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This document provides brief biographical information about various contributors to the Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds and have expertise in fields such as law, gender studies, literature, history, sociology, and art. Their research interests cover a wide range of topics including queer studies, reproductive justice, feminist theory, climate justice, and international law. The contributors have published books, articles, and essays on their respective areas of expertise and are actively engaged in academic and activist work. [Extracted from the article]

In this article we examine three transnational women's movements in countries currently led by dictators—Nicaragua, Russia, and China—to uncover lessons they might offer feminist activists across the world as authoritarian regimes increase in the context of globalization. Although the rise in feminist action within these countries paralleled social movement mobilization elsewhere, what distinguishes feminist activism in these three countries is the national political context in which they each operated: a demonstrably repressive turn in which feminist activities became dangerous. In the three countries under investigation, the leaders' rise to power included feminist repression. To understand how these three different states could evolve from encouraging feminist action to engaging in strategic repression a decade later, we examine oral history interviews with feminist activists in Nicaragua, Russia, and China that were recorded as part of the Global Feminisms Project. Thus, we had thirty-seven unique first-person accounts of the period in question from the perspective of feminist activists. Our analysis suggests that these states employed three mechanisms that disempowered the women's movement over time: suppression of the international flow of ideas and funding, state control of the media, and public criminalization of dissent and activism. We focus on the first as critical to transnational feminism and review the other two as enhancing the effort to suppress the flow of ideas, people, and funding. Among other implications, the conclusion suggests that to protect feminist activism, we directly work to protect the free flow of ideas and funds across national boundaries, as well as a freely operating media that conveys accurate information, and freedom of protest and dissent where they currently exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the Rage special issue, feminist and legal scholar Sarah Deer (Muscogee [Creek]), University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, and Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw), associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, engage in a powerful roundtable conversation moderated by the Rage special issue editors Harvard feminist professor Durba Mitra and UCLA feminist professor Sarah Haley. In their rich exchange, we learn of the role of rage in Indigenous feminisms today. The roundtable explores critical issues for thinking the feminist, queer, and trans politics of rage among Indigenous communities—sexual violence, settler dispossession, the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, survival in the face of institutional and social violence, and the importance of Indigenous solidarity with social movements for Black lives in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We use feminist standpoint theory to investigate how the intersection of identity influenced wealth loss following the Great Recession among older single adults who benefitted from the social movements and legislative gains of the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back on more than a decade of recession and recovery, this study explores how intersections of race, class, and gender produced different wealth outcomes for the early baby boomer EBB cohort. Method: A sample of older baby boomers from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study was selected at two waves, 2004 and 2016. We used a generalized estimation equation with interaction effects to test changes in wealth over time for different race and gender groups. Results: Controlling for income and health, we found that both single Black and white women lost wealth at significantly higher rates than single white men. Poor health was associated with wealth shocks, or substantial wealth loss, for single white women, whereas the intersection of race and gender was associated with wealth loss for single Black women. Black women in this cohort ended the Great Recession with $85,000 less than their peers based on the overlapping identities of race and gender independent of health trouble. Conclusions: The policy history of women's credit and lending access, as well as predatory targeting during the subprime lending crisis, contextualizes our findings. We discuss policy approaches to prevent future wealth erosion in households headed by Black women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates two photographs. The first image has come to represent Rodrigo Duterte's drug war. The second captured a group of women marchers during a 1984 anti–nuclear power protest during the Ferdinand Marcos era. As the visual framing of the drug war focuses upon enumerating the number of dead in ways that discount the conditions of Filipina women's lives, I argue that the marginalization of women within the visual regime of the drug war offers insight into the complexities of Philippine authoritarianism and extrajudicial violence. I contextualize Duterte's power as part of a longer history of women's subjectification under Philippine authoritarianism and its claims for a new national sovereignty. Ultimately, this essay argues that the position of women within state regimes illustrates the power to order death and manage life through their reproductive labor. Filipina women's collective refusal points to other forms of personhood that activate and enable various forms of resistance against state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transnational work that since the 1990s has increasingly opposed abortion in terms of protecting women. It therefore explores how pro-woman rhetoric is used to foster right-wing politics by way of, and beyond, the fight over abortion. Narratives depicting white women as dupes of a sordid, satanic system of abortion provision ignore the fact that most women report feeling relief—not grief, regret, or trauma—after terminating an unwanted pregnancy. To get a sense of the political and cultural influence that right-wing movements gain when they play the woman card, we must trace antiabortion collaborations transnationally. Reading representations of "woman" cross-culturally and intersectionally, this article analyzes the political collusions and cultural work achieved by depicting white women as victims of abortion. To do so I focus on three countries where national identity is especially bound up with whiteness and where abortion is particularly contested: Ireland, Russia, and the United States. This cross-cultural look at antiabortion collaboration reveals a transnational traffic in tactics, personnel, and funds that fuel right-wing politics and ideology and that therefore contribute to the global rise of the Right that characterizes the contemporary moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory was a shock for feminist scholars, yet it was no surprise to his legion of supporters in alt-right digital spaces. In this essay, we analyze one of the online forums that helped propel Trump to electoral victory. Drawing on social movement concepts and an analysis of 1,762 posts, we show how leaders of the forum the "Red Pill" were able to move a community of adherents from understanding men's rights as a personal philosophy to political action. This transition was no small endeavor. The Red Pill forum was explicitly apolitical until the summer before the 2016 election. During the election, forum leaders linked the forum's neoliberal, misogynistic collective identity of alpha masculinity to Trump's public persona and framed his political ascendance as an opportunity to effectively push back against feminism and get a "real" man into the White House. We argue that while previous research shows the importance of alt-right virtual spaces in creating and maintaining racist collective identities, we know very little about how men conceptualize gender in ways that inform their personal and political action—and this is to our detriment. We conclude the essay by arguing that feminists need to understand how men cultivate extreme personal and political identities in online forums so that we can better understand how new technologies are used to move individuals from the armchair to the streets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue of Signs , the contributors address the complex and powerful relationship between gender and the rise of the global Right. This discussion demonstrates how, in transnational terms, the Right has become a significant player in gender politics. It resists the denaturalizing, deconstructive analysis of gender and sex in critical, feminist, and queer scholarship and directs its efforts toward reinstating dominant essentialized gender and sexual norms. These efforts are often coupled with assertions of racial, ethnic, or religious majoritarianism. There is no one formula in responding to this right-wing ideological creep, but one thing is certain: feminist and other progressive groups need to seriously engage with this phenomenon. The compilation of articles for this special issue is one such effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issues of feminism in Eastern European women. According to the author, the film "Occident: offers an overview of a new Europe and motivates reflection on the European Union predicament and women empowerment. Furthermore, the essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," by Gayle Rubin presents a feministic approach and used as a point of departure to consider its the issues.

