Introduction to Special Issue “Gender, Politics, and Everyday Life: Power, Resistance, and Representation”

The conference theme this year was “Gender, Politics, and Everyday Life: Power, Resistance and Representation”. This interdisciplinary conference brought together participants from all academic fields to engage in wide-ranging conversations on gender and politics from all around the world. While formal politics loomed large in 2020, we encouraged an expansive understanding of political action and expression, inspired by Carol Hanisch’s essay “The Personal is Political”, which sees all relationships of power as political, as well as connecting women’s experiences, self-expression, and values to their lives as political actors and subjects. The papers in this Special Issue are representative of some of the more than 200 papers that were submitted.

These papers have a wide span of interpretations of the theme “The Personal is Political”. The topics of the papers included here range from negotiating homeless gender-based violence to the social analysis and politics of protest. There are papers on political expression in cinema, literature and public speeches. The geography of the papers is also expansive, including countries such as India, Mexico, Lebanon, and Thailand.

Stephanie M. House-Niamke’s (House-Niamke 2022) essay asks the reader to reconsider Hannah’s story in the Hebrew Bible through multiple methodological lenses that demonstrate the ability to take back one’s power and confront complex systems of power and oppression for Black women. Her audacity to correct a prophet, fight for her valid desire of motherhood, and determine her own happiness is evidence of an empowerment ethic that is necessary for minoritized women in a post-modern era and political climate where the erasure of all forms of difference and consciousness is the priority, according to House-Niamke. Ilaria Sartini’s (Sartini 2022) essay is based on a study that analyzed the social and physical dimensions of gender-based violence in an Afro-Mexican community in the south of Mexico. The techniques used to gather data for this study consisted of a variety of styles of interviews with a group of Afro-Mexican women from the Costa Chica of Oaxaca, who are survivors of gender-based violence, and participant observation was obtained through conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Oaxaca. A total of 10 interviews were recorded. Twisha Singh studied the socio-political identity of a stage actress, Vera Holme, who embodied gendered transgression during a time that permeated from her public life to private life and vice versa. Themes such as performativity, political theatre, and the deconstruction of sexuality and body politics became intrinsic in order to decipher the sexual lexicon of the time that fettered women on the condition of being socially and morally deviant. Utilizing the personal papers of Vera Holme, Singh (Singh 2022) contemplates her forays into theatre and politics. This context will not only complicate the understanding of gendered transgressions, but will simultaneously throw light on how theatricality ‘enabled’ many women to break away from the existing normative patriarchal structures in socio-economic terms, including Holme. Tasia Matthews (Matthews 2022) writes about the #MeToo movement in her essay. Matthews argues that Thai women utilized the movement to demand progress in gendered areas by examining examples taken throughout the 2020 pro-democracy protest movement, with the overall objective of contributing to an understanding of the relationship between public resistance and feminism. Finally, Carolynn Stauffer’s (Stauffer 2021) essay explores how social capital is deployed by undocumented Latina GBV survivors as a form of personal and collective resistance. This essay only gives a sample of undocumented survivors’ counter-stories regarding three factors: citizenship status, help-seeking behaviors, and service use patterns. Stauffer’s research findings illuminate the social logics of GBV disclosure locations, the use of informal support services, and how survivors strategically deploy new economic opportunity structures.