Reviews of Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences
We give you the scuttlebutt on academic journals—aiding you in selecting the right journal for publication—in reviews that are sometimes snarky, sometimes lengthy, always helpful. Written by Princeton University graduate students and Wendy Laura Belcher.
Gender and Society
For those interested in publishing feminist social science research.
Gender and Society, the journal of Sociologists for Women in Society, is a prestigious, highly cited (as established by research published in the journal itself!) journal publishing empirically-driven articles that approach feminist concerns using social scientific methodology. The journal’s website describes its articles as analyzing “gender and gendered processes in interactions, organizations, societies, and global and transnational spaces”; in practice, the journal is also a space where sociological work about sexuality and sexual identity appears. Each issue contains 5-6 articles, almost all of which are empirically driven. Occasional theoretical comments written on the basis of empirical work also appear, and the journal publishes 9-11 book reviews in each issue and the annual SWS Distinguished Feminist Lecture’s text. The issue on “Theorizing Rape” also reprinted “An Open Letter From Black Women to the Slutwalk.” The journal publishes both qualitative and quantitative work, with a larger number of qualitative articles than in other top sociology journals. Quantitative work over the past five years has analyzed survey data, mapped newspaper articles, or used quantitative content analysis to examine issues such as gender and employment or gendered distributions of care-work—this is not a journal in which quantitative work must be methodologically innovative in order to be published.
Articles’ arguments are frequently framed in terms of feminist goals. This constitutes a significant departure from aim toward value-neutrality that typifies other top journals in the field. They argue, for instance, that they have identified a crucial element of “global justice” or factor in the reproduction of marginalization or inequality in feminist projects, or aim to discern differences between different kinds of feminist goals. It is common for articles to coin a term, such as ““gendered geographies”, “bridgework,” “sexual drama,” “giving sex”—often citing work that has appeared in this journal in order to formulate this new terminology. Another common analytic strategy is to use an existing analytical framework, such as relational work, to characterize new data.
A handy feature of Gender and Society is that it comes with a guide to publication, compiled as part of the “Hey Jane” column of SWS. The guide can be accessed here and provides several important pieces of information for those who hope to submit: first, the journal has an 8% acceptance rate, but upon receipt of “revise and resubmit,” an author’s chances of publication are better than 50%. Second, editors want your work to be in conversation with the journal’s past issues. While I have been told that publication in Gender and Society is dependent on a paper’s framing literature including citation of articles in the journal, not all articles in the past five years directly cited literature from Gender and Society, but all cited authors in the same general conversations or whose other work had appeared in the journal. Third, the journal says they notify authors quickly if papers have been rejected outright and give reviewers’ feedback along with the recommendation for publication within two or three months if the paper is sent out for review.
Useful for Submission
Word Count: ~8500 words
Issues per year: 6
Current volume number: 33
Articles per year: ~36
Citation style: Chicago
Abstract length (if required): 150-200 words
Upcoming special issues (if available): recent special issues have included Gender, Disability, and Intersectionality; Theorizing Rape Through Time, Place, and Relations; Gender and the Sociology of Religion
Relevant Editors: Jo Reger is the current editor
Open access?:
Online?: yes
Website: Gender and Society
About Wendy Belcher
