Obscured Intersections - A special issue?

There is an increasing call across the social sciences for theorisations of racism that can capture European specificities (Boulila 2019; Lentin and Titley 2011, Wekker 2016). This special issue showcases anti-racist contributions to the field of gender and politics in Europe. Developed as a subfield of political science, gender and politics research in Europe can be traced back to the 1980s (Lovenduski 2015). However, it was not until the early 2000s that the field was recognised by leading European journals and associations (Ahrens et al. 2021). From the outset, scholars of gender and politics have challenged epistemic hierarchies in political science and IR relating to the disciplines’ androcentric canons (ibid.). Nonetheless, 20 years on, and despite increased pluralization and interdisciplinarity, some voices have argued that the field continues to produce marginalisation through limited engagement with race and racism (Ahrens et al. 2021; Cavaghan 2020, Cho et al. 2012, Haastrup and Hagen 2021, Kocze 2018), and operationalization of intersectionality divorced from Black feminist normative concerns (Christoffersen 2023, Christofersen & Siow forthcoming). Furthermore, scholarship on intersections of gender and race remains dominated by theorisations originating from the North American context, which do not always translate well to capture the specificities of European experiences (Emejulu and Sobande 2019). This special issue aims to tackle these lacunae by theorising and showcasing anti-racist feminist engagements with politics in Europe.