Gender, Sex and Sexuality Grand Challenge

Sex, gender, and sexuality have increasingly become the focus of academic research, within different disciplines as well as contributing to interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary studies. Gender and sexuality studies are identifiable expanding, interdisciplinary fields (Richardson and Robinson, 2015). This is a multifaceted area of research, which has increasingly become recognized as important and as one which can generate new ways of thinking, which challenge traditional certainties and offer new avenues of exploration and new approaches to understanding social relations and transformations as well as addressing the dynamics of contemporary global politics and unequal power geometries. This fast moving field also presents challenges, not least of how to retain an identity and some shared purpose in changing times, when different axes of power compete for attention. Embodiment and the flesh have always been central, if troubling, to gender studies (Howson, 2005), but bodies are very different and are marked by very different sources of power (Woodward, 2009). Sexual politics are often a key motor of activism and change and link theoretical and methodological concerns with praxis and politics, which impinge upon and arise from the personal and often intimate relationships in everyday life (Bates, 2014). This is also a highly contentious field underpinned by debate and disputation, not least through claims that second wave feminism assumed a homogeneous category “woman,” which did not accommodate or acknowledge the heterogeneity of women’s lives and situations, for example, in relation to class, race, ethnicity, generation, and disability (Yuval-Davis, 2006; Alexander et al., 2014). The challenge is to develop interconnections that retain the integrity and identity of disciplinarity while crossing boundaries and forging new conceptualizations and to avoid the limitations of narrowly defined internal disputes. How do we hold onto the political promise and creative capacities of analyses based upon sex, gender, and sexuality, and incorporate critiques of social inequalities and relations, which are based upon diverse social political and cultural divisions and connections.