While the current local and global crises may be triggering a new wave of domestic and societal violence, this special issue seeks to explore institutional, structural and gendered forms of violence as well as instances of the silenced ‘Other’ within the modern nation-state, globalization and respective ideologies of hegemony and power.

The proliferation of nationalist accounts and discourses of supremacy in many contemporary societies underscores the contingency of understanding the extent to which gendered and state violence continue to mutiply. By examining these modalities, the special issue proposes fresh critiques, re-imaginations, and new visions of understanding gendered violence in societal relations while opening a dialogue about agency, social justice, and social ties in addressing reactive trends, critical trajectories, political projects and activist solidarities.

This themed special issue aims to explore gendered violence and society through diachronic, comparative, ethnographic and historically-grounded contributions which examine the connections of sociocultural, political and economic crises to violence. It will incorporate critical, theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions which explore diverse approaches, case studies, conceptual framings, critiques, deconstructions, discourses of gendered violence and society in an interdisciplinary manner.

The special issue welcomes a multi-dimensionality of these themes and invites contributions that explore issues of violence and society through feminist and intersectional approaches that incoroporate the prisms of gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, nation, region, age, generation, among others.

In examining gendered violence, society and social justice contributors should reflect the diversity and complexity of intersectional concepts through contributions that seek to problematize, deconstruct, dismantle, critique, subvert, contest and articulate phenomena of gendered violence through robust feminist and intersectional analyses.

We particularly welcome contributions that focus on marginalized voices and excluded groups.

We are interested in topics that include but are not limited to responding to the following questions:

What experiences of exclusion shape the understanding of gendered violence on a local, global and/or transnational level?

What contemporary societal experiences contribute to the understanding of gendered violence?

How does critically informed social theory challenge polarized discourses and extremist ideologies associated with instances of gendered violence?

What theoretical lens, methodologies, and approaches may productively be used to study experiential violence in the complexity of gendered, racialized, classed and wider intersectional dimensions in contemporary societies?

Relevant topics here include:

- intersectional perspectives on violence impacting particular communities, and political activism within those;

- theoretical pieces which conceptually situate violence in the context of feminist, intersectional, sociological, psychoanalytic, postcolonial studies as well as other interdisciplinary approaches;

- comparative accounts of gendered violence;

- explorations of gendered tropes and rhetorics of nationalist discourse; theorizations of the relationship between nationalism, xenophobia; globalization etc. in relation to gendered violence

- discussions of homophobic violence and its effects on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people

- discussions of projects and politics of activism and deconstructions of essentialist/normative notions of gendered violence within the North/South divide;

- critical perspectives on gendered violence and the analyses of racializations, ethnicizations, genocide, war, civil war etc.

- explorations of intergenerational conflicts; cultures of relocation, indigenous societies, multicultural and multiethnic communities, accounts of environmental displacement;

- takes on popular representations and stereotypes, mediations, images and imaginations of gendered violence in media representations;

- analyses of interconnected phenomena of gendered violence and neoliberal globalization;

- critical responses to gendered violence in relation to local crises, xenophobia and nationalist ideologies globally;

- discussions of North/South, core/periphery politics of gendered violence and their relationship to the crisis of the concept of ‘multiculturalism’.


This special issue asks feminist scholars to engage with these questions/issues and to explore alternatives.

An inter- and multidisciplinary journal, Frontiers welcomes submissions of scholarly papers, activist essays as well as creative works such as artwork, fiction, and poetry. Works must be original and not published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. All special issue submissions and questions should be directed to frontiers@osu.edu. For submission guidelines, please consult the Ohio State University Frontiers websites: http://frontiers.osu.edu/submissions.