Each table of contents below is designed to highlight topics that have remained of enduring interest over Signs' forty years of publication. By no means comprehensive, each list of twenty articles points to the diverse, and sometimes competing, approaches to these broad, overlapping areas of feminist thought and gives a sense of how approaches have transformed over time. In addition to representative articles, links are provided to relevant special issues, article clusters, symposia, and topic pages in the topic model browser. By reading across lists, sidebars, and topics in the topic model, we hope that readers can glimpse the diverse editorial approaches that have shaped the contents of the journal as well as the immense complexity of feminist thought over the past four decades.
The articles listed below demonstrate the longevity of feminist scholars' interest in surpassing unidimensional and additive models to explore the effects of intersecting modalities of power in many areas of social life. Although many of these articles do not explicitly use the term "intersectionality" (many of them predate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's coinage of the term in 1989), they share an interest in the ways that multiple "axes of power" affect subject formations and structures of inequality. (For a recent appraisal of intersectionality's multiple trajectories in contemporary scholship, see Crenshaw, Cho, and McCall's introduction to the 2013 Signs special issue.) The collection reflects black feminists' crucial role in generating the analytical tools that have enabled sophisticated scholarly treatments of the interactions among race, class, gender, geopolitical context, nation, and sexuality, and it highlights the variety of arenas in which intersectional lenses can be deployed—whether in analyses of political movements, cultural productions, historical figures, or political economy.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1977 | Diane K. Lewis | A Response to Inequality: Black Women, Racism, and Sexism | 3 | 2 | |
1979 | Bonnie Thornton Dill | The Dialectics of Black Womanhood | 4 | 3 | |
1979 | Lucie Cheng Hirata | Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America | 5 | 1 | |
1984 | Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich | Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I | 9 | 4 | |
1988 | Deborah K. King | Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology | 14 | 1 | |
1989 | Elsa Barkley Brown | Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke | 14 | 3 | |
1989 | Maxine Baca Zinn | Family, Race, and Poverty in the Eighties | 14 | 4 | |
1989 | Aída Hurtado | Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color | 14 | 4 | |
1993 | Denise A. Segura and Jennifer L. Pierce | Chicana/o Family Structure and Gender Personality: Chodorow, Familism, and Psychoanalytic Sociology Revisited | 19 | 1 | |
1994 | Maria Lugones | Purity, Impurity, and Separation | 19 | 2 | |
1998 | Shu-mei Shih | Gender and a New Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media | 23 | 2 | |
2000 | Edna Acosta-Belén and Christine E. Bose | U.S. Latina and Latin American Feminisms: Hemispheric Encounters |
25 | 4 | |
2001 | Lois Weis | Race, Gender, and Critique: African-American Women, White Women, and Domestic Violence in the 1980s and 1990s |
27 | 1 | |
2002 | Wini Breines | What's Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, and Feminism in the Movement Years |
27 | 4 | |
2005 | Leslie McCall | The Complexity of Intersectionality |
30 | 3 | |
2008 | Pei-Chia Lan | Migrant Women's Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan |
33 | 4 | |
2009 | Leslie Bow | Transracial/Transgender: Analogies of Difference in Mai's America |
35 | 1 | |
2011 | Erica Michelle Lagalisse | "Marginalizing Magdalena": Intersections of Gender and the Secular in Anarchoindigenist Solidarity Activism |
36 | 3 | |
2013 | Dean Spade | Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform |
38 | 4 | |
2013 | Sarah Haley | "Like I Was a Man": Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia |
39 | 1 |
