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Feminist Scholarly Writing under Authoritarianism, a Conversation with Debjani Chakravarty, Patti Duncan, and Jennifer C. Nash

Debjani Chakravarty, Patti Duncan, Jennifer C. Nash, and Suzanna Walters

The following conversation took place through SquadCast in March 2026. An edited transcript is below.

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Suzanna Walters (SW): Hello, I am Suzanna Walters, the editor of Signs. I’m joined here today by three fabulous editors of other feminist journals to discuss the very cheery topic of feminist scholarly writing under authoritarianism. We’re really pleased to be in conversation here with Jen Nash, editorial director of Feminist Studies, Debjani Chakravarty, coeditor [with Sarita Gaytán and Wanda Pillow] of Frontiers, and Patti Duncan, editor of Feminist Formations. We’re going to have a nice freewheeling conversation and anyone just jump on in to get us going. But let me give you a maybe somewhat positive beginning: All of the journals we published could be described as “bastions of gender ideology”—the big bad gender ideology. But as far as I know, none of our publications have really been targeted. Signs and the rest of our journals  aren’t really on the Trump administration’s radar. So what gets targeted in terms of written work? Is there a pattern to it?  And what I wonder here, too, is it just that we’re too rinky-dink? We’re not on the radar because we’re not on the radar? So let me throw that initial question out. Who wants to start us off with this? 

Debjani Chakravarty (DC): It’s a little hard to say, but I wonder if people in the administration or adjacent to the administration even know about our existence. And that being said, our journal that’s open access now… What I really hope is that it doesn’t get on the reading list of—or should I say AI summarizing list of—the wrong kind of social media influencer. Because recently, feminism has been blamed for everything from decreasing fertility rates to increasing divorces, and even ruining comedy and humor. We are responsible for all of these “bad things.” I just do not want someone who talks about these things in their wide-reaching social media—I do not want them to read us because we will be clearly misunderstood, and I do not want that kind of wrong publicity. And that hasn’t happened yet, but I hope it doesn’t. 

SW: Anyone else want to weigh in on this? I am interested if anything has, I mean, if there have been direct attacks on you as journal editors vis-a-vis this new administration and the attack on universities and the attack on gender studies more broadly? Or has your experience been, as mine has, that in many ways the journals have been flying under the radar or somehow not the site of it? But maybe I’m wrong. 

Patti Duncan (PD): I don’t think you’re wrong. I feel like what I’m seeing getting targeted is more like searchable keywords, DEI statements, anything that is really a visible symbol of power or institutional power. I think targeting journals like ours would require reading the articles and engaging with the ideas. And I’m not sure that that is necessarily what this administration is interested in. I don’t see them engaging with ideas or theory as much as just trying to take down really visible symbols and public profiles.  

Jennifer C. Nash (JCN): I would just add to that: I think, to some extent we’ve been insulated because we’re somewhat out of reach. I mean, Feminist Studies is distributed through Project Muse. Most of the folks who access our journal are institutional subscribers who are affiliated with colleges and universities. We do have a few issues that are open access. But you would have to know to come to Feminist Studies to read our articles.  

Speaking as an author, I know that back in the day, pre-Trump, when I would place my articles on Academia.edu, I would often get harassed. I published an article in GLQ called “Black Anality” about black women and hardcore pornography. And I found myself on a whole slew of right-wing lists that I didn’t expect to be on. And one of the things I learned about Academia.edu is that the Right uses it very skillfully to look for feminist and queer scholarship. And so I removed my work from that platform largely to free myself from harassment. But as a journal editor, I found that, again, the fact that most of our readers come to us through institutions has so far—and I emphasize so far, because we never know what’s coming—meant that we’ve been protected and shielded. 

SW: It is interesting, isn’t it? Because of course the departments in which many of us are embedded have not been shielded. I mean, one of the biggest attacks has been on gender studies programs and departments.  

