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Abstract
The collection of papers we have put together for this special themed section originally emerged from a desire to explore how the rapid and wholescale transformation of everyday spaces brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic might change, challenge and shift experiences and understandings of the gendered body. Since 2020, we have witnessed and experienced the dramatic alteration of everyday mobilities and a concurrent reconfiguration of spatial and embodied relations. The pandemic, and responses to it, has transformed the locations in which subjects routinely situate themselves, and the quotidian bodily practices they participate in, with immediate and lasting impact. Such a moment called for a revisiting of established theoretical and methodological paradigms in feminist geography – many of which developed from within the pages of this journal – which understand the relationship between space and the gendered body to be a mutually constitutive one. If the gendered body is understood as a processual assemblage shaped by the spaces within which it is formed, what do such radical spatial reconfigurations of embodied relations mean for gendered subjects? These papers, then, represent an opportunity to revisit and reflect upon core debates about gender, embodiment, and space in feminist geography, understanding the pandemic via a gendered lens.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like everyone who supported and expressed an interest in this special issue. Thank you to the authors whose work appears in the final themed issue for working with us on requests and comments over an extended period. The editors would like to thank each other for maintaining a kind and intellectually stimulating collaboration, and the Gender, Place and Culture journal editors, particularly Özlem Altan-Olcay, for their patience and support.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Notes on contributors
Rachel Wood
Dr Rachel Wood is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Keele University, UK. Her research examines mediated femininities in digital consumer culture. Her recent work has explored ethical and anti-consumerism on beauty YouTube, and the affective labour of beauty and body work in lockdown. Her current research centres on the labour of zero waste sustainability influencers on Instagram, exploring the challenges faced by content creators in communicating ideas about sustainable consumption on a consumer centric platform. Her work has been published in journals including New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Feminist Media Studies, and she is the author of the Routledge monograph Consumer Sexualities: Women and Sex Shopping.
Hannah McCann
Dr Hannah McCann is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research in critical femininity studies explores feminist discourse on femininity, queer femme LGBTQ + communities, beauty culture, and queer fangirls. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018, and her co-authored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures in 2020, available via Bloomsbury.