Gender issues in pandemic times

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world and no one's life was untouched by the measures taken since spring 2020 by governments to contain the virus. The CHANGErs Anita Thaler and Julian Anslinger (IFZ, Austria) and Hana Himi (BBC, Israel) have contributed to an online journal, the fifth issue of the Queer STS Forum, which took this contemporary crisis as a starting point for scholarly and personal reflection.

Between July and November 2020 texts, videos and art has been collected within the gender and STS community (Anne Bremer, Dennis Zuev, Erin Kavanagh, Ester Conesa, Guitarpsy, Hana Himi, Karen Richmond, Zoltán Bajmócy, and haring & the trouts). The voices sent from Macau, Norway, United Kingdom, Spain, Thailand, Israel, Hungary, and Austria related to the questions:

• How did and does the COVID-19 pandemic — and the measures taken in your country — change your work, research, teaching, daily routines and relationships?
   
• Which consequences will only be temporary, which effects will last?
   
• And: How do you feel about all that?
  
   

Additionally, this issue features four papers:

• Elena Lee Gold on "How Might Hyperlinks Express Shyness? and Other Queer Interfaces";
   
• the literary experiment "Feminist Mothering in the Pandemic — A Literary Cadavre Exquis" by a feminist mothering collective coordinated by Daniela Jauk;
   
• Birgit Hofstätter reviewed the 2020 volume "Intersektionalität — Von der Antidiskriminierung zur befreiten Gesellschaft?" (Engl. Intersectionality — From anti-discrimination to a liberated society?) by Christopher Sweetapple, Heinz-Jürgen Voß and Salih Alexander Wolter; and finally
   
• Susanne Kink, Lisa Scheer and Anita Thaler's contribution explores the question of how doing queer family is shaped by and how families use ICT. A question of utmost relevance since many of us have not seen their families for many months in the pandemic.