As protests against racist police violence and other forms of racial discrimination persist, Signs is pleased to offer free access to the below articles until August 3. We hope that they will be of use as activists, teachers, and others grapple with the histories of racism in the US, analyze the carceral present, and search for models of activism and thought that can create an antiracist feminist future. While this list of articles is not intended to be exhaustive, it aspires to reflect just some of the breadth and relevance of feminist scholarship.
Thanks to the University of Chicago Press for making these articles available. For additional free resources, visit the “Research in Policing, Civil Rights, and Racial Justice” page, which collects research from across the University of Chicago Press’s journals.
Photo: Fibonacci Blue
Racism, Violence, and Carcerality
“Like I Was a Man”: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia
Sarah Haley
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): 53-77
Unwidowing: Rachel Jeantel, Black Death, and the “Problem” of Black Intimacy
Jennifer C. Nash
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 751-74
The Hoodie as Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force
Mimi Thi Nguyen
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 791-816
Queering Black Girlhood at the Virginia Industrial School
Mary Zaborskis
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 373-94.
Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto
Shatema Threadcraft
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 735-60
Photo: Leonhard Lenz
Feminist Antiracist Activism
Ask a Feminist: A Conversation with Cathy J. Cohen on Black Lives Matter, Feminism, and Contemporary Activism
Cathy J. Cohen and Sarah J. Jackson
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 775-92
The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women: A History of Public Motherhood in Women’s Antiracist Activism: Winner of the 2017 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship
Meghan Healy-Clancy
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 4 (Summer 2017): 843-866
Front Porch Revolution: Resilience Space, Demonic Grounds, and the Horizons of a Black Feminist Otherwise
Laura McTighe and Deon Haywood
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 1 (Autumn 2018): 25-52
Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Cross-Identity Coalitions for Progressive Social Change
Tamar W. Carroll
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 600-607
On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt
Sara Salem
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 245-267
Recognition on the Surface of Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody
Shilyh Warren
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 353-78
Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform
Dean Spade
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 1031-1055
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Photo: Jama Abdirahman
Contextualizing the Political Present
Backlash, Intersectionality, and Trumpism
Zein Murib
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 295-302
Demographic Fever Dreams: Fragile Masculinity and Population Politics in the Rise of the Global Right
Banu Gökarıksel, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 561-587
Telling It Just Like It Is: The Tragicomedy of the 1965 Voting Rights Act
Stephen Houston Marshall
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 39, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 709-33
Photo: Kon Karampelas
Racism and Health
Obese Black Women as “Social Dead Weight”: Reinventing the “Diseased Black Woman”
Sabrina Strings
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 107-130
Milk Money: Race, Gender, and Breast Milk “Donation”
Laura Harrison
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 281-306