Let me ask a related question: Have the submissions you are receiving changed since the second Trump administration began? Are certain topics over- or underrepresented? And—sort of an allied question to that: Many of our journals were founded in a moment when the relationship between scholarship and activism was very tight. And I wonder, and this has been occupying me of late, if all of the attacks bring us closer back to activism. That’s certainly the trajectory of women’s studies programs and gender studies programs and the journals being founded in this moment of feminist ferment and closely allied with the movement in various ways that really got attenuated. That closeness got attenuated as women’s studies programs got institutionalized more. We all know that narrative and that story. And I wonder if the inverse is happening now, if there’s a way in which there’s a recommitment to the journals and the programs, too, as more sites of feminist political organizing and consensus and engagement in light of the attacks. I wonder what you all think of that. Jen, do you want to start us off on this? 

JCN: Sure. To the first part of your question, which I think was about the kinds of submissions that we’re seeing now: I only took over as editorial director of Feminist Studies last June, so it hasn’t even been a year. So I’ve only been involved in this capacity with the journal since the second Trump administration. 

I can say that our pool of submissions—we definitely have received a lot of work about the post-Roe landscape and what Dobbs has done to reproductive health care. That’s a topic we see really robustly represented. I think we’ve seen a lot of work on the proliferating policing of trans people and a lot of work on of trans rights, trans students’ experiences, trans medical care. I think those are two topics. I don’t say that to suggest that we’re saturated, but I can see that people are drawn or pulled to those topics in the particular crises that we face.  

To the second part of your question, I’m less wedded to a narrative that, once upon a time, women’s studies was the academic arm of the women’s movement and then we grew apart and now we’re back together. I think gender studies has always been a political formation. What I think is different about this moment and that I think puts pressure on us in scholarly journals, as a space that has traditionally moved slowly, is that people want responsiveness. One of the things that we’ve seen more of at Feminist Studies is folks wanting to write short, timely responses to the variety of catastrophes that we see, which I think is at odds with the slowness of the peer-review process and the slowness of the journal publication process and the long backlog we all have of articles that need to be published. So as an editor, I’ve tried to figure out, and also to learn from all of you—I’m thinking of, Suzanna, what you’ve done with Signs and Short Takes and all of the ways that the journal is responsive to the various things that are happening in the present—how to create spaces to get work out fast. Because what I see as one of my primary responsibilities is using the journal as a space that can respond quickly. 

SW: Right. I mean, it is interesting because I agree with you: We’ve certainly seen this uptick in submissions around abortion rights, reproductive access, trans rights. But I’ve also seen (and I’m happy about this) a more general uptick in submissions that are robustly and unabashedly political, really of the moment. And not just for our public-facing Feminist Public Intellectuals Project but long-form articles that are really trying to wrestle with the moment in more substantial ways. And that’s been very gratifying to see, people really responding to this, because it’s been one of my complaints that too often we get submissions that are really arcane intellectual exercises. And I’ve seen a shift in that. I wonder about the rest of you. Debjani? 

DC: Interestingly, we have not seen a spike in political submissions. It’s kind of stayed steady. And of course, it speaks to the current moment. But what has been really interesting is in the last year or so, we have definitely seen an increase in submissions from around the world talking about misogynistic authoritarianism around the world. This includes submissions centering movements in Taiwan, China, India, Nigeria, Canada, Jamaica; talking also about online and offline spaces of activism. So it’s not just about oppression, it’s also about resistance. It’s about queer movements, environmental movements, resistance to populist political regimes. I have to say that as someone that has written about the international academic division of labor, where spaces outside the US are often erased or treated as data but not as sites of theory and actual feminist scholarship, this decentering of the US—but also this transnational sense of commonality and the antifeminist backlash [discussed in these submissions]—is kind of helpful. But I’ve also wondered, why isn’t there a spike in submissions analyzing the current US moment? Is it a chilling effect? Are people trying to protect themselves and their careers? I don’t know, but it has been interesting. 

SW: Patti? 

PD: That is interesting, Debjani. We have seen at Feminist Formations a lot more submissions that are engaging transnational feminist activism as well, including more manuscripts that are not simply locating transnational feminist movements in relation to the US or in relation to the global North but thinking on their own terms, which has been really powerful. We’ve seen more pieces that are addressing institutional failures within the US as well as in other contexts, and that has been really—I feel like there’s a bold move happening in some of these pieces.  