Locating the theory produced by feminist scholars within frameworks of intervention uncovers the embodied, intellectual, and material labor that is implicit in feminist efforts to articulate lives and worlds otherwise. Frameworks of intervention not only index intentional shifts in the use of key thematics, methods, and languages of critique. They also signal the urgency underlying the shared work of disassembling and reconstituting the boundaries of what and who counts in the production and circulation of knowledges. Through these interventions, new landscapes of theory emerge, giving rise to alternative intellectual communities and modes of exchange. In the following selection of feminist theoretical interventions, scholars bring lived experience, geopolitical locatedness, activist practices, and subjugated genealogies to bear on questions of epistemology, power, and the multiscalar stakes of critical inquiry. In the process, these pieces also engage the limits and assumptions of any claim to a unified "feminist theory." The vital effects of these interventions continue to enliven new modes of theorizing-otherwise that reorient and redistribute the conditions of possibility for feminist knowledge-making practices
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1975 | Carroll Smith-Rosenberg | The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America | 1 | 1 | |
1978 | Ruth H. Bloch | Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change | 4 | 2 | |
1979 | Dorothy Kaufmann McCall | Simone de Beauvoir, "The Second Sex", and Jean-Paul Sartre | 5 | 2 | |
1980 | Adrienne Rich | Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence | 5 | 4 | |
1981 | Julia Kristeva | Women's Time | 7 | 1 | |
1982 | Catharine A. MacKinnon | Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory | 7 | 3 | |
1988 | Linda Alcoff | Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory | 11 | 1 | |
1989 | Patricia Hill Collins | The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought | 14 | 4 | |
1991 | Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham | African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race | 17 | 2 | |
1995 | Layli Phillips and Barbara McCaskill | Who's Schooling Who? Black Women and the Bringing of the Everyday into Academe, or Why We Started "The Womanist" | 20 | 4 | |
1996 | bell hooks | Sisterhood: Beyond Public and Private | 21 | 4 | |
2000 | Claudia de Lima Costa | Being Here and Writing There: Gender and the Politics of Translation in a Brazilian Landscape | 25 | 3 | |
2000 | Uma Narayan | Undoing the "Package Picture" of Cultures | 25 | 4 | |
2001 | Paula M. L. Moya | Chicana Feminism and Postmodernist Theory | 26 | 2 | |
2002 | Chandra Talpade Mohanty | "Under Western Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles | 28 | 2 | |
2003 | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination | 28 | 2 | |
2010 | Sara Ahmed | Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness | 35 | 3 | |
2011 | Jennifer Suchland | Is Postsocialism Transnational? | 36 | 4 | |
2012 | Raewyn Connell | Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics | 37 | 4 | |
2014 | Shatema Threadcraft | Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto | 39 | 3 |
The critique, evaluation, and reorganization of the methodological grounds of knowledge production have constituted central concerns for feminist scholars published in Signs. The articles included in this curation evidence the vast diversity of methodological approaches engaged and reshaped by feminists across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Early interventions reconfigured epistemological assumptions, methods of inquiry, and standards of evidence used in the traditional disciplines (e.g. history, anthropology, literary criticism, international relations, or sociology) in order respond to research questions that foregrounded women's lives as well structures of power articulated around gender, sexuality, race, and class differences. The feminist commitment to interdisciplinarity has produced methodological innovations that foreground the experience of non-Western women, interrogate Orientalizing registers of representation, problematize positionality, and denaturalize liberal hegemony in the production of feminist knowledge and in feminist imaginings of social and economic justice.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1976 | Joan Kelly-Gadol | The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History | 1 | 4 | |
1977 | Ximena Bunster B. | Talking Pictures: Field Method and Visual Mode | 3 | 1 | |
1980 | M. Z. Rosaldo | The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding | 5 | 3 | |
1986 | Susan N. G. Geiger | Women's Life Histories: Method and Content | 11 | 2 | |
1989 | Mary E. Hawkesworth | Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth | 14 | 3 | |
1991 | Kathy E. Ferguson | Interpretation and Genealogy in Feminism | 16 | 2 | |
1994 | Jane Roland Martin | Methodological Essentialism, False Difference, and Other Dangerous Traps | 19 | 3 | |
