Introduction to fishy feminisms: feminist analysis of fishery places

Abstract

Both fisheries and feminism have been the subject of much research spanning academic disciplines and topics for many years. The papers in this themed issue are considered ‘fishy’ in the sense that they are both about fisheries and fish in diverse places, but also because they use a feminist lens, and feminism is often taken as something suspicious that can be doubted by virtue of the social bias associated with the term. Feminism has long offered an understanding of how patriarchal frameworks are embedded within larger structures of societies that maintain social inequities. In their various papers, the authors bring critical insight to understanding the significance of feminist research and its potential for understanding the connections between place and the future of our relationship with oceans and marine ecosystems. This themed issue contributes to a hopefully growing interest in feminist insights to fisheries and ocean/maritime spaces, and addresses more broadly, the argument that (feminist) geography has remained ‘land-locked’.