Finally, there have also been more submissions in the last four or five years to Feminist Formations that are really taking methodological risks, opening up new spaces to try out new forms. And my feeling on this is that as crises get stacked, we are in need of new forms to address them. It’s been really interesting. Some of the new methods that I’m seeing—and I don’t want to say that they’re “new,” but they’re really innovative or arts-based, engaging communities and arts and activism in some interesting, creative ways. We’re also seeing a little bit more poetry and art. And that is not something that we’ve always had submissions for. We usually invite cover art, and we do feature poetry. But it’s usually by invitation, and we’re suddenly getting submissions. So that has also been interesting as a response to the current moment.  

And I just want to go back to something Jen said about the need for more immediate responses in this moment and how hard that is for feminist journals. I have been thinking about that a lot too. But it’s not just that we want quicker responses; we want more diversity in these urgent responses. And so this podcast feels like a way to do that or to engage that. And I’m just imagining how else we can push our conversations and ideas out in this moment of crisis, right? It just feels like people are demanding it. They’re needing it. 

SW: I’d like to follow up on that because I think that is so important. The question—it’s the big question—of what is the role of a scholarly feminist journal? Because we aren’t a newspaper, you know; we aren’t a blog. We might have some public-facing aspects of our work, as Signs, of course, does, and we might have some built-in quick responses, but we are scholarly journals. So I guess one of the question is what can we do? What is our role in fighting fascism? What is the place—both the appropriate place and the limits of what is possible for feminist journals that are scholarly, that rely on the long process of peer review, that rely on the old-school, long-form manuscripts that really take folks a long time to write, much less get reviewed. What can we do in this moment that can be of use in the world?  

DC: I agree with my colleagues that short-form writing and a diversity of formats would be really useful. One way Frontiers has done it—we haven’t been able to do it so much on the pages of our print journal, but we have a feature called Frontiers Augmented, where we have entirely online issues that are actually more immediate. And they are often a result of a lot of editorial work. We don’t send out all of those pieces for peer review. We also publish book reviews online. The online platform has allowed us that ability to respond to current issues and current developments immediately. But that also requires a lot of invisible background work to ensure that, even if it’s online, it still maintains a certain standard of feminist scholarship.  

Another thing that I wanted to respond to, Patti, when you say that there has been sort of feminist critique of the institution, also of anticipatory compliance. I mean, universities are closing women’s centers even before there was legislative discussion, to show that we are complying. But I love how feminist scholarship has always pushed back against the university as an imperialistic, militaristic, gentrifying institution that is not community-facing enough. So I think feminist scholarship—we should continue doing that. We should continue holding our own institutions accountable, because deinstitutionalization, to me, is a slippery slope, unless there is a new institution set up to give us a platform. So we are still contained by institutions, and we need to keep holding the institutions accountable, sometimes at great risk. 

JCN: I see a key part of our role in the feminist intellectual ecosystem as helping scholars get tenured and promoted. That’s part of what scholarly journals are about. And in a moment when gender and sexuality studies is under siege, it seems to me that it’s all the more important that we’re publishing regularly, that we’re publishing promptly, that we’re ensuring that work moves through the pipeline and gets out. I think book reviews are incredibly important. And I think for a long time, journals moved away from short reviews towards longer book review essays for a variety of reasons. But in the same way that I want scholars in our field to get tenured and promoted, I want their books to sell, and I want university presses that publish in gender and sexuality studies to survive. So I think it matters that we do book reviews.  

I think it matters, as folks have said, that we think about scholarly publishing in a variety of forms. But I also—one of the things I’ve been really committed to is that I believe in the 10,000-word scholarly article because I believe it’s important that we make the case for rigor and expertise, particularly in a moment where truth and critical thinking are under siege, and where our field in particular has long been marred by accusations that we’re not rigorous, that we’re not experts. The culture wars that are being waged in this moment have gender and sexuality at their center. So we are the experts in this moment, and I think our scholarly journals can make that case. So I find myself more invested in peer review, right? More invested in making the case for what our journals do when we publish articles. I can stand behind everything that we publish because it’s been rigorously vetted. And I think that matters a lot. 

