Gender & Society invites submission of research articles and conceptual essays that explore the social construction of culturally gendered identities and the lived realities of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in the borderlands. Literally, the borderlands include the geopolitical space around the U.S.-Mexico border characterized by the ongoing movement of people, products and ideas. Gloria Anzaldˆ†a’Äôs theoretical formulation of ’Äúborderlands,’Äù however, postulates the existence of spaces that transcend the geopolitical border area where women, men, and children, adapt, resist and innovate to cope with social inequalities based on racial, gender, class and/or sexual differences. These expressions of agency incorporate spiritual transformations and psychic processes of exclusion and identification’Äîof feeling ’Äúin between’Äù cultures, languages, or places. Within these spaces, marginalized ’Äúothers’Äù voice their identities and resistance. All of these social, political, spiritual and emotional transitions transcend geopolitical space.
In the social sciences, borderlands research tends to focus on transnational social formations, how migrants engage in economic, political or socio-cultural activities that transcend national borders and ’Äúdeterritorialize,’Äù or span international boundaries. Increasingly researchers who use this approach consider multiple sites ’Äì ’Äúsending’Äù and ’Äúreceiving’Äù communities ’Äì to concretize how deterritorialized processes unfold. Another important approach to borderlands emphasizes the social construction of new, hybridized identities where the fluidities of identities are shaped by multiple processes. Both approaches offer ways to identify some of the changes that historically disenfranchised subjects negotiate.
This special issue of Gender & Society seeks articles that utilize either approach or innovations in the field to analyze structural forces and borderlands subjects’Äô individual and collective agency or ’Äúsubjective transnationalism.’Äù Subjective transnationalism refers to individual and collective negotiations for economic and political space in the geographic and psychic borderlands in which they live, work and play.
Key Areas:
The articles this volume will consider include those that reflect a sea change of gender-based strategies and cultural transformations in the borderlands. All methodologies are welcome but paramount in each case is the articulation of borderland voices. Completed manuscripts should be submitted online to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gendsoc and should specify in the cover letter that it is to be considered for the special issue. Manuscripts are due Oct. 1, 2007. For additional information, please contact either co-editor: