Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice

Contributors include Kate Bedford, Jon Binnie, Erika Bornová, Laura Briggs, Ann Cammett, Lisa Duggan, fierce pussy, Mary Margaret Fonow, Suzanne Franzway, Chitra Ganesh, Deborah Grant, Josephine Ho, Janet Jakobsen, Naomi Klein, Esperanza Mayobre, Mandisa Mbali, Carrie Moyer, Martina Pachmanová, Sheila Pepe, Svati Shah, Anna Marie Smith, Neferti Tadiar, Michalene Thomas, Fatimah Tuggar, Katerina Vincourova, and Ara Wilson.

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.

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 (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.