Manuscript Submission
Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts online via the Signs Editorial Manager system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/signs/default.aspx. Detailed instructions are available below.
Statement of Policy
The editors invite submission of article-length manuscripts (of no more than 10,000 words) that might appropriately be published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. We publish articles from a wide range of disciplines in a variety of voices—articles engaging gender and its interaction with race, culture, class, nation, and/or sexuality. We are looking for lively, provocative essays that launch new inquiries or prompt intense debate; we publish essays not only in areas of scholarship familiar to Signs readers but also in newly emergent fields relevant to women and gender. Essays may be cross-disciplinary in their theorizing, their methodology, or their sources.
Signs does not consider manuscripts that are under review elsewhere or that have been previously published. For what constitutes prior publication, please consult the Guidelines for Journal Authors’ Rights. Signs does not accept unsolicited book reviews.
All articles published in Signs are peer reviewed.
Open Access Policy
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society authors have the option to make their accepted paper freely available online immediately upon publication. The fee for Open Access is $2,500. Contact signs@neu.edu for more information.
UK authors should note that this option cannot be used to comply with RCUK regulations for gold OA, as the University of Chicago Press requires permission for commercial reuse. UCP does comply with the RCUK regulations for green OA.
“Green” Open Access
The University of Chicago Press supports Green Open Access for all articles, as defined by the RCUK Open Access Policy, under the Press’s Guidelines for Journal Authors’ Rights.
General Specifications
Articles should not exceed a maximum length of 10,000 words, including references and footnotes. Please indicate the word count on the title page.
Preparation of Copy
A separate title page should include the article title and the author’s name, postal address, telephone number, and e-mail address. To protect anonymity, the author’s name should not appear in the manuscript, and all references in the body of the text and in footnotes that might identify the author to reviewers should be removed and cited on a separate page. Articles that do not conform to these specifications will be returned to the authors.
Signs also recommends that authors think carefully about crafting a title that clearly conveys the subject of the article, avoids jargon, and will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience. A well-crafted title is important for making a good first impression on editors, potential reviewers, and other readers. It can also help your article be more easily discoverable in search engines, thus potentially increasing readership and citations, should the article be accepted for publication.
An abstract of no more than 250 words should accompany your submission. Like the title, the abstract will be key to forming many readers’ first impression of your article. If a manuscript is sent out for peer review, for instance, the abstract is sent to potential reviewers. It is therefore worth taking the time to write an engaging and accessible abstract designed for an interdisciplinary audience that includes editors, reviewers, and other readers. Should your article be accepted, the abstract will also be published in the online version of the journal and will also be indexed by search engines. It is therefore in your interest and the interest of the journal that both abstracts and titles be clear and jargon free, and that they resonate with as wide a range of feminist scholars as possible.
Sample titles and abstracts are below:
Awkward-Rich, Cameron. 2017. “Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual.” Signs 42(4):819–41.
Trans and feminism, it seems, are caught in a continually reiterated conflict. Reading this conflict as being motivated by the desire for an integrated theory of gender that is undermined by the perhaps irresolvable political desires of each field, this essay is interested in how the expression of this failure of integration is articulated (on both “sides”) as a feeling of being annihilated and the displacement of these bad feelings onto the other. Rather than seeking new terms of resolution—and focusing, in particular, on how transmasculinity has increasingly posed an un- or misrecognized problem for imagining trans-inclusive feminisms—I excavate the “depressed transsexual” and develop this as a reading position from which to think through the possibility of living with the lack of integration, even if it does not feel good.
Allen, Leah Claire. 2016. “The Pleasures of Dangerous Criticism: Interpreting Andrea Dworkin as a Literary Critic.” Signs 42(1):49–70.
How does it change the accepted history of the sex wars to consider the debates as part of a conversation about literary representation? What happens when Andrea Dworkin is analyzed as a literary critic? Although usually cast as social critics, participants in the sex wars were part of the development of feminist literary criticism as a distinct field of literary interpretation. Feminists on all sides of the debates about pornography and censorship read pornography. That is, they deployed strategies borrowed from literary criticism to interpret it, and they based their understanding of the dynamics of pornographic consumption on the relationship between author and reader that was established through earlier feminist debates about literature in the 1970s. This article reads literature’s presence in the sex wars to argue that Dworkin was first and foremost a literary critic and also an unexpected ancestor of queer theory. In addition, I contend that many of the debates that were putatively about sexual practices were in fact about representation in ways that relied on and helped generate the project we now call feminist literary criticism.
A high-resolution electronic file of each illustration should accompany the manuscript. Reproduction-quality prints of illustrations will be required for manuscripts accepted for publication, as will reprint permission from the copyright holder.
In addition to the main manuscript file, submit a cover letter as a separate file.
Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the above formatting and citation guidelines, please follow these guidelines for submitting your manuscript.
Revised and Final Versions of Manuscripts
If you are submitting a revised manuscript, please include your responses to the reviewers’ comments as part of the cover letter file. When submitting a revised manuscript with figures, include all figures, even if they have not changed since the previous version.
Submissions should follow the author-date system of documentation, with limited footnotes, as outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). (See chapter 15, outlining documentation for the social sciences.) The journal office may request full revision of manuscripts not meeting the CMS requirements for documentation.
