The Summer 2014 issue of Signs (available on JSTOR) begins with a comparative perspective symposium on the theme of “Gender, Media, and Social Change,” edited by Christina Dunbar-Hester. Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh opens the symposium with an exploration of how the Iranian women’s movement turned to virtual spaces to forge connections between different social groups and to […]
This issue (available on JSTOR) begins with a comparative perspectives symposium on the theme of “Translation, Feminist Scholarship, and the Hegemony of English.” Claudia de Lima Costa and Sonia Alvarez open the symposium by signaling the importance of translation, conceived both linguistically and ontologically, to contemporary decolonial feminisms, and they examine the role of academic […]
This issue of Signs begins with two articles analyzing the literature of Japanese American internment, Sarah Dowling’s “‘How Lucky I Was to Be Free and Safe at Home’: Reading Humor in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660” and Cynthia Wu’s “Asian American Feminism’s Alliances with Men: Reading Hisaye Yamamoto’s ‘Seventeen Syllables.’” Dowling and Wu propose modes of […]
The past forty years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of women imprisoned worldwide; over half a million women are now incarcerated, and the growth rate of women’s imprisonment has outstripped that of men’s. Despite neoliberal commitments to cut back the state, many states have dramatically increased spending on policing and imprisonment at […]
Intersectionality has become one of feminist and critical race theory’s most generative concepts. The Summer 2013 issue of Signs, Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory, guest edited by Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, provides a timely and critical assessment of this pathbreaking concept. Since its coinage in Crenshaw’s work in the late 1980s, […]
Leading off this issue of Signs is Anna Hájková’s “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” the winner of the 2013 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship. The article draws on archival material, memoirs, and interview data to relate a remarkable story about gender power in a […]
The articles in Signs’s Winter 2013 issue span a range of disciplines, theoretical vantage points, and topics of study. Jonneke Koomen’s “Without These Women, the Tribunal Cannot Do Anything” explores the limits justice revealed in the nexus of prosecutors, translators, and survivors of genocide, among others, during the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Megan Moodie […]
Signs’s Autumn 2012 issue begins with a symposium on Romani Feminisms, edited by Ethel C. Brooks. Bringing together scholars and activists, the symposium examines the complex ways that Romani women and feminists are positioned in relation to states, communities, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as their multivalent responses to such positionings. In response to the […]
Taking an expansive approach to the many valences of “sex,” this issue brings together perspectives from sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and science studies scholars to consider the emergence of sex as a category, its surprising geographical and historical variability, and its imbrication with processes of regulation, racialization, and commodification. The issue challenges any attempt to ground […]
This issue features a comparative perspectives symposium titled “Fish/Wives: Gender, Representation, and Agency in Coastal Communities,” edited by Valerie Burton. The symposium includes historical essays, ethnographic studies of contemporary fishing communities, and analyses of representations of fish/wives. Essays track historical and contemporary gendered labor practices and representations in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. […]