1996 | Minrose Gwin | Space Travel: The Connective Politics of Feminist Reading | 21 | 4 | |
1997 | Susan Hekman | Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited | 22 | 2 | |
2001 | Patti Lather | Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography | 27 | 1 | |
2005 | Shahnaz Khan | Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age | 30 | 4 | |
2005 | J. Ann Tickner | Gendering a Discipline: Some Feminist Methodological Contributions to International Relations | 30 | 4 | |
2006 | Lisa M. Diamond | Careful What You Ask For: Reconsidering Feminist Epistemology and Autobiographical Narrative in Research on Sexual Identity Development | 31 | 2 | |
2009 | Meena Khandelwal | Arranging Love: Interrogating the Vantage Point in Cross-Border Feminism | 34 | 3 | |
2009 | Juliet A. Williams | Unholy Matrimony? Feminism, Orientalism, and the Possibility of Double Critique | 34 | 3 | |
2009 | Maura A. Ryan | The Introduction of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the "Developing World": A Test Case for Evolving Methodologies in Feminist Bioethics | 34 | 4 | |
2010 | Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd | Critical Race Black Feminism: A "Jurisprudence of Resistance" and the Transformation of the Academy | 35 | 4 | |
2011 | Abigail J. Stewart, Jayati Lal, and Kristin McGuire | Expanding the Archives of Global Feminisms: Narratives of Feminism and Activism | 36 | 4 | |
2012 | Sara O'Shaughnessy and Naomi T. Krogman | A Revolution Reconsidered? Examining the Practice of Qualitative Research in Feminist Scholarship | 36 | 4 | |
2013 | Devon W. Carbado | Colorblind Intersectionality | 38 | 4 |
The following selection locates genealogies within feminist scholarship that explore and trouble impressions of embodiment, subject formation, sexual difference, and the political life of bodies and identities. Capturing these disparate lineages under the rubric of a single category resonates with the enduring challenges feminist scholars face in theorizing differences across multiple fields containing unique stakes, sites, and methods of inquiry. The problem of categorization is in no way novel in feminist theory; some of the earliest work in this constellation ardently questions stable, inherited notions of bodily truth, including the binary organization of sex and gender. Other pieces attend to the management and policing of categories as they are lived and experienced. Earlier interventions facilitate vital exchanges in later feminist scholarship, which situates bodies, identities, and differences within genres ranging from language and institutions to subjectivity, materiality, and the specificities of social emplacement. With continued attention to the problematic parameters of categorization, more contemporary feminist scholars included here take up the liminal sites and structuring absences of prior feminist body-theorizing. Nation, race, disability, and trans experience emerge as some of the many generative sites through which feminist scholars work, expanding the limits of how we can know, talk about, and exist as bodies today.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1976 | Marlene Boskind-Lodah | Cinderella's Stepsisters: A Feminist Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia | 2 | 2 | |
1980 | Rosalind Pollack Petchesky | Reproductive Freedom: Beyond "A Woman's Right to Choose | 5 | 4 | |
1980 | Luce Irigaray (trans. Carolyn Burke) | When Our Lips Speak Together | 6 | 1 | |
1984 | Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby | American Feminism in the Age of the Body | 10 | 1 | |
1986 | Susan Bordo | The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought | 11 | 3 | |
1990 | Suzanne J. Kessler | The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants | 16 | 1 | |
1996 | Marilyn Frye | The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women | 21 | 4 | |
1997 | Rita Felski | The Doxa of Difference | 23 | 1 | |
1998 | Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins | How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler | 23 | 2 | |
1998 | Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook | The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment | 24 | 1 | |
2004 | Rosemarie Garland-Thomson | Feminist Disability Studies | 30 | 2 | |
2005 | Malini Johar Schueller | Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body | 31 | 1 | |
2006 | Diane Price Herndl | Our Breasts, Our Selves: Identity, Community, and Ethics in Cancer Autobiographies | 31 | 2 | |