SW: I couldn’t agree with you more. I want to shift a little bit here. I wonder what you think is new about today’s moment of precarity. I mean, a lot of the factors that are undermining WGS’s ability to retain its institutional gains are longstanding, right? Cuts to tenure, diminished faculty governance, diminishment of service work. What from your position as editors, and of course we’re all situated in women’s studies more generally as well, what feels new about these attacks on WGSS? And I guess the other part of that is, what is the role of feminist theory in resisting these new attacks that are on both our programs and on, of course, any critical thinking in universities at all?  

DC: I have a quick response to what’s new and have been thinking about this because women’s and gender studies in every country has been under siege. The reason I stayed in the US was to get a PhD in women’s and gender studies, which my country of origin did not have, most countries did not have. And it’s really heartbreaking to see those programs getting lean, not accepting cohorts every year. That is going to affect cutting-edge feminist scholarship because so much of that came from grad students and newly graduated women’s and gender studies students.  

But there is something chaotic about the current moment, and that has to do with this unleashing of digital media, the immediacy of hate campaigns, the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation and deep fakes. And to counter this, I really think there needs to be a concerted feminist effort to criticize AI, to criticize the worst of digital culture, and also to imagine a kind of feminist and queer digital futurity. Because it’s here to stay, but we really need to push back against the harms it can do. This is why I’m really excited about submissions on how to use the online space, how to mobilize the online moment for feminist activism and to push back against doxxing and really scary things. 

PD: I totally agree. And, to me, what feels new in this moment is just the speed and coordination of the attacks. It’s like one thing after another. Just as we’re starting to develop a response, something else happens. And I don’t think institutions like our universities are designed to handle this kind of attack or these kinds of stacked crises. The other thing is using federal funding, right? That, to me, feels like another part of this sustained attack.  

I think feminist theory is more vital in this moment, because feminist theory has always been about developing an analysis of what’s happening so that we can respond effectively.  

SW: Let me push on that a little bit because we’re all in different states and with different situations, but as we all know, women’s studies programs, gender studies programs have been shut down, have been under attack, have been merged into other programs, have been defunded, the list goes on. Some of us have not had that happen yet. Others probably have. So I guess the question is what’s coming down the pike. As this administration attacks women’s and gender studies programs, and of course, they’re also doing it with Africana studies programs, they’re doing it with Chicano studies—all of it. But as they do that, what happens to journals like ours, in which the relationship between that field and our journals is so tight? I mean, we are the scholarly expressions of those programs and departments. They’re inseparable.  

Here’s the really postapocalyptic question: Can we imagine feminist journals situated in the academy, as we all are, outside of women’s and gender studies programs? I mean, they are going to go after all of the programs.  

JCN: Maybe I have more apocalyptic things to layer onto that. I appreciate the question. And I also think the things that give me anxiety as a journal editor are those and more. I’m genuinely frightened about AI (artificial intelligence). We’ve spent so much time at Feminist Studies having conversations about AI policies, not just for authors but for reviewers, and trying to think about how AI is already changing the nature of the submissions that we get.  

As an educator, I’m concerned that people can’t and don’t read anymore. As scholarly journals, we publish something that is meant to be read and we live in a culture where print is dying. So, I mean, I am so compelled by formats like this. One of the things we’ve been talking about at Feminist Studies is, as people don’t like to read or write anymore, maybe we need to have more podcasts, more things that people can listen to as they walk the dog. But I also believe in people reading and writing. So how do I think about that?  

And then how do we continue to think about the long reach of COVID? Despite the fact that all of our institutions have told us it’s over, we know that it’s not over and that it’s transformed everything about our relationships to work, our relationships to each other, our capacity to interact.  

