Read the Fiftieth Anniversary Issue
“Big Feminism: The Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of Signs” is now available! The anniversary issue represents an occasion “to imagine—to think—feminism as big and bold and full of herself,” as Signs editor Suzanna Danuta Walters puts it in her introduction. As a look through the Signs archive shows, feminism has never shrunk from tackling big, systemic problems and never shied from envisioning bold transformations to address them. While many of the challenges that feminists identified in the 1970s seem depressingly intractable (reproductive freedom, sexual violence), the articles in “Big Feminism” draw on the long history of feminist conceptual innovation as they chart new and surprising ways forward.
Explore the Time Line
Scroll through fifty years of feminist knowledge production with our fiftieth-anniversary time line! It foregrounds the visions expressed by the eight editors and coeditor teams that have headed the journal, drawing on the editorials they published in the journal as well as video interviews with the editors. The time line also displays the special issues that Signs has published since 1975, which give a sense of the the field’s changing areas of interest and theoretical frames. And the most-cited articles in the Signs archive highlight both the consistent innovation in feminist thinking and the enduring impact of the scholarly work the journal has published over the course of its fifty years.
Watch Editor Interviews
Watch six Signs editors discuss their experiences of editing the journal. Founding editor Catharine R. Stimpson and editors Barbara Gelpi, Jean F. O’Barr, Judith Howard, Mary Hawkesworth, and Suzanna Danuta Walters reflect on their approach to editing the premiere journal in the field of (what would become) Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. A brief compilation video pulls together all six editors’ thoughts on common themes–their proudest achievements, the burning questions in the field while they were editors, and their hopes (and worries) regarding the future of the field and of the journal, among others. And videos of each editor’s full interview go into more depth about their editorships, careers, regrets, and visions for the future of Signs.
Watch Anniversary Symposium
In March, Signs and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Northeastern University held a symposium–“Feminist Foundations, Feminist Futures”–celebrating Signs and exploring its legacies, its role in shaping the field, and the contributions to feminist theory and scholarship that have graced its pages. The speakers, all of whom have published in Signs, included: Marcie Bianco, Lorna Bracewell, Mary Anne Case, Soraya Chemaly, Breanne Fahs, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Sophie Lewis, Treva Lindsey, Chandra Mohanty, Sherie Randolph, Salamishah Tillet, Jane Ward, and Andi Zeisler. Watch full video of the event.