honored to be stepping into the co-editorship of Gender & Society. We began our editorial work with new submissions on May 1, 2023. This is the first issue published under our guidance, and it includes articles submitted under Barbara Risman’s editorship as well as our own.
Going forward, in addition to research papers and book reviews, we will occasionally feature interviews with feminists from the Global South in order to sustain South–North dialogues and enrich our sociologies. In that spirit, this issue includes an interview with Ochy Curiel Pichardo conducted by Roberta Villalón, published in Spanish and English.
Given the histories of critical feminist scholarship and leadership by former editors, the SWS Publications Committee, and the SWS community, we recognize the responsibility we have to continue this legacy. We are confident that we will rise to the occasion over the next 4 years with our team of deputy editors: Professors Erika Busse-Cárdenas (Macalester College), Ben Carrington (University of Southern California), Pei-Chia Lan (National Taiwan University), Ghassan Moussawi (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign), and stef shuster (Michigan State University). The deputy editors reflect what is best in our discipline’s trans/gender/racial foci. They inflect their sociologies with transnational sensibilities and with both qualitative and quantitative methodological skills. In addition, we have an outstanding team of student managing editors: Erin Carpenter and Jasmine Underwood from the University of Georgia and Alexander Holt from the University of Texas at Austin.
We take up our editorship at a particularly troubling time for scholars of gender, amid a concerted backlash against feminism and against critical research on gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. It seems that global predicaments increase exponentially every year. The list could go on, but here are a few: climate refugees, racial violence, food insecurity, and evisceration of reproductive and transgender justice. The world already has changed since we started receiving papers in May. We experienced summer heat as never before. Wars have only intensified, as have random acts of violence. More and more communities lack access to such basic necessities as water, electricity, food, and medical supplies. Human rights seem ever elusive. These are issues that affect us deeply, not just as sociologists but as citizens of the world.
While troubled by the socioeconomic and political zeitgeist, we recognize that the discipline of sociology is in the throes of a renaissance informed by a wealth of theoretical approaches, methodological innovations, and political orientations. We hope to bring some of these critical interventions to the pages of Gender & Society.
Gender & Society grew in stature under the guidance of Barbara Risman. We are grateful for her leadership. We are also grateful for the UIC team that helped us transition into our new roles almost seamlessly. As the incoming editorial team, we take seriously our responsibilities to both understand and respect the founding objective of this journal: to provide a home for critical feminist scholarship informed by social scientific methods and theories. We believe the work we are doing will ensure that the journal remains relevant to the debates and issues of the second decade of the twenty-first century. We welcome submissions from all scholars studying gender and sexuality whose approaches are sociologically informed, even if they are not, formally, sociologists or working within departments of sociology. We encourage all colleagues to submit their work to us, regardless of geographical location, rank, experience, or time in the academy. We look forward to reading your work, working with you, and seeing you in print in our pages.
In Solidarity,