2008 | Kristin Bumiller | Quirky Citizens: Autism, Gender, and Reimagining Disability | 33 | 4 | |
2010 | Jie Yang | Nennu and Shunu: Gender, Body Politics, and the Beauty Economy in China | 36 | 2 | |
2011 | Deepti Misri | 'Are you a man?': Performing Naked Protest in India | 36 | 3 | |
2011 | Ellen Samuels | Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet | 37 | 1 | |
2012 | David Rubin | "An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name": A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender | 37 | 4 | |
2013 | Sarah Pemberton | Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes | 39 | 1 | |
2014 | Talia Mae Bettcher | 'Trapped in the Wrong Theory': Re-Thinking Trans Oppression and Resistance | 39 | 2 |
Critical studies of science and medicine have been a mainstay in the pages of Signs, challenging these fields' (often exclusionary) claims to objective truth; their privileging of dominant groups (as practitioners and as implicit or explicit norms within research); their historical and continuing participation in the construction, naturalization, and regulation of categories of race, gender, disability, and sexuality; and their increasing (and increasingly regulative) reach into more and more areas of social life. Historical accounts identify how scientific and medical regimes of knowledge have justified the regulation of women's bodies and gendered forms of racialization, often serving national interests. Other scholars link these histories to contemporary social policies or forms of medicalization and geneticization. Nuanced readings of scientific and medical research demonstrate how gender and race inform scientific accounts of animal behavior, anatomy, genetics, and reproduction and how definitions of disability, sex, and sexuality conform to neoliberal forms of responsibilization and trans/national regimes of racialization. But feminist critiques of science seek not only to unmask and expose but to reconfigure the terms scientific knowledge itself, arguing that feminist epistemologies have the potential to produce new questions, new forms of scientific truth, and new knowledges that are simultaneously more complex and more capacious.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1975 | Inez Smith Reid | Science, Politics, and Race | 1 | 2 | |
1976 | Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman | Women in Evolution. Part I: Innovation and Selection in Human Origins | 1 | 3 | |
1978 | Donna Haraway | Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, Part I: A Political Physiology of Dominancea | 4 | 1 | |
1979 | Ann Oakley | A Case of Maternity: Paradigms of Women as Maternity Cases | 4 | 4 | |
1982 | Evelyn Fox Keller | Feminism and Science | 7 | 3 | |
1983 | Gisela Bock | Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State | 8 | 3 | |
1983 | Hilary Rose | Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences | 9 | 1 | |
1986 | Sandra Harding | The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory | 11 | 4 | |
1987 | Londa Schiebinger | The History and Philosophy of Women in Science: A Review Essay | 12 | 2 | |
1991 | Emily Martin | The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles | 16 | 3 | |
1997 | Cynthia R. Daniels | Between Fathers and Fetuses: The Social Construction of Male Reproduction and the Politics of Fetal Harm | 22 | 3 | |
2001 | Sally Markowitz | Pelvic Politics: Sexual Dimorphism and Racial Difference | 26 | 2 | |
2001 | Nilanjana Chatterjee and Nancy E. Riley | Planning an Indian Modernity: The Gendered Politics of Fertility Control | 26 | 3 | |
2003 | Karen Barad | Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter | 28 | 3 | |
2003 | Evelyn Hammonds and Banu Subramaniam | A Conversation on Feminist Science Studies | 28 | 3 | |
2005 | Anne Fausto-Sterling | The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1—Sex and Gender | 30 | 2 | |
2006 | Joan Fujimura | Sex Genes: A Critical Sociomaterial Approach to the Politics and Molecular Genetics of Sex Determination | 32 | 1 | |
2009 | Dorothy E. Roberts | Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia? | 34 | 4 | |
2010 | Olivia Banner | "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation": Interrogating the Genetic Discourse of Sex Variation with Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex | 35 | 4 | |
2014 | Zine Magubane | Spectacles and Scholarship: Caster Semenya, Intersex Studies, and the Problem of Race in Feminist Theory | 39 | 3 |
