Gender and Transnational Media

Abstract

This editorial introduction explains that in conceiving of this special issue, we were particularly interested in how mediated practices intersect with political contexts within a transnational frame. We set out to explore how gender-based social movements are currently circulating via transnational media, and thus afford diverse kinds of interventions in issues of social justice. Each article in this issue starts from a specific location and traces the trajectory of media texts and gendered collective subjects as they both move within and across national boundaries. Differences within specific uses of “transnationality”, located within grounded feminist critiques, emerge from reading these cases together. While the articles in the special issue do not deal centrally with the topic of the global COVID-19 pandemic, their critiques of the role of gender in transnational media—in various contexts—all point to the pressing need to think beyond the politically limiting optics of national histories and the boundaries of the nation-state, which we would argue is needed now more than ever.