Themed Section Editorial

Dis/Positions: Reflections on Gender, Sexuality, Race and Culture

Abstract

The diversity of the articles included in this special issue attests to the ongoing relevance of gender as a crucial determinant of individual and social identity, a key component of political engagement, and a multidimensional field of scholarship. Gender is also a core aspect of dis/positionality, by which we mean the intersections of gender, race, class, human and physical geographies, and any other aspects of identities that are ‘markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities’ (Maher & Tetreault 1993:118; see also Alcoff 1988; Benard 2016; Darling-Wolf 1998). By emphasising gender as productive, plural and constitutive of the dis/positionality of a subject, rather than a quintessential, intrinsic and static constituent of the subject per se, these articles aim to dispel the notion that subjectivity is ‛universal’, and that gender is in any sense binary.