Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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"We want to be free in the same way we want our homeland to be free." In the latest Ask a Feminist, Sarah Ihmoud expounds on Palestinian feminism. Listen to her full conversation with Zinaida Miller in your podcast app or on our website! buff.ly/i8STdFU

ICYMI: New Ask a Feminist on Palestinian feminism and its analysis of colonialism, sexual violence, the carceral state, and reproduction. Featuring Sarah Ihmoud and Zinaida Miller - available free.

Sarah Ihmoud and Zinaida Miller discuss what a Palestinian feminist lens reveals about the use of reproductive violence against Palestinian women, as well as sexual violence against both men and women in Israel's carceral system. Listen to the latest episode of Ask a Feminist.

"I think that Palestinian feminist analysis is unambiguous about this: that rape and sexual violence are not incidental to this colonial project. They are structurally constitutive of it." — Sarah Ihmoud Listen to the episode free, or read on our website: buff.ly/4EyT5JX

"Palestinian feminism is about the embodiment of a life-affirming politics and ethics. It’s about an orientation toward Palestinian livability & future, both in terms of daily life and in terms of collective liberatory struggle." --Sarah Ihmoud

New Ask a Feminist! Sarah Ihmoud and Zinaida Miller discuss PALESTINIAN FEMINISM. What can it reveal about the extreme violence of the war in Gaza? About the quotidian violence of life under occupation? Listen in your podcast app or read for free! signsjournal.org/palestinian-...

"We go online to call them to the street." Sofia P. Caldeira, Camila Lamartine & Ana Kubrusly follow Portugal's 2023 International Women's Day march on- and offline, showing how digital & street feminism are tangled together.

Whether it's Polish police archives or Portuguese street protests, feminist businesses or driver's license gender markers, our new issue covers a lot of ground. The theme remains the same: patriarchy finds new ways to adapt, and feminist critique must adapt with it.

Are feminist businesses sellouts to capitalism or sites of resistance? Natacha Bastiat-Jarosz, Florence Degavre, & Alena Sander interviewed 52 founders across Europe & the US and found something more complicated: safer economic spaces.

See how care, abortion, and other feminist aims can be co-opted and weaponized by the state. Our new issue pushes past easy binaries to show what feminist analysis can do in dark political times.

Erica Millar, Carrie Purcell, Fiona Bloomer & Emma Campbell's "Framing a Feminist Abortion" proposes seven principles for feminist abortion care: supported, informed, safe, stigma-free, decriminalized, autonomous, & accessible.

Feminist history has often been written through Western eyes. In this article, Jorūnė Linkevičiūtė revisits socialist feminism in Soviet & postsocialist Lithuania, arguing it deserves its own place, rather than serving as an afterthought to liberal Western frameworks.

See how care, abortion, and other feminist aims can be co-opted and weaponized by the state. Our new issue pushes past easy binaries to show what feminist analysis can do in dark political times.

Solving for X: Gender Markers, the Law, and the Administrative State Juliet A. Williams' article "Solving for X" looks at gender markers on US driver's licenses and finds "not one but two different versions of the X gender marker" currently in use.

Mary Byrne's article "The Right Revives Ophelia" unpacks how Moms for Liberty mobilizes "neoliberal, white feminist rhetorics about girlhood" to fuel panic over trans teens.

"Gender ideology" is now central to MAGA's attempts to roll back feminist & queer gains. Our new issue addresses all of this and more—from anti-trans "Ophelia" panic to conspiracies about "trans medicine" to the two faces of the "X" gender marker.

In our latest Short Takes on Rachel Karp’s The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, we discuss the living history of lesbian bars—from Eve’s Hangout and Maud’s to The Sports Bra and Gossip Grill—asking what it means to build queer community in and beyond the bar. buff.ly/eNIFTRa

June Thomas detects a "faint odor of the puff piece," but nonetheless finds The Lesbian Bar Chronicles full of incredible stories. Read our New Short Takes for free. buff.ly/eNIFTRa

Why do we keep declaring lesbian bars dead, only to mourn them into meaning once they're gone? Our latest Short Takes on Rachel Karp's The Lesbian Bar Chronicles push back on the eulogy narrative. Read for free! buff.ly/GFETj0K

“What would it mean to love lesbian bars while they are still living…still messy, expensive, undercapitalized, exclusionary, reparative, disappointing, thrilling, and in need?” — @msullivanphd.bsky.social in our new Short Takes. Free to read. buff.ly/GFETj0K

Ashley Green pushes us to ask: why do we keep centering bars—spaces built around alcohol—as the default site of queer community? What other spaces are we missing when we focus only on the bar? Read our latest Short Takes on The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, free! buff.ly/GFETj0K

Read Krista Burton’s Short Take on why there’s always “a lesbian bar coming to you soon” and why those spaces still matter—for friendship, desire, and everyday queer life. Read for free! buff.ly/GFETj0K

Krista Burton, Ashley Green, @msullivanphd.bsky.social, & June Thomas respond to Rachel Karp’s The Lesbian Bar Chronicles in our new Short Takes, exploring bar culture, addiction, racism, trans inclusion, and the everyday politics of lesbian spaces. Read for free!

Joanna Wuest's article "Exposing the Gender Identity Industry" examines the paranoid politics claiming a "vast capitalist conspiracy" is driving trans medicine, and why this narrative appeals to the anti-gender right.

Ewa Alicja Majewska's article "Perverted Care in the State of Exception" looks at how care gets "instrumentalized by neoliberal and fascist states," using 1980s Polish police operations against gay men as a case study.

The Summer issue of Signs is out now! As fascism accelerates in the US, this issue addresses some of the questions feminist scholarship tackles best: trans rights, abortion, care, socialist histories, feminist businesses & digital activism.

