Virtual Special Issue of Women’s Studies International Forum
The Future of Gender Regimes - Edited by Heidi Gottfried, Sylvia Walby and Karen A. Shire
The contributions in this special issue analyzes how the futures of gender relations are conceptualized, and the possible pathways for gender equality in a globalizing world. The editors’ introduction situates the contribution of this volume in moving gender regime research beyond a Eurocentric perspective, and considering the impacts of globalization in transnational research on gender inequalities in the world. The volume opens with a theoretical contribution by Walby (2023) on violence and the conceptualization of a new type of public gender regime, authoritarian gender regimes. Authoritarian gender regimes are not only part of the patriarchal past, but re-emerging in modern societies as forces against neo-liberal and social-democratic varieties of public gender regimes. The subsequent articles in the volume focus on how the varieties of futures are imagined, as well as the global and transnational processes that are shaping the possible and probable futures in country-level, regional and World Systems analyses. Tied as it is to processes of de-democratization and failures to mitigate violence including that of states in war and inter-personal violence, authoritarian gender regimes are possible futures for some European countries as well as for the more well recognized cases of authoritarian political systems in the world, with consequences for roll-backs in gender equalities.
Empirical research on trajectories of public gender regimes in the special issue cover the full range of social-democratic, neo-liberal, conservative and authoritarian gender regimes evident in institutional changes in Germany (Gottfried 2023, Klammer 2023, Shire 2023), Iran and Tunisia (Moghadam 2023), Turkey (Kocabicak 2023), Spain (Ballesteros-Pena, Bustelo, & Mazur 2023), and regionally in southern (Alonso, Ciccia & Lombardo 2023; Gottschall 2023) and northern Europe (Gottschall 2023; Shire 2023). These interrogations of trajectories of authoritarian, conservative, social-democratic and neo-liberal gender regimes are placed in a broader global and transnational perspective, drawing uniquely on and gendering World Systems (Moghadam 2023) and transnational (Gottfried 2023) theory. The world regional perspective emerging out of these theoretical contributions addresses the European Union itself as a gender regime with its own trajectory (Guerrina, MacRae and Masselo 2023), and the globe, through contributions by Bose (2023) on the trajectories of gender regimes in the global south, and by Weldon, Lusvardi, Kelly and Forester (2023) who trace the historical waves of feminism informing the sorts of activism aimed at creating more egalitarian gender futures.
The special issue was launched on September 15, and a recording of the presentations can be accessed here https://www.uni-due.de/ekfg/research_sylviawalby.
Links to the articles in the Virtual Special Issue:
Alonso, A., Ciccia, R., & Lombardo, E. (2023). A Southern European model? Gender regime change in Italy & Spain. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Ballesteros-Pena, A., Bustelo, M., & Mazur, A. (2023). Theorizing the penal state: The darkside of gender regimes in the case of Spain. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Bose, C. (2023). Regional gender regimes in the global south: An empirical approach. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Gottfried, H. (2023). Multi-scalar geographies of inequalities: Trajectories of gender regimes in a world regional perspective. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Gottschall, K. (2023). The interaction of gender and long-term care regimes across Europe: Ambivalent intersections of gender, class and ethnicity. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Guerrina, R., MacRae, H., & Masselo, A. (2023). Between a rock and a hard place: The EU’s gender regime in times of crisis. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Klammer, U. (2023). The ambivalent trajectory of the German gender regime: Are female breadwinner families an indicator of a shift towards a public gender regime? Women’s Studies International Forum.
Koçabicak, E. (2023). The causes and the consequences of the patriarchal state: Evidence from Turkey. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Moghadam, V. (2023). Gender regimes, polities, and the world system: Comparing Iran and Tunesia. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Shire, K. (2023). Social democratic imaginaries of transformation in conservative gender regimes. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Walby, S. (2023). Authoritarianism, violence, and varieties of gender regimes: Violence as an institutional domain. Women’s Studies International Forum.
Weldon, S. L., Lusvardi, A., Kelly-Thompson, K., & Forester, S. (2023). Feminist waves, global activism, and gender violence regimes: Genealogy and impact of a global wave. Women’s Studies International Forum
The webinar launching the special issue took place on 15 September 2023. The recording of the event is now online!