Revisioning Gender, an Introduction

This issue of Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society features articles presented at the conference “Revisioning Gender: Complex Inequalities and Global Dimensions,” held in Stockholm in 2014 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the journal. These articles beautifully fulfill the promise to provide “incisive analyses of gender, politics and policy across the globe” that we have articulated since our founding. In this introduction, the sections of which are written by the former editors of the journal and one of the new editors, we survey some of the accomplishments of the past twenty years. Social Politics has been a leading force among a multinational, interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars who have aimed to incorporate a wide-ranging understanding of gender in the study of welfare regimes and political economies, increasingly understood as situated in global contexts. This is linked to another of our signal achievements, discussed in the entry below by Sonya Michel and Mary Daly: the development of the concept of care as central to systems of social provision and regulation, and its entanglement with issues of global flows of labor and inequalities among women rooted in class, race and the hierarchies among states and nations. And throughout, we have been mindful of the challenges Fiona Williams surveys in her entry: bridging the insights of feminist activism and feminist theory, practicing transversal politics (talking across differences), engaging with concerns of gender not only in explicitly feminist politics but also in other arenas in which feminists work, such as environmental politics, human rights activism; and challenging capitalist practices and logics.