Disarranging our album: photography and gender Maria da Luz Correia & Carla Cerqueira This special issue of the journal Comunicação e Sociedade departed from our desire of intersecting knowledges and exchanging looks, proposing a meeting on the border- crossing between photography studies and gender studies. In other words, our willing- ness to consider photography and gender extended a need to think the gaze politically, from the feld of communication sciences. In this context, our intent was to consider the network of asymmetries – gender, but also ethnicity, age, geography, culture and society, among others – as well as the complex bundle of ways of doing and undoing gender, which permeate the everyday circulation of images, and fnally, that cross the media discourses and the artistic fgurations of our contemporary visual culture (Correia & Cer- queira, 2017). This need, already at work in the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School philosopher Walter Benjamin, would have been reinforced, since the second half of the 20 th century, by diferent disciplinary traditions, such as structuralism (Foucault, 1975) cultural studies, psychoanalysis, visual culture studies (Berger, 1972, Mitchell, 2002, Mulvey, 1989, Shoat & Stam, 2006), the french contemporary thought of philosophers like Georges Didi-Huberman (2017) and Jacques Rancière (2008), and of course, the feminist studies, namely post-structuralist and queer (Butler, 1990; De Lauretis, 1987, 1991) and postcolonial (hooks, 1984; Spivak, 1985). In an editorial process in which more than thirty articles were submitted to double- blind peer review, we sought to select and organize the diferent contributions accepted by the reviewers 1 , just like someone who organises and disorganises a collection of pho- tographs, arranging and re-arranging the objects and the problems that appear in this “indisciplined” horizon of photography and gender (Mitchell, 1995; Rancière, 2006; Cor- reia, 2013). Hence, the theoretical frame is already vast in the specifc intersection of pho- tography and gender (Alloula, 2001; Friedewald, 2014; Didi-Huberman, 2012; Sullivan & Janis, 1990; Rosenblum 1994; Humm 2002; Raymond, 2017; Salomon-Godeau, 2017). Likewise, in the more general cross-referencing of media, art and gender, references go beyond any exhaustive enumeration efort. Concentrating on the communication scienc- es feld, and exemplarily in the Portuguese context, the study of media and culture has been profusely fltered by a feminist lens that reveals its dazzling stereotypes, binarisms and exclusions, but which also exposes its trembling breaches of resistance, ambiguity and dialogue (Álvares, 2012; Cabrera et al., 2016; Cascais, 2014; Cerqueira & Cabecinhas, 2015; Cerqueira et al., 2016; Cerqueira & Magalhães, 2017; Martins et al., 2015; Pinto- Coelho & Mota-Ribeiro, 2012; Santos et al., 2015; Silveirinha, 2015). This prolix research in the border-crossing of media and gender is not thus a surprising fact, when we think that the origins of communication theory, linked to the 1 We are sincerely grateful to all the reviewers of this special issue of Comunicação e Sociedade. Without their contribution, the volume could not be edited. Comunicação e Sociedade, vol. 32, 2017, pp. 19 – 27 doi: 10.17231/comsoc.32(2017).2748