The article discusses the cultural significance of childcare services. The author examines the links between childcare services and gender equality in feminist discourse, specifically focusing on the view of free twenty-four-hour day care as a key element of women's liberation. The author claims that childcare programs in Canada and the United States are severely underdeveloped, since they are seen as a private family problem in these countries. The economic aspects of expanded childcare and early childhood development services are analyzed.

In her 1560 sonnet sequence, Anne Lock's poetics offer a new understanding of the emergence of poetic subjectivity in early modern verse. Lock constructs an abject poetic persona based on biblical figures of penitent sinners and unprofitable servants, and simultaneously authorizes herself as a talented biblical exegete, a Calvinist, and a poet. This article uses Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject to examine Lock's construction of spiritual identity. Additionally, Kristeva's theories of the semiotic and the symbolic elucidate tensions within Lock's verse between poetic and sacred discourses, and illustrate how Lock defies conventional disapproval of women speaking publically, while asserting her identity as a member of the Geneva exiles' reform movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses postmodern feminism in Italy and the role of new social movements paradigms in the transformation of the Union of Italian Women. The case of the Union of Italian Women shows the difficulties in merging a new postmodern feminism with traditional firms of political organization and practice. The implications of postmodernism and poststructuralism was explored by feminists since the 1980s for their own practices and ideals. The Union emerged as the new vehicle for the continued political participation of women, with its goal to address social problems, including women's issues.

The article presents a literary criticism on several works that focused on black feminism in the U.S. This literature explores works informed by the tenets of black feminist criticism, readings that focus on the intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality with an eye toward equality and justice, criticisms that emerges from those whose positionality has made them experience physical, psychic, and economic violence at the hands of the country from within its borders which provides a unique insight into the workings of this global, imperial power.

