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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy

Signs does not currently accept articles or other contributions that have been composed using generative AI or LLMs to generate content or to enhance content or ideas with the exception of projects involving large data sets, which may use AI provided the usage is clearly disclosed and documented following the guidelines laid out in the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Authors may use software that checks their grammar or spelling; such usage does not need to be documented.

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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.