This collection of articles is an effort to delineate the contours of an extremely wide ranging and heterogeneous body of feminist scholarship that discusses modes of social and political engagement relating to women's rights, sexual politics and social justice. The present compilation chronicles early mobilizations for women's rights, the articulation of feminist and LGBTQ discourses within mainstream institutions, and the creation of autonomous women's groups and communities in ways that challenge widely-adopted periodizations of feminism in waves. Stepping outside the arena of conventional politics and social organizing, several authors explore the politics of everyday resistance through women's practices in voluntary local associations and loosely-structured movements. In the context of an increasingly globalized world, more recent work explores the potential of transnational and intraregional networks as venues for activism and solidarity in productive tension with official intergovernmental organizations like the UN, and maps the transcultural circulation of feminist ideas and the emergence of neoliberal forms of humanitarian activism that deviate from traditional understandings of social justice.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1976 | Linda Gordon | Are the Interests of Men and Women Identical? | 1 | 4 | |
1977 | Susan H. Hertz | The Politics of the Welfare Mothers Movement: A Case Study | 2 | 3 | |
1980 | Alix Kates Shulman | Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism | 5 | 4 | |
1981 | Marianne Schmink | Women in Brazilian Abertura Politics | 7 | 1 | |
1985 | Jack S. Blocker, Jr. | Separate Paths: Suffragists and the Women's Temperance Crusade | 10 | 3 | |
1990 | Mary Fainsod Katzenstein | Feminism within American Institutions: Unobtrusive Mobilization in the 1980s | 16 | 1 | |
1992 | Arlene Elowe MacLeod | Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance: The New Veiling as Accommodating Protest in Cairo | 17 | 3 | |
1993 | Gay W. Seidman | "No Freedom without the Women": Mobilization and Gender in South Africa, 1970-1992 | 18 | 2 | |
1993 | Shane Phelan | (Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics | 18 | 4 | |
1993 | Verta Taylor and Leila J. Rupp | Women's Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism: A Reconsideration of Cultural Feminism | 19 | 1 | |
1994 | Farida Shaheed | Controlled or Autonomous: Identity and the Experience of the Network, Women Living under Muslim Laws | 19 | 4 | |
1996 | Charlotte Bunch and Susana Fried | Beijing '95: Moving Women's Human Rights from Margin to Center | 22 | 1 | |
2001 | Susan Greenhalgh | Fresh Winds in Beijing: Chinese Feminists Speak Out on the One-Child Policy and Women's Lives | 26 | 3 | |
2003 | Sonia E. Alvarez, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro and Marcela Ríos Tobar | Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms | 28 | 2 | |
2004 | Obioma Nnaemeka | Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way | 29 | 2 | |
2007 | Natalie Oswin | Producing Homonormativity in Neoliberal South Africa: Recognition, Redistribution, and the Equality Project | 32 | 3 | |
2009 | Seema Arora‐Jonsson | Discordant Connections: Discourses on Gender and Grassroots Activism in Two Forest Communities in India and Sweden | 35 | 1 | |
2011 | Amal Hassan Fadlalla | State of Vulnerability and Humanitarian Visibility on the Verge of Sudan’s Secession: Lubna’s Pants and the Transnational Politics of Rights and Dissent | 37 | 1 | |
2012 | Magdalena Grabowska | Bringing the Second World In: Conservative Revolution(s), Socialist Legacies, and Transnational Silences in the Trajectories of Polish Feminism | 37 | 2 | |
2012 | Erica E. Townsend-Bell | Writing the Way to Feminism | 38 | 1 |
Feminist encounters with the methods, artifacts, and circuits of transmission within cultural production constitute a significant portion of the critical work undertaken in Signs since the journal's inception. The articles assembled here reflect the varied terms of these engagements by offering up analyses of visual culture, representation, affect and emotion, and the cultural politics of narrative and storytelling. Many of these contributors approach the broad field of cultural production with acute attention to the historical and material unevenness implicit in accessing, legitimating, and extending value to visual and literary cultures. Engagements with the manifold contexts of cultural production—geopolitical, racial, sexual, linguistic—elucidate the very real stakes of rendering social worlds and intimate lives intelligible, given the ongoing proliferation of censorship, silencing, and devaluation. In this curation, reparative readings of canonical Western texts are situated in proximity to subaltern visual politics and practices, queer performance, and public intellectualism. Ultimately, this scholarship demonstrates feminist interventions into the hegemonic division between high and low culture by challenging long-established gatekeeping practices vis-à-vis the meaning, value, and accessibility of cultural production.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1976 | Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen | The Laugh of the Medusa | 1 | 4 | |