“In an era where trans people often figure as phantoms, devoid of their names and personal stories, the authors remind us that this 'debate' begins by stripping trans athletes of their full humanity.” - Elizabeth Sharrow Check out this Short Takes on Fair Game!

To close out #Pride, check out our Ask a Feminist “Trump’s Anti-Trans, Anti-Gender Executive Orders” with Libby Adler and K.J. Rawson, discussing Trump's 2025 “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" signsjournal.org/trumps-anti-...

To close out #Pride, check out our Ask a Feminist “Trump’s Anti-Trans, Anti-Gender Executive Orders” with Libby Adler and K.J. Rawson, discussing Trump's 2025 “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" signsjournal.org/trumps-anti-...

#HappyPrideMonth! Check out our multimedia archives “Signs Resources for Trans Rights and Justice” & “Radical Feminism and Trans Rights,” accompanying Breanne Fahs’s essay “The Urgent Need for Radical Feminism Today.” signsjournal.org/catharine-a-...

“What Do We Learn About Protecting Trans/Queer Youth If We Ask a Lesbian Feminist?” Matt Richardson explores the experiences of Stacy D., a Black trans lesbian femme, emphasizing "life as an ongoing quest for self-discovery & community.” #HappyPrideMonth www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Check out Julia Golda Harris’ “Womanly Sounds: Women’s Music and Lesbian Transfeminisms and Transphobias in the 1970s,” which offers musical engagement “as a potent tool for claiming lesbian selfhood in the face of transphobic oppression.” #HappyPrideMonth www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

#HappyPrideMonth! Tamara Lea Spira’s “Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times,” draws from queer ancestors to imagine queer reproductive futurity "within abolitionist, anti-imperialist & anti-colonial movements for justice and life.’” www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Read Emily K. Hobson’s “Women/Lesbian/Prison/Trans? Categories of Mobilization in the Campaign to Change the Definition of AIDS” to learn about campaigns that proved "generative for queer politics & the politics of prison abolition.” #HappyPride www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

#HappyPride! Learn about Marxist-feminist community in Annelise Heinz & Judith Raiskin’s “’It Was Mythic’: Starflower Natural Foods and Lesbian Collective Space,” examining Starflower’s “radical experiment rooted in and oriented toward wider social change.” www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/signs/20...

Check out Cati Connell’s “The Lesbian-Identified Lesbian: Lesbian Feminisms for a Post-Binary Future,” urging reconceptualization of gendered and sexual power, toward "a framework for how to live in an increasingly unlivable world.” #Pride www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Happy #PrideMonth! Revisit the “Lesbian Studies, Now” special issue, which “affirms that to begin with lesbian is to begin with possibilities for survival, solidarity & radical world making” through feminist engagement within a thriving scholarly field. www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/signs/20...

Kara Swanson’s discussion of A Woman’s Work digs into Cleghorn’s sweeping history of “patriarchal motherhood,” where across millennia the same story repeats: control over women’s bodies, dressed up as law, medicine, or morality. Check out the new Signs Short Takes here: buff.ly/Bc4sMzN

What COVID exposed about childcare wasn’t new—it was centuries in the making. Alicia Modestino on A Woman’s Work is a powerful reminder that care has always been essential, and persistently undervalued. Check out her response in our latest Short Takes: buff.ly/Bc4sMzN

From ancient midwives to modern activists, Elinor Cleghorn's A Woman's Work spans 3000+ years of maternal resistance. Join Alicia Modestino, Amanda Montei, and Kara Swanson in conversation, here: buff.ly/Bc4sMzN

“Mothering beyond the biological” is a radical, historical practice. In her comment on A Woman’s Work, Amanda Montei traces how histories of care, coercion, and resistance unsettle both tradwife nostalgia and liberal “choice” feminism. Read our new Short Takes here:

In our new Short Takes, Alicia Modestino, Amanda Montei, and Kara Swanson discuss Elinor Cleghorn’s A Woman’s Work, which challenges patriarchal constructions of motherhood and documents grassroots movements for bodily autonomy and maternal agency. Read it here! signsjournal.org/elinor-clegh...

New Short Takes just published! Alicia Modestino, Amanda Montei, and Kara W. Swanson discuss Elinor Cleghorn's new book A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Motherhood. Check it out for free!

"The knowledge that feminist theory has produced has permeated the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The reason we're a target is because there's no going back. The work that we've done is everywhere." — @jennifercnash.bsky.social of @feministstudies.bsky.social

“If institutions can fold, they can also unfold.” — Debjani Chakravarty, coeditor of @frontiersjournal.bsky.social Our new Ask a Feminist looks at backlash against gender studies and the stubborn survival of feminist scholarship in the US context and beyond.

"As crises get stacked, we are in need of new forms to address them." Patti Duncan, editor of Feminist Formations, discusses the proliferation of genres and methods in response to the current moment. Read or listen at the link!

Scholarly journal editors talking about feminist scholarly writing under authoritarianism. Thanks @signsjournal.org for including us!

What does it mean to mentor feminist grad students when programs are shrinking and jobs are disappearing? Editors describe using the editorial process itself as feminist mentoring and solidarity work. New Ask a Feminist, out now!

Programs closing, departments under attack, digital hate campaigns, AI reshaping publishing—how can feminist journals respond? Hear editors from across the field think through crisis, strategy, & care in our new Ask a Feminist w/ @jennifercnash.bsky.social, Debjani Chakravarty, & Patti Duncan.

New Ask a Feminist! Editors from @feministstudies.bsky.social, @frontiersjournal.bsky.social, Feminist Formations, and Signs explore how Trump 2.0's attacks on WGS are affecting the production of feminist scholarship. Read or listen for free!