Conversations editorial

As a contribution to critical feminist research, this Special Issue offers situated accounts of the contradictory role that the state has played in promoting and hindering the advancement of gender rights agendas in Latin America. The lessons that we learn from this important research, however, have the potential to illuminate many aspects of feminist activism against conservatism all over the world. After all, the political use and manipulation of people’s fears and anxieties to further a restrictive gender-blind or anti-gender agenda is unfortunately not unique to Latin America. Consequently, the need for feminist solidarity across borders – of nationality, class, race, sexuality, and so on – presents itself in all of its urgency. Latin America certainly has much to teach about how to make diversity a strength rather than a weakness, and how to build unexpected alliances. But other contexts – and the Conversations piece that follows is a case in point – also share this need for cross-border solidarity. In this regard, an upsurge of digital media protests and internet mobilizations in very different contexts and under different regimes of violence has generated new opportunities for people to articulate such solidarity.

This Conversations piece by Shirley Xue Yang and Bowen Zhang opens the opportunity for valuable cross-cultural dialogue about the many forms that conservative agendas can take, and how far political propaganda can go in manufacturing a false vision of progressive change and gender sensitivity when, in fact, little has actually been done to further women’s rights. This piece also invites the opportunity for ongoing reflection on the important role that digital feminist protest can play in challenging state narratives about gender equality.

The authors point to the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the many layers of gendered hierarchies that structure Chinese society – from the often invisible care work done by women during the pandemic, to the multiplicity of women’s needs that go unrecognized. They highlight how digital feminist protests exposed the hypocrisy of the Chinese government’s use of de-gendered political symbols to rally youth support, pointing the way to a more systematic feminist resistance to government propaganda.

The Conversations section is an innovative intervention by IFJP which aims to offer space and opportunity to make strong theoretical and practical contributions to feminist debates that do not necessarily take standard academic forms. It may include interviews with prominent or early-career scholars, practitioners, and activists; narratives and short stories; photo essays, artistic pieces, and poetry; film readings; conference reports; and other “non-traditional” modes of scholarly writing.

Interested authors should submit their articles via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rfjp. Please also upload a biographical note and five keywords. Make sure to edit it thoroughly for language and clarity, format it to correspond to the Taylor & Francis guidelines, and identify it as a submission for the Conversations section.

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_conversations_shortcut.

Enquiries should be directed to both Conversations Editors.