1977 | Sandra Gilbert | Plain Jane's Progress | 2 | 4 | |
1979 | Lourdes Arizpe and Carmen Naranjo | Interview with Carmen Naranjo: Women and Latin American Literature | 5 | 1 | |
1980 | Tania Modleski | The Disappearing Act: A Study of Harlequin Romances | 5 | 3 | |
1982 | Alicia Ostriker | The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking | 8 | 1 | |
1984 | Esther Newton | The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman | 9 | 4 | |
1985 | Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi | Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English | 11 | 1 | |
1991 | Lisa Aronson | African Women in the Visual Arts | 16 | 3 | |
1994 | Madhu Dubey | Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal Metaphor of Tradition | 20 | 2 | |
1997 | Marilyn Maness Mehaffy | Advertising Race/Raceing Advertising: The Feminine Consumer(-Nation), 1876-1900 | 23 | 1 | |
1998 | Teresa de Lauretis | Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg's "M. Butterfly" | 24 | 2 | |
1995 | Leela Fernandes | Reading "India's Bandit Queen": A Trans/national Feminist Perspective on the Discrepancies of Representation | 25 | 1 | |
2002 | Amelia Jones | The "Eternal Return": Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment | 27 | 4 | |
2004 | Liza Johnson | Perverse Angle: Feminist Film, Queer Film, Shame | 30 | 1 | |
2004 | Ying-Ying Chien | Marginal Discourse and Pacific Rim Women's Arts | 29 | 2 | |
2006 | José Esteban Muñoz | Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position | 31 | 3 | |
2006 | Eve Oishi | Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure | 31 | 3 | |
2007 | John P. Bowles | "Acting like a Man": Adrian Piper's Mythic Being and Black Feminism in the 1970s | 32 | 3 | |
2008 | Iftikhar Dadi | Shirin Neshat's Photographs as Postcolonial Allegories | 34 | 1 | |
2013 | Michiko Suzuki | The Husband's Chastity: Progress, Equality, and Difference in 1930s Japan | 38 | 2 |
This section demonstrates feminist scholars' steadfast preoccupation with gendered, classed, and racialized manifestations of economic inequality. Along with the impressive topicality of feminist political economy research published by Signs during its four decades of existence (the fact that a total of eleven special issues have tackled labor issues stands as evidence of this tendency), this collection seeks to capture the swift responsiveness of the field to local and global rearrangements in class stratification, relations of production and reproduction, and labor activism. Many of the earlier contributors turned to class analysis to theorize women's participation in rural and industrial economies and their activities within the household as well as across various fields of paid employment. Analytics that foreground the interactions between structures of gender, race, and class emerge soon after, particularly in examinations of that position the family and the household within broader social and political contexts. The neoliberal spatial reorganization of production and reproduction foregrounds the transnational the scale of feminist inquiries into the political economy of emerging socioeconomic phenomena such as commercial surrogacy, carcerality, and biocolonialism.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1976 | Francine D. Blau and Carol L. Juseniush | Economists' Approaches to Sex Segregation in the Labor Market: An Appraisal | 1 | 3 | |
1977 | Ann Stoler | Class Structure and Female Autonomy in Rural Java | 3 | 1 | |
1981 | Heidi I. Hartmann | The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework | 6 | 3 | |
1981 | Lourdes Benería and Gita Seny | Accumulation, Reproduction, and "Women's Role in Economic Development": Boserup Revisited | 7 | 2 | |
1982 | Barbara Evans Clements | Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution, 1917-1923 | 8 | 2 | |
1984 | Kathleen M. Weston and Lisa B. Rofel | Sexuality, Class, and Conflict in a Lesbian Workplace | 9 | 4 | |
