Feminist Resources for #TheResistance
This virtual issue draws on the Signs archive to provide resources to contextualize, criticize, and analyze the current political crisis. The issue makes clear the urgent need to apply a feminist lens to the reinvigorated attacks on women, people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ people that have been precipitated, most immediately in the US, by the election of Donald Trump. The issue also aims to show that feminist thought—which has long been concerned with analyzing and resisting policy agendas, political discourses, and cultural phenomena that promote sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia—can play a key role in promoting forms of solidarity, strategy, and activism to resist these forces and to imagine alternative futures.
We hope the articles contained in the virtual issue will be of use to teachers, students, and activists—anyone with an agenda of resistance. These articles are meant to be illustrative and suggestive, not exhaustive, of Signs' content in these areas.
The issue is divided into the following sections:
Women's March on Washington by Mobilus In Mobili
Models of Feminist Protest & Resistance
Susan H. Hertz, “The Politics of the Welfare Mothers Movement: A Case Study” — 1977
Piya Chatterjee, Josefa (Gigi) Francisco and Gina dela Cruz, Michele Ford, Tong Xin, Masako Yuki, Richard Sullivan and Kimi Lee, Monisha Das Gupta, and Suzanna Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow, “Women’s Labor Activism” Comparative Perspectives Symposium — 2008
Dean Spade, “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform” — 2013
Athena Athanasiou, Ratna Kapur, Zakia Salime, Sherine Hafez, Rama S. Lohani-Chase, Stella Nyanzi, Karina Eileraas, Hannah Appel, Joana García Grezner, Amana Mattos, and Rouba Mhaissen, “Gendered Bodies in the Protest Sphere” Comparative Perspectives Symposium, edited by Miranda Outman and Susana Galán — 2014
Emily S. Channell-Justice, “‘We’re Not Just Sandwiches’: Europe, Nation, and Feminist (Im)Possibilities on Ukraine’s Maidan” — 2016
Tamar W. Carroll, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Cross-Identity Coalitions for Progressive Social Change” — 2017
Pro-choice feminists protesting in São Paulo on the International Women's Day, via Wikimedia
Reproductive Politics and Health Care
Rosalind Petchesky, “Reproductive Freedom: Beyond ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’” — 1980
Małgorzata Fuszara, “Legal Regulation of Abortion in Poland” — 1991
Mary Lyndon Shanley and Adrienne Asch, “Involuntary Childlessness, Reproductive Technology, and Social Justice: The Medical Mask on Social Illness” — 2009
Jennifer M. Denbow, “Abortion as Genocide: Race, Agency, and Nation in Prenatal Nondiscrimination Bans” — 2016
Julia McReynolds-Perez, “No Doctors Required: Lay Activist Expertise and Pharmaceutical Abortion in Argentina” — 2017
Muslim Ban Protest II by Victoria Pickering
Judith F. Baca, Uprising of the Mujeres (1979)
#NoBanNoWallNoRaids: Immigration, Borders, & the Nation
Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” — 2003
Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir, “(En)Gendering Checkpoints: Checkpoint Watch and the Repercussions of Intervention” — 2007
Miriam Ticktin, “Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti-immigrant Rhetoric Meet” — 2008
Susan A. Berger, “Production and Reproduction of Gender and Sexuality in Legal Discourses of Asylum in the United States” — 2009
Katie E. Oliviero, “Sensational Nation and the Minutemen: Gendered Citizenship and Moral Vulnerabilities” — 2011
Say Her Name 7 by Joe Brusky
Antiblack Racism & Criminalization
Patricia Hill Collins, “A Comparison of Two Works on Black Family Life” — 1989
Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia” — 2013
Stephen Houston Marshall, “Telling It Just Like It Is: The Tragicomedy of the 1965 Voting Rights Act” — 2014
Shatema Threadcraft, “Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation, and the Dark Ghetto” — 2014
Mimi Thi Nguyen, “The Hoodie as Sign, Screen, Expectation, and Force” — 2015
Jennifer Nash “Unwidowing: Rachel Jeantel, Black Death, and the 'Problem' of Black Intimacy” — 2016
Robin D. G. Kelley, “On Violence and Carcerality” — 2017
Gabrielle Le Roux, in collaboration with trans activists – Proudly African & Transgender
LGBTQ Rights
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” — 1980
Shane Phelan, “(Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics” — 1993
Anna Kirkland, “What’s at Stake in Transgender Discrimination as Sex Discrimination?” — 2006
Raewyn Connell, “Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New Understanding and New Politics” — 2012
Sarah Pemberton, “Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes” — 2013
Talia Mae Bettcher, “Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance” — 2014
Cameron Awkward-Rich, “Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual” — 2017
Pussy Riot – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, painted portrait by thierry ehrmann
Gender, Authoritarianism, & Right-Wing Politics
Leila J. Rupp, “Mother of the ‘Volk’: The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology” — 1977
Rebecca Klatch, “Coalition and Conflict among Women of the New Right” — 1988
Zillah Eisenstein, “The Sexual Politics of the New Right: Understanding the ‘Crisis of Liberalism’ for the 1980s” — 1982
Heidi Tinsman, “Reviving Feminist Materialism: Gender and Neoliberalism in Pinochet's Chile” — 2000
Sarah Dowling, “‘How Lucky I Was to Be Free and Safe at Home’: Reading Humor in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660” — 2014
Janet Elise Johnson and Aino Saarinen, “Twenty-First-Century Feminisms under Repression: Gender Regime Change and the Women’s Crisis Center Movement in Russia” — 2013