The article offers information about the feminist movement, the feminist theory, and feminism in France. In this literature, the author holds that until turbulent and mesmeric episodes of the feminist history is treated as history rather than as mythic in origin, it will be difficult to call into question the subject of feminism and women without seeming to threaten the feminist utopia itself, and it will prevent people from providing a more radical critic of the French republican doctrine, especially regarding the topic of feminism.

The article offers information about biopiracy in the Philippines as analyzed by social movements which analyze and address biopiracy in diverse ways. It is noted that biopiracy has not been a central issue for the general women's movement in the country except for indigenous and peasant women's movements. One factor that can explain this is that women's progressive organizations have been preoccupied with body politics issues such as sexuality and health, reproductive rights, violence against women, and trafficking, along with other concerns such as women's participation in decision making as well as peace, land, and wage issues.

The article focuses on the issues regarding a cyborg theory of coalition. The author examines the sense of bounded identity in order to work with threatening and frightening others. The proposed alternative, cyborg feminism, drew upon a different understanding of the self that had been developed by women of color and charged white feminists with the task of dismantling their exclusive notions of woman. According to the author that one of the most important steps for a new feminist figuration of identity is acknowledging that certain persistent Western dualism is systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers and animals.

The article focuses on the issues regarding the social and political theory of feminism. It has been mentioned that political action will be dynamized rather than compromised by a more alive observation of economic organizations and activities. The author has suggested that feminist social theorists across the disciplines must join the several feminist economists who are dropping the negative one-size-fits-all prescription of protection from markets. It is essential to have more positive results in the complex contemporary economies.

The author reflects on the transformation of the context of feminist knowledge production due to the geopolitical shifts and the cognitive shifts generated by feminist activism and scholarship. Signs, as the leading journal in feminist scholarship, had served both as a journal of record, which tracks the raced and gendered effects of ongoing geopolitical transformations, and as a principal agent that shapes the emergence and growth of interdisciplinary feminist studies.

The article discusses the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States under various dimensions. The supporters of these black power and the Feminist Movements in the 1960s and the 1970s tried to create a world where they would be safe and influential. However, these participants tried various ways to pursue their goals. The activists of both these movements considered that their goal was to defeat their opponents such as the Black power activists tried to overpower the "White supremacy," and the feminist activists aimed to overthrow the "Male supremacy." These two movements shared some similarities during their struggle including their traits, strategies and goals. According to activist and writer Audre Lorde, there is a pretense to homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood, which in fact does not exist.

The article focuses on feminist interpretations of the philosophical canon. Feminist scholarship grew out of an active social movement that began in the late 1960s. The political origin and the practical orientation of feminist scholarship are compatible with feminist scholarship contribution to that is now called the history of philosophy. The explicit political goal of feminist scholarship puts in on a collision course with philosophy's traditional self-image as the disinterested search for truth and knowledge. The author argues that feminist work on the history of philosophy is divided into three specific categories.

The article focuses on contemporary perspectives from human development and its implications for feminist scholarship. Several theories on developmental psychology are described that focused on childhood that could enrich feminist work. The author proposes that developmental theories could contribute to feminist accounts by clarifying the processes by which change occurs. She concludes that by asking whether "developmental feminism" should be a new feminist theory or should simply add a new dimension to each existing feminist theory.

The article is an attempt to respond to criticism on feminist animal care theory. The author has concluded that many of the critics have misapprehended the original message of the feminal animal care theorists. She hopes to reposition the discussion to emphasize the dialogical nature of care theory. She is also proposing to shift the epistemological source of theorizing about animals to the animals themselves. Rejecting the imperialist imperative in the scientific method, humans must cease imposing their voice on that of animals.

The article presents a discussion related to the moral and emotional regulation of antiracism and feminism. Rage, tears, and confusion often follow even the most tentative discussions of racism and explorations of antiracism. Feminist scholars in particular have observed that antiracist challenges in feminist organizations and classrooms can elicit emotional responses from white feminists. Researcher Ruth Frankenberg's well-known research on whiteness, for example, stemmed from her own despair over white feminists' limited repertoire of emotional responses to charges of racism. It becomes clear that while emotional aspects of solidarity have always been vital to building progressive communities of feminists and other activists, they are also the unsteady foundations on which antiracist change falters. However, there have been few sustained observations of how and why these emotional responses have been able to block, defuse, and distract from change in feminist, pedagogical, and social movement sites.