1988 | Rose M. Brewer | Black Women in Poverty: Some Comments on Female-Headed Families | 13 | 2 | |
1988 | Linda Blum and Vicki Smith | Women's Mobility in the Corporation: A Critique of the Politics of Optimism | 13 | 3 | |
1992 | Evelyn Nakano Glenn | From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor | 18 | 1 | |
1995 | Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva K. Stasiulis | Making the Match: Domestic Placement Agencies and the Racialization of Women's Household Work | 20 | 2 | |
1999 | Laura E. Donaldson | On Medicine Women and White Shame-Ans: New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism | 24 | 3 | |
2001 | Carla Freeman | Is Local : Global as Feminine : Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization | 26 | 4 | |
2004 | Sarah A. Radcliffe, Nina Laurie, and Robert Andolina | The Transnationalization of Gender and Reimagining Andean Indigenous Development | 29 | 2 | |
2004 | Éva Fodor | The State Socialist Emancipation Project: Gender Inequality in Workplace Authority in Hungary and Austria | 29 | 3 | |
2005 | Mary Beth Mills | From Nimble Fingers to Raised Fists: Women and Labor Activism in Globalizing Thailand | 31 | 1 | |
2007 | Susan Hawthorne | Land, Bodies, and Knowledge: Biocolonialism of Plants, Indigenous Peoples, Women, and People with Disabilities | 32 | 2 | |
2008 | Robyn Magalit Rodriguez | The Labor Brokerage State and the Globalization of Filipina Care Workers | 33 | 4 | |
2010 | Amrita Pande | Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker | 35 | 4 | |
2010 | Genevieve LeBaron and Adrienne Roberts | Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Capitalism and Carcerality | 36 | 1 | |
2013 | Megan Moodie | Microfinance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva.org | 38 | 2 |
From its founding, Signs has been invested in transforming the academy, disrupting disciplinary organizations of knowledge production, and challenging the epistemological conventions and power relations that shape the terms of what counts and knowledge and who can produce it. Founding a journal to publish "new scholarship about women," to quote the first issue's editorial, the editors demonstrated a clear commitment to creating an interdisciplinary space. But they were also committed to taking stock of the status of women working in traditional disciplines and of the state of those disciplines' knowledge about women (see the sidebar for the earliest examples of clusters of review essays, a practice that was sustained for over a decade of publication). Visions for the field of women's studies were subject to contestation from the start. Concern with the geopolitical, material, national, and racial contexts within which women's studies and feminist knowledge take shape also consistently marks the meditations on field formation published in Signs. And, in addition to the generative and transformative role that feminist efforts to reconceptualize academic knowledge have had, feminist scholars have retained a keen sense of self-reflexivity, producing sophisticated accounts of the shifting exclusions, lacunae, and hegemonic impulses contained within the organizational structure of the field, its institutionalized forms, and the conceptual frameworks employed within it.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1975 | Catharine R. Stimpson, Joan N. Burstyn, Domna C. Stanton, and Sandra M. Whisler | Editorial | 1 | 1 | |
1975 | Linda Gordon | A Socialist View of Women's Studies: A Reply to the Editorial, Volume 1, Number 1 | 1 | 2 | |
1979 | Soon Young Yoon | Women's Studies in Korea | 4 | 4 | |
1982 | Marilyn J. Boxer | For and about Women: The Theory and Practice of Women's Studies in the United States | 7 | 3 | |
1986 | Maxine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill | The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Women's Studies | 11 | 2 | |
1991 | E. Maxine Ankrah and Peninah D. Bizimana | Women's Studies Program for Uganda | 16 | 4 | |
1993 | Rosemary Hennessy | Queer Theory: A Review of the Differences Special Issue and Wittig's The Straight Mind | 18 | 4 | |
1994 | Ann duCille | The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies | 19 | 3 | |
1994 | Xiaojiang Li and Xiaodan Zhang | Creating a Space for Women: Women's Studies in China in the 1980s | 20 | 1 | |
1997 | Mary Hawkesworth | Confounding Gender | 22 | 3 | |
2000 | Barbara Ransby | Black Feminism at Twenty-One: Reflections on the Evolution of a National Community | 25 | 4 | |
2001 | Robyn Wiegman | Object Lessons: Men, Masculinity, and the Sign Women | 26 | 2 | |
