We are delighted to be taking over as coeditors of Politics & Gender with this issue of the journal. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to the journal's inaugural editors, Karen Beckwith and Lisa Baldez, who did a superb job in launching the journal in 2005 and have subsequently established its identity as a place for state of the art scholarship on gender and politics. We are indebted to them for their exemplary professionalism, vision, and hard work, and for leaving in our hands such a well-managed journal.
We plan to continue the mission and objectives of the founding editors, who have seen Politics & Gender as “an agenda-setting journal that publishes the highest quality scholarship on gender and politics and on women and politics. It aims to represent the full range of questions, issues, and approaches on gender and women across the major subfields of political science, including comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and U.S. politics.” We welcome research that looks at central problems in politics and political science from the perspective of gender difference, as well as studies that challenge conventional analytical categories, methodologies, and approaches from a feminist or gender-related perspective.
To continue Politics & Gender's evolution as a distinctive and prestigious journal, we envision articles that ask new, interesting and relevant questions. They should be cutting edge, reflecting existing debates as well as opening up new dialogues and identifying new concerns in the subfield. The journal will continue to reflect a wide range of issues, approaches, and methodologies in the study of gender politics and women and politics. We would like the journal to continue to show an appreciation for the ways in which gender intersects with other identities, such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation.
We envision that Politics & Gender will continue to analyze questions of politics through the lens of gender, while critically reflecting on more mainstream methodologies and approaches and engaging interdisciplinary approaches. We are interested not only in topics relating to women and politics but also in approaches that treat gender as a subject of political inquiry. We encourage submissions that examine how politics shapes, or is shaped by, differences between men and women. We define gender as constituting social relations based on a perception of sex differences and therefore distinct from sex. Thus, we are also interested in how gender-based relations of power and advantage are created, maintained, and challenged through the state, as well as through laws, institutional practices, political processes, ideologies, cultures, and other means. Our primary goal is to ensure that the journal reflects the best scholarship in the discipline as it relates to women and gender.
This is an exciting time to be editing a journal like Politics & Gender because it is a moment when new research agendas on gender and politics and women and politics are opening up, and when there is an active dialogue around women's status and rights taking place, both in the United States and globally. We intend for the journal to be seen as a critical resource in informing these debates in the United States and beyond.
Kathleen Dolan is the lead editor. The editorial offices are based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the journal is ably supported by Kim Johnson, who serves as the editorial assistant. As coeditors, we share all editorial responsibilities. In this work, we are supported by an international team of associate editors and an editorial board that includes scholars from all subfields and approaches. We are thrilled to be working with a first-rate team of associate editors: Martha Ackelsberg, Hawley Fogg-Davis, V. Spike Peterson, Sue Thomas (also book editor), and Georgina Waylen.
Recently we moved to a Web-based editorial management system called Editorial Manager, which has simplified and streamlined the technical side of our work. We wish to thank Maura Wittstein of the Aries Systems Corporation for helping as we make the transition a fairly seamless and painless process. We thank our readers and reviewers for their patience with us as we work through the small and somewhat inevitable kinks along the way.
We would like to thank all the people who have helped facilitate the editorial transition in Politics & Gender. First and foremost, we thank the Women and Politics Research Section of the APSA and the outgoing and incoming presidents of the section, Karen O'Connor and Kira Sanbonmatsu. Also, we thank the members of the Selection Committee and are grateful for the trust they placed in us: Lee Ann Banaszak (chair), Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, Karen O'Connor, Elisabeth Prügl, and Michael Britnall.
We especially wish to thank Michael Brintnall, APSA Executive Director, and the APSA staff for providing us with assistance and advice. Their support has made us more aware of APSA's strong commitment to the journal and to the Women and Politics Research Section. Cambridge University Press has offered invaluable support, which we greatly appreciate. In particular, we would like to mention Mark Zadrozny (Senior Editor), Susan Soule (Journals Marketing Manager), Megha Jain (Associate Production Editor), and Pooja Jain (Assistant Editor). And finally, we would like once again to acknowledge Karen Beckwith and Lisa Baldez for their role in making the transition between editorial teams as smooth as possible.
