ABSTRACT
Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives presents transnational and local views of social science gender and women’s studies research by analyzing the historical, economic and political trends that shape the trajectory of these investigations around the world. We describe some of the major unique theoretical and empirical issues that emerge in gender and women’s research in various countries and regions, as well as several common threads that are found across multiple regions. In doing so, we consider the intertwined relationship of gender research to women’s and feminist social movements, and point out the most typical methods used in such research. Of course, in many countries gender and feminist perspectives are well integrated into the social science disciplines, particularly sociology, but in others, they are isolated in the interdisciplinary field of women’s studies. Because we know that the category “women” encompasses a great diversity of experiences, understanding global variation is important in order to comprehend why some research questions (and feminist issues) are of greater concern in one locale versus another.
