Introduction: special issue on tomboys and tomboyism

This article provides a critical introduction to, as well as an overview of the articles within, this special issue. The opening portion briefly discusses the history of tomboyism as both a cultural concept and embodied phenomenon. Then, the subsequent paragraphs provide a brief summary of the five essays that comprise this themed edition. In so doing, the Introduction addresses the current state of scholarship on tomboys and tomboyism, while it also highlights possible areas for future study.     

Introduction to the special issue: after trust

‘Trust’ has long been seen as critical to the success and durability of trading networks, and conceptualized as a positive moral sentiment that is embedded in shared kinship, ethnicity or friendship, or in shared frameworks of morality. Other recent studies of business communities suggest that the ability to work in settings characterized by pervasive mistrust is a key factor in the development of commercial acumen and a determinant of success. Here, the authors argue that a focus on trust and mistrust, and an underlying concern with ethics and morality, can obscure equally critical factors that inform the durability of trading networks. They offer ethnographic accounts of different inter‐Asian trading networks active in the city of Yiwu, which is one of China's most dynamic and diverse ‘international trade cities’. Yiwu is home to the largest wholesale market of small commodities in the world, and attracts traders and merchants from across the planet; more than 12,000 foreign traders are also resident in the city. The authors of the articles presented here analyse the durability of these networks in relation to broader geopolitical processes and contexts. They argue that success often depends on the ability to negotiate geopolitical shifts and the fault lines of political identity. They trace traders’ efforts to create institutions that allow them to withstand geopolitical transformations. They also document the ability of trading networks to operate flexibly across different social fields, showing that resilience often depends on the ability to navigate and profit from shifting relations between economic, political and familial domains.     

Introduction to the special issue: Sociology and feminist scholarship

Feminist writers in the seventies angrily criticized the work of male academicians, arguing that what scholarship presented as the norm was in fact white male experience. That critique generated a body of interdisciplinary theory and scholarship. This introduction examines what feminist sociologists mean when they talk about feminist theory—how they use the interdisciplinary theories, and how they apply a feminist methodological stance to generate feminist theory within sociology. It provides a context for understanding the articles that follow in this special issue as examples of feminist research in sociology and as statements of some of the current issues and as problems of concern to feminists in sociology. She is interested in gender, culture, religion and feminist theory. She wroteCharisma and Community: A Study of Religious Commitment within the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and is currently studying witchcraft traditions and the communities that support them.     

Made wrong,excluded, and ignored: Introduction to a special issue on lesbians and the law

Abstract

For some time now, the specific experiences that lesbians have with the law have been considerably overlooked. This is because there is a focus on how gay males have contact with the law, as gay males are the group whose same-sex intimacies are most often criminalized in legislative frameworks. It is rare for the same-sex intimacies of lesbians to be targeted explicitly in legislative frameworks. This special issue therefore focuses on how lesbians have contact with the law. It features articles focused on what the guest editors conceptualize as how lesbians are being made wrong, being excluded, and being ignored by the law, and each of these are outlined in further detail in this introduction. The articles highlight the relational nexus between lesbians and different frameworks, processes, rules, policies, institutions and applications of law, and the far-reaching impacts this nexus produces in the lives of lesbians around the world.     

Space,place, and the materiality of Internet Studies: an introduction to the #AoIR18 special issue

ABSTRACT

In this introduction we are pleased to present the papers invited to the #AoIR18 special issue, and the thematic for the annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference.