Curated Tables of Contents Edited lists of topics over forty years

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.

Intersectionalities A table of contents

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.

Michelle Magema, Goodbye Rosa (2005)
Nell Painter, Dedication (2009)
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

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Interventions in Theory A table of contents

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

Judith F. Baca Uprising of the Mujeres (1979)
Bongi Kasiki, After the Rain (2009)
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

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Methodologies A table of contents

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.

Stacey Steers, Fish Dream (2006)
Elena Figurina, Composition (2002)
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

Bodies, Identities, Differences A table of contents

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.

Kenojuack Ashevak, Woman with Fish (2006)
Katarzyna Pollok, Sara in a Snailhouse (2002)
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

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Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person

Editorial

Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person

Forum: Loss of Paradigms in Current Thinking

Who Is Sylvia? On the Loss of Sexual Paradigms

Elizabeth Janeway

Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism

Alix Kates Shulman

Sexuality as the Mainstay of Identity: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Ethel Spector Person

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Adrienne Rich

Reproductive Freedom: Beyond "A Woman's Right to Choose"

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky

Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration

Irene Diamond

The Front Line: Notes on Sex in Novels by Women, 1969-1979

Ann Barr Snitow

The New Scholarship: Review Essays

Behavior and the Menstrual Cycle

Richard C. Friedman, Stephen W. Hurt, Michael S. Arnoff and John Clarkin

Toward a Biology of Menopause

Madeleine Goodman

Pregnancy

Myra Leifer

Maternal Sexuality and Asexual Motherhood

Susan (Contratto) Weisskopf

Social and Behavioral Constructions of Female Sexuality

Patricia Y. Miller and Martha R. Fowlkes

Edited by Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, and Kathleen M. Weston

Editorial

Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson and Kathleen M. Weston

The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman

Esther Newton

"The Thing Not Named": Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer

Sharon O'Brien

Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships

Martha Vicinus

Sexuality, Class, and Conflict in a Lesbian Workplace

Kathleen M. Weston and Lisa B. Rofel

Viewpoint

Ourself behind Ourself: A Theory for Lesbian Readers

Jean E. Kennard

Review Essay

"The Politics of Transliteration: Lesbian Personal Narratives

Bonnie Zimmerman

Revisions/Reports

Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward an Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience, Part I

Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich

Discrimination against Lesbians in the Work Force

Martin P. Levine and Robin Leonard

Science Studies A table of Contents

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.

Lisa A. Turngren 2-Way Mirror (2004)
Laura Splan, Gloves (2009)
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

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Political and Social MovementsA table of contents

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.

Yolanda M. López, Your Vote Has Power (2007)
Madeline Anderson, still from I Am Somebody (1969)
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

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Edited by Amrita Basu, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Liisa Malkki

Editorial

Amrita Basu, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Liisa Malkki

Traveling with Her Mother's Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in "Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands"

Sandra Gunning

Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics

Suzanne Bergeron

Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization

Carla Freeman

Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad

Jasbir Kaur Puar

Showcasing India: Gender, Geography, and Globalization

Rupal Oza

Exploring Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective from Contemporary Bangladesh

Shelley Feldman

Transgressing the Nation-State: The Partial Citizenship and "Imagined (Global) Community" of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Constructing Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women's Activism

Valerie Sperling, Myra Marx Ferree and Barbara Risman

Nongovernmental Organizations, "Grassroots," and the Politics of Virtue

Deborah Mindry

On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement

Cindi Katz

Conversations

Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalization, and Punishment

Angela Davis and Gina Dent

A Dialogue on Globalization

Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Diane Wolf

Protesting World Trade Rules: Can We Talk about Empowerment?

Kathleen Staudt, Shirin M. Rai and Jane L. Parpart

Comments

Debating Business: Women and Liberalization at the Council on Foreign Relations

Nancy Folbre

Middle Eastern Studies, Feminism, and Globalization

Minoo Moallem

Area Studies, Transnationalism, and the Feminist Production of Knowledge

Ella Shohat

Roundtable: "Globalization, Postsocialism, and the People's Republic of China"

The Politics of the Frame: An Introduction

Tani E. Barlow

From "Modernization" to "Globalization": Where Are Chinese Women?

Li Xiaojiang and Tani E. Barlow

Talking about Gender, Globalization, and Labor in a Chinese Context

Huang Ping

Whither Feminism: A Note on China

Lin Chun

Globalization, China, and International Feminism

Tani E. Barlow

Cultural Production A table of contents

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.

Rosa Menkman, "Shattered Horizons" (2010)
Lucien Kubo, Japanese American Internment (2005)
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

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Labor and Political Economy A table of contents

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.

Prem Chowdhry, Scarlet Woman (2008)
Natasha Ward and Toni Bowers, detail from an untitled composition (2011)
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

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Preface

Martha Blaxall and Barbara B. Reagan

Introduction: Occupational Segregation in International Women's Year

Barbara B. Reagan and Martha Blaxall

Can We Still Afford Occupational Segregation? Some Remarks

Martha W. Griffiths

The Social Institutions of Occupational Segregation

Toward a Homosocial Theory of Sex Roles: An Explanation of the Sex Segregation of Social Institutions

Jean Lipman-Blumen

Work Aspiration of Women: False Leads and New Starts

Judith Long Laws

Dual Linkages between the Occupational and Family Systems: A Macrosociological Analysis

Constantina Safilios-Rothschild

Occupational Segregation and the Law

Margaret J. Gates

Comment I

Kenneth Boulding

Comment II

Harold J. Leavitt

Comment III

Karen Oppenheim Mason

Comment IV

Sandra S. Tangri

The Historical Roots of Occupational Segregation

Historical and Structural Barriers to Occupational Desegregation

Jessie Bernard

Familial Constraints on Women's Work Roles

Elise Boulding

Occupational Segregation and Public Policy: A Comparative Analysis of American and Soviet Patterns

Gail Warshofsky Lapidus

Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex

Heidi Hartmann

Comment I

Carl N. Degler

Comment II

Hanna Papanek

Economic Dimensions of Occupational Segregation

Economists' Approaches to Sex Segregation in the Labor Market: An Appraisal

Francine D. Blau and Carol L. Jusenius

Discrimination and Poverty among Women Who Head Families

Isabel Sawhill

Women: The New Reserve Army of the Unemployed

Marianne A. Ferber and Helen M. Lowry

Comment I

Kenneth Arrow

Comment II

David M. Gordon

Comment III

Janice Fanning Madden

Combating Occupational Segregation
The Policy Issues: Can We Agree on Goals, and How Do We Get There? Panel Discussion

Introduction

Phyllis A. Wallace

Presentation I

Ruth G. Shaeffer

Presentation II

Nira Long

Presentation III

Winn Newman

Presentation IV

Bernice Sandler

Presentation V

Janet L. Norwood

Presentation VI

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Summary Statement

Toward Dimorphics: A Summary Statement to the Conference on Occupational Segregation

Myra H. Strober

Appendix

Sex Differences in Economists' Fields of Specialization

Myra H. Strober and Barbara B. Reagan

Foreword

Michelle McAlpin, Catharine R. Stimpson and Domna C. Stanton

Preface

Ester Boserup

Toward Models of Development

Theories of Development: An Assessment

Carolyn M. Elliott

Definitions of Women and Development: An African Perspective

Achola O. Pala

Development Planning for Women

Hanna Papanek

Changing Modes of Production

Introduction

Helen I. Safa

Women in the Informal Labor Sector: The Case of Mexico City

Lourdes Arizpe

Industrialization, Monopoly Capitalism, and Women's Work in Guatemala

Norma S. Chinchilla

Sex Roles and Social Change: A Comparative Appraisal of Turkey's Women

Deniz Kandiyoti

Class Structure and Female Autonomy in Rural Java

Ann Stoler

Women and Symbolic Systems

Introduction

Felicia Ifeoma Ekejiuba

Biological Events and Cultural Control

Carol P. MacCormack

Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries

Fatima Mernissi

Women and the Hindu Tradition

Susan S. Wadley

Migrants and Women Who Wait

Introduction

Lisa Peattie

Migration and Labor Force Participation of Latin American Women: The Domestic Servants in the Cities

