Gender, Change and Continuity in Island Communities

In this chapter we present our idea behind compiling this anthology on gender and island communities. We had been pondering the topic for a while, and discussed the possibility of attempting to bring together academics from near and far in a joint volume. Then we came across Marina Karides’ 2017 article on ‘Island Feminism’ and were confirmed in our hunch that there is something peculiar to gender relations and island settings which offsets a need for new intersectional readings of gender and place. In this first chapter, we therefore introduce our take on islands and ‘islandness’, and we discuss how and why we see a necessity in investigating islands as gendered places. Furthermore, we introduce our interest in change and continuity, which is closely interlinked with our preoccupation with the interrelations between global and local worlds. In this way, the short introduction to the book would be that it is about gender in a global/local island world.