Editorial

This issue of Journal of Gender Studies begins with a collection of papers that focus on workplace issues. In the first of these, Abeer Kamel Saad Alfarran shows how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the work patterns of married women in the Saudi Arabian public education sector. Alfarran outlines some of the difficulties experienced by remote women workers, from institutional disrespect for official working hours to weak internet connections, sitting for long periods and the distraction of children. However, women found that remote working and a blended workplace offered opportunities; making work easier in some ways, saving them time, offering a better work environment, allowing them to engage in self-development, for example by taking courses or studying, and creating a better work-life balance. Focusing on software engineering in China, Xiaotian Li examines how this work is gendered through men’s dominance in the sector, the prevalence of geek culture and overwork which privileges men as ideal workers and a hierarchisation of subspecialties which stigmatizes the work that women do. As a result, women in the sector use a range of strategies to navigate and negotiate gender rules and boundaries in the workplace – for example moving between feminine and masculine work styles and forms of appearance strategically to advance their careers. Navjotpal Kaur, Rosemary Ricciardelli, Amber Fletcher and R. Nicholas Carleton consider how public safety personnel – professionals in border services, communication officials, correctional workers, firefighters, paramedics and police, seek out support for their experiences of stress and potential trauma. Focusing on public safety personnel in Canada, they show how gender significantly impacts this, with men tending to rely more on families or spouses for support, while women turn to friend networks, colleagues or formal programmes. The other papers in this issue deal with violence in a range of contexts. The first considers the interrelation of work and intimate partner violence. Stevia Asiimwe, Ruth Nsibirano and Victoria Flavia Namuggala examine intimate partner violence by Ugandan male police against their civilian female spouses – violence which is widely practiced and against which there is little protection. Identifying the ways in which the institutional framework of the Ugandan police force facilitates intimate partner violence, they single out particular aspects of police work such as abrupt transfers, work that separates couples and work overload as significant. They conclude that a range of responses including training and counselling and addressing the culture of overwork are needed. In the second Amanda Keddie, Maria Delaney, Ben McVeigh and Jaylon Thorpe consider violence against women in the context of colonial violence, and the importance of this for Indigenous programmes developed to prevent violence against women. Their paper focuses on an Australian programme and its facilitators and the way that these take into account the impacts of colonization on its participants who are young Indigenous men living with the burdens of trauma. Programmes like this can only work if they are able to build relations of respect with young men and create safe spaces for healing trauma and engaging with issues of violence. Two further papers consider issues of violence and trauma in fiction and art. Cansu Özge Özmen explores Hanya Yanagihara’s challenging novel A Little Life, (2015) which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and which focuses on child sexual abuse, violence, self-injury, death, and male friendship. In particular, the paper shows how A Little Life uses existing literary conventions and motifs to narrate trauma, while also defying norms, expectations and categorization. JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 2023, VOL. 32, NO. 4, 315–316 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2023.2193011