Introduction: Feminisms and gender studies: Convergences, divergences, and pluralities

This chapter overviews the focus, structure and cross-cutting themes of the handbook. It speaks to the unique nature of the handbook, which brings together essays from renowned feminist and gender studies academics from the ‘global North’ and ‘global South’, as well as emerging and established scholars. Structured in three parts, the volume offers an overview of the state of the art of feminist and gender studies across the globe in the last 40 years; identifies key cross-cutting theoretical debates and controversies and addresses methodological and empirical research questions signalling the need to promote new approaches. Notwithstanding the geopolitical diversity of the volume, the chapter surfaces emergent themes including the significant institutionalisation of gender studies; resurgence of attacks on feminist scholarship and activists; the strong presence of young scholars addressing new agendas; role of international organisation/s and transnational solidarities and challenges of neoliberal market logics and continued geopolitical inequalities in current academic forms of gender studies. The chapter further points to emergent topics, directions and paradoxes in feminist scholarship represented in the handbook.