2001 | Ella Shohat | Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge | 26 | 4 | |
2001 | Minoo Moallem | Middle Eastern Studies, Feminism, and Globalization | 26 | 4 | |
2002 | Kimberly Springer | Third Wave Black Feminism? | 27 | 2 | |
2008 | Allaine Cerwonka | Traveling Feminist Thought: Difference and Transculturation in Central and Eastern European Feminism | 33 | 4 | |
2011 | Kelly Coogan-Gehr | The Politics of Race in U.S. Feminist Scholarship: An Archaeology | 37 | 1 | |
2012 | Rebecca L. Clark Mane | Transmuting Grammars of Whiteness in Third-Wave Feminism: Interrogating Postrace Histories, Postmodern Abstraction, and the Proliferation of Difference in Third-Wave Texts | 38 | 1 | |
2012 | Sally L. Kitch and Mary Margaret Fonow | Analyzing Women's Studies Dissertations: Methodologies, Epistemologies, and Field Formation | 38 | 1 | |
2014 | Maria do Mar Pereira | The Importance of Being "Modern" and Foreign: Feminist Scholarship and the Epistemic Status of Nations | 39 | 3 |
The following selection reflects feminist scholars' persistent concern with gender violence and women's participation in conflicts. The early works undertake a critical review of existing research on rape and family violence and advance a feminist analysis that has progressively grown attuned to the interactions between race, class, sexuality, and cultural difference. A second set of interventions examines women's multiple positions and constrained agency in situations of war, nationalist struggle, and military conflict—as combatants, national icons, and survivors of sexual violence. More recent pieces investigate how the protection of women has recently been instrumentalized to justify increased border control and military interventions. This collection of texts should be explored in conjunction with the related material displayed in the sidebar of the page. In particular, Rosemary Marangoly George's article, published in the War and Terror II special issue in 2007, highlighted in the sidebar, may serve as a guiding thread for the navigation of this table of contents, as she compels us to reflect on what extraordinary violence reveals about the ordinary.
Date | Author | Title | Vol. | Iss. | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1977 | Rochelle Semmel Albin | Psychological Studies of Rape | 3 | 2 | |
1977 | Leila J. Rupp | Mother of the Volk: The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology | 3 | 2 | |
1980 | Community Action Strategies to Stop Rape | A Rape Prevention Program in an Urban Area | 5 | 3 | |
1983 | Wini Breines and Linda Gordon | The New Scholarship on Family Violence | 8 | 3 | |
1984 | Carole S. Vance and Ann Barr Snitow | Toward a Conversation about Sex in Feminism: A Modest Proposal | 10 | 1 | |
1987 | Carol Cohn | Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals | 12 | 4 | |
1989 | Darlene Clark Hine | Rape and the Inner Lives of Black women in the Middle West | 14 | 4 | |
1993 | Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray | Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation? | 18 | 2 | |
1997 | Julie Peteet | Icons and Militants: Mothering in the Danger Zone | 23 | 1 | |
1999 | Andrea C. Westlund | Pre-Modern and Modern Power: Foucault and the Case of Domestic Violence | 24 | 4 | |
2000 | Christine Helliwell | "It's Only a Penis": Rape, Feminism, and Difference | 25 | 3 | |
2000 | Beth E. Richie | A Black Feminist Reflection on the Antiviolence Movement | 25 | 4 | |
2003 | Iris Marion Young | The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State | 29 | 1 | |
2003 | Nancy A. Naples | Deconstructing and Locating Survivor Discourse: Dynamics of Narrative, Empowerment, and Resistance for Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse | 28 | 4 | |
2006 | Pascale R. Bos | Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945; Yugoslavia, 1992-1993 | 31 | 4 | |
2007 | Meg Samuelson | The Disfigured Body of the Female Guerrilla: (De)militarization, Sexual Violence, and Redomestication in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story | 32 | 4 | |
2007 | Rosemary Marangoly George | (Extra)Ordinary Violence: National Literatures, Diasporic Aesthetics, and the Politics of Gender in South Asian Partition Fiction | 33 | 1 | |
2008 | Miriam Ticktin | Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Meet | 33 | 4 | |
2011 | Melissa Wright | Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border | 36 | 3 | |
2012 | Amanda Lock Swarr | Paradoxes of Butchness: Lesbian Masculinities and Sexual Violence in Contemporary South Africa | 37 | 4 |