Citations of works are given in the text in chronological order by enclosing the author’s last name and the year of publication in parentheses—for example (Collins 2005)—and are keyed to an alphabetical list of references at the end of the article. Specific page or section citations follow the date, preceded by a comma: (Collins 2005, 88). Other examples are as follows: for dual authorship (Hasan and Menon 2005); for more than three authors (Li et al. 2001); for two works by the same author in a single year (Lugones 1990a, 1990b); for two or more works by different authors (Rai 2000; Stimpson 2000; Brennan 2004).
Footnotes are used for material commenting on or adding to the text and should be used instead of parenthetical citations for citations of more than three works, archival materials, unpublished interviews, and legal cases. Within footnotes, second and later citations of a work should refer to the author’s last name and date. Do not use op. cit. Footnotes should be typed double-spaced at the end of the article, following the list of references.
Full documentation appears in the references. References must list all works cited in the text, including citations in footnotes. List works alphabetically by author and, under author, by year of publication. References not cited in the text should not appear in the reference list. For additional information, see the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.).
The following are examples of references:
Entire book.
Zerilli, Linda. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hasan, Zoya, and Ritu Menon, eds. 2005. The Diversity of Muslim Women’s Lives in India. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Sinfield, Alan. 2005. Cultural Politics—Queer Reading. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Book chapter.
Smith, Faith. 1999. “Beautiful Indians, Troublesome Negroes, and Nice White Men: Caribbean Romances and the Invention of Trinidad.” In Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson, 163-82. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2005. “Prisons for Our Bodies, Closets for Our Minds: Racism, Heterosexism, and Black Sexuality.” In her Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, 87–116. New York: Routledge.
Vatuk, Sylvia. 2005. “Moving the Courts: Muslim Women and Personal Law.” In Hasan and Menon 2005, 18-58.
More than one citation by author.
Rai, Shirin. 2002. Gender and Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalisation. London: Polity.
———. 2003. “Knowledge and/as Power: A Feminist Critique of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights.” Gender, Technology and Development 7(1):91-113.
With original date.
Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949) 1993. The Second Sex. Ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
———. (1958) 1974. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Trans. James Kirkup. New York: Perennial.
Journal article
Brennan, Denise. 2004. “Women Work, Men Sponge, and Everyone Gossips: Macho Men and Stigmatizing Women in a Sex Tourist Town.” Anthropological Quarterly 77(4):705–33.
Sandoval, Chela. 1991. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.” Genders 10 (Spring): 1–23.
First Signs reference in list.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(2):499–535.
Subsequent Signs reference in list.
Stimpson, Catharine R. 2000. “On Being Transminded.” Signs 25(4):1007-12.
Author with more than one article in same year.
Lugones, María. 1990a. “Hispaneando y Lesbiando: On Sarah Hoagland’s Lesbian Ethics.” Hypatia 5(3):138–46.
———. 1990b. “Structure/Antistructure and Agency under Oppression.” Journal of Philosophy 87(10):500–507.
Entire issue.
Somerville, Siobhan, and Judith Roof, eds. 2004. “Recent Lesbian Theory.” Special issue of Concerns: Journal of the Women’s Caucus of the Modern Language Association 27, nos. 3-4.
Unpublished manuscript
Childers, Mary M. 2002. “Failure Goes to Your Head: Three Generations Growing Up on Welfare.” Unpublished manuscript, University of Georgia.
Film
Children of the Crocodile. 2001. Directed by Marsha Emerman. New York: Women Make Movies.
Magazine or newspaper article
Without author.
New York Times. 2005. “The Normality of Gay Marriages.” September 17, A14.
With author.
Soares, Claire. 2005. “Liberia Set to Elect Africa’s First Woman President.” Guardian, November 11, 21.
Stable URL
Rauch, Angelica. 1996. “Saving Philosophy in Cultural Studies: The Case of Mother Wit.” Postmodern Culture 7(1). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v007/7.1rauch.html.
Dissertation
Rolin, Kristina Helena. 1996. “Gender, Emotions, and Epistemic Values in High-Energy Physics: A Feminist Challenge for Scientific Methodology.” PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Conference paper
Sloat, Amanda L. 2004. “Integrating Women: The Gendered Dimension of EU Enlargement.” Paper presented at the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR)—Second Pan-European Conference Standing Group on EU Politics, Bologna, June 25.
Published case
UN Security Council. 2000. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (S/Res/1325). New York: United Nations.
Please adhere to the requirements below when submitting a new or revised manuscript via Editorial Manager. The system relies on automated processing to create an Adobe Acrobat PDF file from your submission. If you do not follow these instructions, your submission cannot be processed and will not be received by the journal office.
Acceptable Formats
Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) (any version that can be read by Word 2000 for Windows)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Please do not submit your manuscript as a PDF.
File Contents
Authors should submit figures as separate files, in TIFF or JPEG format.
Please note that authors of accepted manuscripts may be required to submit high-resolution digital copies (preferably TIFFs) of all figures during production, and in certain circumstances, a hard copy may be required, as not all digital art files are usable.
If you used any revision or editorial tracking tools in your word-processing program, be sure the final version of your manuscript does not contain tracked changes.