Elizabeth Jelin

Female Status, the Family, and Male Dominance in a West Indian Community

Yolanda T. Moses

Women and Men, Power and Powerlessness in Lesotho

Martha Mueller

How African Women Cope with Migrant Labor in South Africa

Harriet Sibisi

Women and Migration in Contemporary West Africa

Niara Sudarkasa

Politics and Institutions

Introduction

Jane S. Jaquette

Raising the Status of Women through Law: The Case of Israel

Pnina Lahav

The Shaping of the Kaum Ibu (Women's Section) of the United Malays National Organization

Lenore Manderson

The Case of Eva Perón

Marysa Navarro

Women, Education, and Labor Force Participation

Introduction

Cynthia Nelson

Social Change and Sexual Differentiation in the Cameroun and the Ivory Coast

Remi Clignet

Women's Labor Force Participation in a Developing Society: The Case of Brazil

Glaura Vasques de Miranda

Methodology and Data Collection

Introduction

Nadia H. Youssef

Talking Pictures: Field Method and Visual Mode

Ximena Bunster B.

Sexuality and Birth Control Decisions among Lebanese Couples

Mary Chamie

Implications

Reflections on the Conference on Women and Development: Introduction

Michelle McAlpin

Reflections on the Conference on Women and Development: I

Bolanle Awe

Reflections on the Conference on Women and Development: II

Lourdes Casal

Reflections on the Conference on Women and Development: III

Eleanor Leacock

Reflections on the Conference on Women and Development: IV

Vina Mazumdar

Reflections on the Conference on Women and Development: V

May Ahdab-Yehia

Other Papers Presented at Conference on Women and Development, Wellesley College, June 2-6, 1976

Preface

Helen I. Safa and Eleanor Leacock

Development and the Sexual Division of Labor: An Introduction

María Patricia Fernández Kelly

Women, Production, and Reproduction

Accumulation, Reproduction, and "Women's Role in Economic Development": Boserup Revisited

Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen

Changing Modes of Production and the Sexual Division of Labor among the Yoruba

Simi Afonja

Women's Business Is Hard Work: Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Love Rituals

Diane Bell

Peasant Production, Proletarianization, and the Sexual Division of Labor in the Andes

Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León de Leal

Women in Rural Production and Reproduction in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Tanzania: Socialist Development Experiences

Elisabeth J. Croll

Women in Rural Production and Reproduction in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Tanzania: Case Studie

Elisabeth J. Croll

Sexual Division of Labor and Industrial Capitalism

Paths of Proletarianization: Organization of Production, Sexual Division of Labor, and Women's Collective Action

Louise A. Tilly

Runaway Shops and Female Employment: The Search for Cheap Labor

Helen I. Safa

Planned Development, Social Stratification, and the Sexual Division of Labor in Singapore

Aline K. Wong

The "Comparative Advantages" of Women's Disadvantages: Women Workers in the Strawberry Export Agribusiness in Mexico

Lourdes Arizpe and Josefina Aranda

Comment

History, Development, and the Division of Labor by Sex: Implications for Organization

Eleanor Leacock

Field Formations A table of contents

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.

Judith K. Brodsky, detail, Women, Love, and Philosophy III (2004)
Carmen McLeod, No Place (2007)
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

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Psychology

Mary Brown Parlee

Economics

Jane Roberts Chapman

Anthropology

Carol B. Stack, Mina Davis Caulfield, Valerie Estes, Susan Landes, Karen Larson, Pamela Johnson, Juliet Rake, and Judith Shirek

Political Science

Kay Boals

An Overview

Shirley S. Angrist

Audiovisual Teaching Materials

Karen F. A. Fox

Literary Criticism

Elaine Showalter

American History

Barbara Sicherman

Philosophy

Christine Pierce

Art History

Gloria Feman Orenstein

Violence and Conflict A table of contents

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.

Judith Mason The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent (1998)
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

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