This special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online stems from a public lecture and colloquium entitled “Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice,” organized by the Barnard Center for Research on Women and generously funded by the Ford Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation. The colloquium, held at Barnard College in New York City, aimed to bring together people working on issues conventionally understood to be about economic justice, such as poverty, structural adjustment, welfare reform, trade agreements and so on, with those working on reproductive and sexual justice, sex workers’ rights, combating HIV/AIDS, and gay, lesbian and transgender politics. It was inspired by several trends, including the (long-held) insistence within feminist circles that love and labor were interrelated; work on how the economic and the sexual are interlinked; analysis of the ways in which globalization is re-shaping kinship, ideologies of romance, and erotic possibilities; and the growing sense, out of alternative globalization movements, that another world was possible wherein previously disconnected struggles were brought together in productive collaboration.1
In addition to this issue of the journal, discussions at the colloquium generated a report published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women as part of their New Feminist Solutions series. The report (NFS4) is available online here (PDF).
This issue of the journal brings together articles exploring diverse and interrelated topics at the crux of sexual and economic justice. We hope that it, in turn, inspires many others to continue working at this important intersection.
- For writing on all of these trends, see, for example, Waring 1988, Barriteau 2008, Hennessy 2000, Young 2003, D’Emilio 1983, Butler 1997, Duggan 2002, Binnie 2004, Babb 2007, Padilla et al 2007, Wilson 2004, Jackson 2008, Oswin 2006, Briggs 2003, Alexander 2005, Cruz-Malave and Manalasan 2002, Steyn and van Zyl 2009. See Introduction for full reference information. [↩]
