This special issue was assembled with the goal of improving the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist Security Studies and Security Studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The articles included in this special issue not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, feminists argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. As such, accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics.