Revisioning Gender, an Introduction

Gendering a Field: The Influence of Social Politics

Barbara Hobson and Ann Orloff

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 20^th 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.

Social Politics’ origins can be traced back to a series of conversations among the founding editors, Barbara Hobson, Sonya Michel and Ann Orloff, and the colleagues who became the initial cadres of the journal. We recognized the need for a journal that brought gender front and center into studies of states, politics and policies and, crucially, would situate these issues within international, global and comparative contexts. The scholars involved in birthing and raising Social Politics were engaged in debates across several intellectual venues which, importantly, also took us across national and disciplinary boundaries and between “mainstream” and feminist approaches. Both feminist colleagues and our publisher at that time, University of Illinois Press, thought we ought to include gender in the title – making it Gender and Social Politics. We argued against this as redundant, for social politics is irreducibly shaped by gender, and we wanted to insist, as we still do, that social politics cannot be understood properly without attention to gender. We settled on “Social Politics,” tout court, and launched the journal in spring 1994 at the conference “Crossing Borders: Gender, Social Politics and Citizenship,” in Stockholm. The participants saw themselves as trailblazers, and, with hindsight, we can see they were correct, for the themes addressed at that initial meeting found their way into the research and policy debates appearing in the journal in the two decades following: citizenship and inclusion, encompassing gender, class, sexuality, race/ethnicity and nation; the politics of global markets and economies; transnational governance; and the gendered contexts and contests around care practices and policies.

After several strong volumes and early recognition of its promise— a prize for the best new journal awarded by the American Library Association—in 1996, the journal moved to Oxford University Press, a publisher that featured an impressive international reach. Ann Orloff and Barbara Hobson served as editors for twenty years, until 2015; Sonya Michel served from 1994–2004, replaced by Fiona Williams, editor from 2003–2012; Rianne Mahon joined the team when we became a quarterly in 2006 and served until 2015; and Deborah Brennan joined us briefly as an editor in 2013. Our stellar new team of editors—Kate Bedford, Mary Daly, Margarita Estévez-Abe, and Aleksandra Kanjuo-Mrčela – took the reins in 2015. Hobson, Orloff, Mahon, MicheI and Williams remain as editors emeritae. Our associate editors, Deb Brennan, Monique Kremer, Wendy Larner, Kimberly Morgan and Ito Peng (as well as the current...