I think there’s so much going on top of your question, Suzanna, about what happens to the feminist scholarly journal if the women’s studies or gender studies department isn’t there. While I always carry a brief for the gender and sexuality studies department as it is the place that trained me as an undergraduate and the place that pays my bills right now, I also recognize that the knowledge that we produce has permeated the humanities, right? And so, as I said to my dean, “if you come from my department, you’ll have to drag me out with you because that’s how closely I feel aligned with this unit.” I also know that the work that I’m interested in is happening in Black studies, in critical ethnic studies, in English and history, all of which are fields that are under siege as well, though in different ways. I think we’re the frontline in different ways than say a history department or English department.  

All of this is to say, if tomorrow the gender and sexuality studies department dies, do I think my journal dies? No. I think, actually to our credit and our field’s credit, the knowledge that feminist theory has produced has permeated the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The reason we’re a target is because there’s no going back. The work that we’ve done is everywhere We’ve already transformed the academy, right? And yet, still, we need to fight to the death to make sure that these departments survive. 

SW: Yeah, I’m less optimistic that we’ve transformed the academy. I think we have some, of course, but I think the fact that these institutions have folded so quickly and are so willing to throw us under the bus when the going gets tough, instead of defending us, worries me, to say the least.  

What do other folks think of this? Because it is an interesting question, right? I mean, if women’s and gender studies programs are so under attack on this, and if our feminist journals are tied in with those very programs, is there a sense of mutual support? How can those programs support the journals, and how can the journals help to bolster these programs that are under attack? 

DC: As someone that’s currently located in a really red state, in the red state of Utah, I’m just going to provide a couple of tongue-in-cheek responses. If institutions can fold, they can also unfold. They usually tend to subscribe to the bandwagon effect. When DEI was cool, institutions were falling over each other to prove how extremely diverse and equitable they were. And gender studies, in some ways, was utilized to bolster that image.  

When our journal was started in 1975, the field was nascent. There was no field. So, can I imagine feminist journals without field formation? Probably not, but as Jennifer mentioned, what other field has scholarship—to make the rigor argument—that’s this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and intersubjective. It has permeated various disciplines, and I would argue also some STEM fields that are interdisciplinary. Also nursing, also healthcare.  

Even if we are folded under “American cultural studies” or new names to shield us, I think our relevance is firmly established. So I think we will continue. It will be hard. I just think we have transformed so many fields in so many ways that I’m a little optimistic. But I don’t know. I hope. 

SW: Well, I’m going to be the old lady voice of pessimism here. If in fact these attacks on gender studies continue, when we see no reason that they won’t for the foreseeable future, then can’t we also foresee a possibility that fewer and fewer students are going to want to do that kind of feminist scholarship? So we also could run into a pipeline problem, right?, of fewer and fewer submissions or submissions that are robustly feminist and really come from feminist theorizing because feminist theory has been attacked as a framework by this administration. And what then happens to journals that are dependent on that?  

And then the more positive version: What can we do as more senior scholars and editors to support and encourage younger scholars in the face of these sort of vulnerabilities to still do feminist work? Because I certainly am seeing it with graduate students — maybe you guys are as well — where they’re trepidatious, right? They’re worried about doing feminist work. And then there are the ones who are like, “Jesus, I’m never going to get a job. Gender studies is under attack. There are no jobs in academia anyway. Certainly no jobs in women’s studies programs.” So, again, I guess I’m going to ask, what could our role be as editors of these journals to intervene in that circuit?  

PD: That’s such a good and big question. You know, we’re seeing some of that in my program at Oregon as well. And I’m a Gemini, so I can see both the optimism here and the pessimism. I feel both. On the one hand, I really feel like our departments and programs are doing that amazing work of opening up where feminist knowledge lives, right? It’s permeating the university; it’s permeating our institutions in some ways. At the same time, if the academy abandons women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, we lose the infrastructure for the slow, careful, thoughtful knowledge building that our movements require. And it’s that infrastructure that is part of creating coalitions. It’s not just our shared values but also actually having an infrastructure in place. I guess I’m grappling with: how do we build that outside of, or maybe in relation to, these academic institutional spaces? Is it through our communities? Is it with movements? I don’t have the answer in terms of the feminist scholarly journals. I think it’s been a question that I have struggled with over the last several years in this role. 

