The contributions of the issue examine the interplay between gender and emotion and trace the dynamics of rigidity, instability and fluidity within it. Fluidity, in these essays comes in several forms and registers: as ambivalence, circulation and divergence. Our essays explore the interface between the social and the individual as well as the points of tension or cohesion that appear in ways of feeling (out of) gender. In bringing fluidity to the centre of our analysis, this special issue advances an understanding of gender, emotions and their interactions as phenomena in motion and in the process of becoming, rather than fixed. With a geographical scope encompassing Zambia, Turkey, Soviet Russia and India, and drawing on archival histories, individual biographies, ethnographies and explorations of popular culture, we elaborate how gender categories are strengthened, disturbed or made ambivalent by emotions.