Feminist economics is a knowledge project that works toward a feminist transformation of economics. Using gender as an analytical category, feminist economists have shown that unquestioned and unexamined masculinist values are deeply embedded in the theoretical and empirical aspects of economics. Feminist economics is concerned with women's economic well-being, but economic well-being often has much to do with class as it does with gender. In this article, the author argues for a methodological pluralism in feminist economics that encompasses both empiricist and interpretive approaches.

The article examines the role and position of feminism and feminists within the anti-globalization movement. The author of this article proposes that feminists are the "Skeleton Women" haunting this movement. One strategy for the investigation is suggested in a parallel debate about the relationship between the anti-globalization movement and anti-racist struggle. The powerful metaphor of "Skeleton Woman" is used to convey the inexhaustible and growing opposition to the policies of global elites, sharply revealed at the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington, at the end of 1999.

The article reports on feminists embracing intersectionality, that is, the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations. One could even say that intersectionality is the most important theoretical contribution that women's studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far. Yet despite the emergence of intersectionality as a major paradigm of research in women's studies and elsewhere, there has been little discussion of how to study intersectionality, that is, of its methodology.

Discusses feminism and Christianity in the historiography of women and gender in the contemporary period. Discussion on the combination of treatments that combine attention to religion and feminism as historical phenomena; Critical accounts of religious feminism that share common assumption with accounts of feminist history that exclude religion; Reason for the importance of the inclusion of religion within the historical assessment of feminism.

Addresses the impact of worldwide catastrophes on the state of feminism in the motion picture industry in the U.S. Challenges facing future feminism; Connection among intellectual work, discursive frameworks and sociopolitical realities; Overview of the feminist film theory.

Explores how the death of feminism is represented in order to plumb the larger meanings embedded in proclamations of feminism's symbolic demise. Role of the obituary and narrative accounts of evolutionary extinction as mechanisms by which feminism's death has been produced; Exploration of how particular assumptions about the ontology of feminism are tied to specific forms of metaphorical death; Efforts to undermine feminist struggles for social justice.

Feminism and performance theory share a focus on endangered and engendered live bodies. Both concern complex and highly contested discourses with immediate relevance to current issues of technology, politics, media, and the production of meaning in the field certainly testifies to the vitality and prominence of the feminist critique in performance studies. The works under consideration illustrate how the feminist critique of performance serves as a lens through which the intersection of sociology, semiotics, body theory, film studies, cultural studies, literary analysis, and psychoanalysis may be perceived.

The article focuses on psychoanalysis and feminism in postcolonial time. In psychiatry and academic psychology programs, psychoanalysis is notable mostly for its absence. Managed care has eliminated payment for most long-term forms of therapy. Analytic institutes have been compelled to alter their former restriction of full training to medical school graduates, and this has intensified the demedicalization and diversity of American psychoanalysis. The theoretical and political developments entail profound challenges to feminist psychoanalysis, including the self-understandings and self-representations of those engaged in its practices.

Castration, in particular, has always been particularly troublesome to feminists. Women are castrated. Femininity is an effect of castration, woman is a void, a nothingness. The great majority of practicing analysts have long since abandoned classical Freudian and Lacanian femininity theories and quite rightly insist that they do not analyze women with such notions in mind. This article is based on the assumption that psychoanalysis does not need a theory of femininity at all. Psychoanalysis does not need such a theory of sexual difference. What it does need is a new understanding of the wide range of different ways of becoming a woman in the world.

The article focuses on women's activism and social movements in contemporary conditions of globalization. The effectiveness of the global women's movement surely rests on its ability to heed local concerns. The framing of violence against women not only screens out local constructions of events, but it deflects attention from other issues of social justice, notably the material forces that oppress women. By the late nineties, violence against women was not only a feminist issue that concerned women's groups; it had become an international development issue.

The goal of this article is to evaluate the success of the state socialist women's emancipation project through comparison with the achievements of a comparable capitalist society. Hungary underwent a rapid social transformation along the principles of Marxism Leninism, while Austria followed a relatively smooth capitalist development into the twentieth century. Gender inequality in the workplace decreased considerably over time within state socialist Hungary, and, relative to women in capitalist Austria, Hungarian women had a significantly better chance of career advancement.

