Comments from the Editor-in-Chief

Abstract

The 2018 Janet Blackman Prize has been awarded to Victoria Martín de la Rosa and Luis Miguel Lázaro Lorente for How women are imagined through conceptual metaphors in United Nations Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security. This article is reproduced here since it appears it was not printed in the issue to which it had been assigned (Issue 8, 2018). We must apologise for this but also congratulate the authors on their contribution to the journal. Further in this issue, in, Where am I in this story? Levi-Hazan and Harel-Shalev discuss the roles of activist women in militarized societies. The perspectives of Israeli women in non-fiction writings are examined and interviews with them analysed. This study reveals additional knowledge about these writers’ insights into activism, as well as, into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their counter-narratives de-centre Israeli hegemonic masculinity and critique the reality of conflict and war. In Gender Differences in Perpetuating Factors, Experience and Management of Chronic Insomnia, Sidani, Guruge, Fox and Collins compare men’s and women’s self-reports of factors that perpetuate insomnia; their experience of symptoms; its perceived severity; its impact on daytime functioning and the use of strategies to manage insomnia. The study reveals gender differences in the following: perpetuating factors (men took more naps and held more unhelpful beliefs about insomnia, whereas women experienced higher pre-sleep arousal); the perception of insomnia severity (which was higher among women); the perceived impact of insomnia (there was higher fatigue among women); and, finally, in the use of strategies to manage insomnia (higher in women). In Hope is a mistake, if you can’t fix what’s broken you go insane, Du Plooy looks at the fourth Mad Max film (Fury Road, 2015). The authors describe the gender dynamics of this film as significantly different from the three preceding it. They argue that Fury Road introduces a corrective to the earlier films in terms of their reductive depictions of the relations between men and women. This article considers some of the most salient aspects related to the depiction of women in Fury Road and of the relationship between the two main characters, Max and Furiosa. In I’m about to get my tamp on, Mou, Yin and Wang investigate the superstitions and beliefs that prevail in China where domestic tampon brands did not appear until 2016. The study examines the promotional posts of tampons on We Media channels. More than half of the posts focused on the health benefits of tampons, and about a quarter portrayed them as ‘trendy’. While a spectrum of values and ideas co-exist here, the authors argue that these posts reflect the gender equality wave of contemporary Chinese society. In I was completely oblivious to gender, Nash and Moore scrutinise further the persistent underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM); particularly in leadership positions. The authors explore this phenomenon through the leadership experiences of 25 women who were actively seeking to enhance their leadership capacities in STEMM fields. They argue that women seem to be caught in an ‘ideological dilemma’ between recognizing sexism and gender bias in their organizational contexts and seeing their organizations as gender neutral, rendering inequality difficult to articulate and address. The authors suggest that women are problematically bound to a fantasy of success in STEMM in which leadership is attainable through arduous effort. JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 2019, VOL. 28, NO. 4, 371–372 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1591446