SW: Are you all seeing that journals that are in disciplines that are similarly under attack are working in concert with us, that there is some coalition? I am not seeing that, to be honest. It doesn’t appear that both the fields and the journals that have been in the forefront of this version of the culture wars have been building bridges with each other as a bulwark against the attacks. And maybe I’m just not seeing it here at my university, but I’d be interested. Because I think you’re right. We need those coalitions to make this happen, or at least to provide some sense of solidarity so that students in those fields can feel supported and nurtured in some way. Are you seeing those coalitions being built? And if not, why do you think not? 

JCN: No, on the coalition question. I do not see coalitions being built. We are in the middle of a moment that I don’t even think we yet know how to fully diagnose.  I think part of the challenge is that the current administration operates through chaos—I think that’s a word that you used, Patti—through keeping us all unsure of what’s happening through just saturating the news with misinformation and nonsense. It’s hard to even sort out what’s happening every day, right? I think all of us are just trying to put 1 foot in front of the other and keep moving. which I think has meant that there have been very few connections between, say, gender and sexuality studies journals and Black studies journals. Black studies is the other field that I move in. I have actually seen far less organization and coalition among the Black studies journals than I’ve seen among the gender and sexuality studies journals. And I will drop a footnote and say that I think the academy’s logic of competition often gets in the way of coalition. I think the feminist scholarly journals are unusually cooperative in our shared sense that the way that we succeed is by making sure that we all succeed. But the logic of the academy is that if Signs is doing well, Feminist Studies can’t be doing well.  Part of what we have to do is forget that logic.  

The question for us is: What can we be as a group of editors? What can we make possible for each other, for the student, especially for the graduate students who turn to us as a first or second publication? It used to be a feather in the cap for the job market, but as the job market erodes, what can we offer those folks in terms of mentorship and being serious readers? I’ve tried to say to graduate students that I see the review process as an opportunity for us to mentor you. Which I think is very different than how they understand the review process, which is that they are verbally assaulted and belittled and then have to respond to it. Whereas I’m like, no, I want this to be a process of feminist mentoring. I want this to be an educational process for you and also for me. So it seems to me that there are larger conversations for us to have as a collective about how can we nurture, to your point, Suzanna, the students who might feel it’s scary to claim gender and sexuality studies as a home, or who might feel it’s scary to identify as a feminist scholar out loud, right? Like, what kind of mentoring work can we do, particularly as we see, you know, PhD cohorts collapsing, getting smaller and smaller, fully eroding, not just in gender and sexuality studies, but across the humanities. I mean, with departments no longer admitting cohorts, they’re just going to be fewer and fewer scholars, right? I guess it’s kind of the universe that we’re in. So I think it’s up to us to figure out what we want to dream up to in some ways step up to do some of the work that, say, departments used to do. 

DC: I want to quickly make a comment about coalitions. You know, when Plato was banned in Texas, my first thought was, maybe it’s time to make coalitions with fields that are not ours, and fields that have in some ways undermined us, that have called us not rigorous enough or not disciplinary enough. I think it’s time to make those coalitions across fields, and I would argue including STEM fields that work on climate change, fields that work on environmental destruction, soil and water contamination. We have many things and common, and we need to form those coalitions.  

PD: I just want to quickly echo a point that Jen made earlier about the editorial process as also a form of feminist mentoring. The editorial process itself, for feminist scholars, is a form of solidarity, right? And in that way, we can think about the process of peer review, the editing process, having an editorial team, having an editorial board—all as part of a collective process that is political, that’s politicized. To me, that feels really important, especially in this moment. And it’s another little glimmer of hope that I see in terms of supporting, nurturing, mentoring future generations of feminist scholars and activists. Maybe that’s where I can imagine something positive in this really, really challenging moment. 

SW: Well, that’s on a happy note. Listen, it was great talking with you all. I do hope that we can find ways to continue these conversations. This has been fabulous. Keep on keeping on.