The article focuses on the theoretical, historical and political implications of feminist criticism to eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The author argues that under the conditions in this region, several Anglo-American feminist criticisms of liberalism do not apply, while others have a very different significance. A feminist defense of central aspects of liberalism is a primary issue in eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union and that those criticisms of liberal thought that are important in the region are often not the Anglo-American feminist criticisms of liberalism.

The article focuses on the attack on hegemony of Western cultural feminism by women from developing countries. The idea of a global sisterhood erases important differences in power and access to resources among women of varying races, ethnicities, and nationalities. Western feminists and their nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been employed by the multilateral and bilateral aid communities to help women in former socialist countries survive the process of economic transformation. Cultural feminism refers to a specific package of discourses and practices that promote the idea that women and men are essentially different because of inherent biological differences.

In this article the author will explore, among other issues, the intertwining of the colonial moment, the politics of fieldwork, and the politics of representation in feminist scholarship and development studies by revisiting the processes of theory making and knowledge construction in an environment of unequal power relations and cultural difference. The author will use the different features and methods of feminist engagement in Africa to propose what the author calls nego-feminism, the feminism of negotiation; no ego feminism, as a term that names African feminism.

In Israel, often people date the beginning of the women's peace movement arguably the strongest movement for peace in the Middle East-from the creation of Women in Black in Jerusalem in January 1988. Until then, there were more women than men in the Israeli peace movement that was plainly visible at any peace rally-though we did not have a public voice to represent the numbers. But the women's peace movement in Israel is more than just the vigils of Women in Black. It was more varied because women did not just hold vigils but engaged in a wide variety of activities-dialogues between Israeli and Palestinian.

In an introduction to their influential collection "Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures," M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty suggest as a crucial feminist task the elaboration of "a working definition of feminist democracy which is anti-capitalist and centered on the project of decolonialization." A focus on ways that women have been excluded from democratic institutions and processes has been a central mode of critique for feminists, and generating increased participation has been a primary goal. In this essay, the author will argue that, in addition to focusing on exclusion, people must critically examine new forms of democratic inclusion fostered by the interacting processes of development and globalization.

Like feminist scholarship generally, feminist bioethics has been continually remaking itself as new issue emerging and conceptual shortcomings surface. This article has sprung from the author's growing realization of a limitation in feminist bioethics. An overlapping concern is the tendency of rights-based theories to lapse into a rigid individualism that disregards the basic human needs of socially excluded groups. Developing this thread, feminists from a variety of traditions have spoken out about an overemphasis on individual rights, how it lends itself to an impoverished sense of personal and social values,and how it neglects other moral aims that are not expressible as matters of individual preference-relational ties, sexual equality and a nurturing stable child-rearing environment.

Presents an examination of two socialist feminist organizations in Boston, Massachusetts in the late 1960s and 1970s, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective. Description of the organizations; Charge that the white women's movement was racist; Analysis of the women's movement; Study of the second wave of the women's movement; Factors which divided women other than race; Evidence of racism within these two women's organizations.

Argues that not only is feminism appropriate for Latin America, but it also is the kind of thriving, broad-based social movement that many other feminist movements are still aspiring to become. The general picture of the political trajectory of Latin American feminists during the 1970s and 1980s; View of feminist development in Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole.

Presents a reconstruction of the feminist process of synthesis of women activists in the United States. Disagreement among them as to how to achieve a combination of formal equality and gender difference; Their writings suggested a feminist theoretical process of how to reconceive gender equality; How unequal power relations turned biological differences into socially constructed, substantive gender inequalities; Public policies based upon gender equality.

The article presents research which focused on women elementary-school teachers and the Feminist Movement. The articulation of the dissatisfaction of women in general was the responsibility of the Movement. The Movement has focused its attention on the inequality of women in the society and the discrimination against them in employment and education.

This article comments on the analysis by Sally Engle Merry and Rachel E. Stern of the female inheritance in Hong Kong. The article points out that Merry and Stern offer an eloquent and perceptive theorizing of local translation of global rights. Essentially, they examine how gender equality and human rights could be used to deal with discrimination against women by traditional cultures.