Crisis

Edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Cati Connell, and Gowri Vijayakumar

Feminists are no strangers to crisis. In the context of rapidly escalating population-threatening catastrophes—the global rise of fascism; war and genocide; climate crisis and Indigenous dispossession; sharp rises in unhoused, migrant, and refugee populations and their subsequent criminalization; increased normalization and legalization of gendered and sexual violence; lethal threats to public and reproductive health; the upward distribution of resources and wealth; and the crisis of the university—feminist theorizing feels both as urgent and as under threat as it was during the dawning of women’s studies as an academic enterprise. This special issue invites contributions theorizing and responding to crisis. Where and how do we locate crisis (or crises)? What enables crisis conditions, and how do we—feminists and feminism—survive them? Feminist, queer, and trans theorists are uniquely positioned to offer critical readings of crisis within the longer temporal frame of slow violence and everyday brutality.  

The current threats are not new. Crisis crystallizes and builds on existing patterns. Writing in the late 1970s, at the dawn of Reaganism and Thatcherism, Stuart Hall (1978, iii) described “crisis” as an “ideological conductor … for the construction of an authoritarian consensus, a conservative backlash” targeting “race, crime and youth.” At the same time, in the 1970s, women’s studies became institutionalized in the academy, and women-of-color feminisms and postcolonial feminisms emerged as critical and political tools to resist neoliberalism and globalization. In other words, the milieu of crises gave rise to radical feminist and queer intellectual thought and social movements.  

Given the simultaneous institutionalizations of neoliberalism and feminism, states and movements can leverage the language of crisis in multiple directions. They can employ it to erase or deliberately forget the past. They can use it as a tool for retrenching rights and mobilizing violent tactics of state repression. On the other hand, crisis can recall and generate vital forms of solidarity, critique, and renewal that connect historical crises and offer more lasting infrastructures of care. We invite work in both theoretical and practical registers that engages the following questions and more: 

• How can feminist, queer, and trans theorists define crisis? Where, when, and how might we locate and study crisis (or crises)? Is there something distinct about this moment? 

• Is “crisis” a sufficient framework to conceptualize and respond to the cascade of global catastrophes? Or do we need other language to describe it? Are there other political, economic, and ideological analytical frameworks that feminists might leverage (e.g., Lauren Berlant’s (2011, 10) “crisis ordinariness,”2 racial capitalism, or neoliberalism)? 

• How is the rhetoric of crisis mobilized, either by repressive actors or by feminist and queer scholars and activists? What makes it compelling? What does it enable? What does it obscure? 

• Why and how have gender and sexuality become so central to contemporary moral panics and crises, in various parts of the world? 

• What pedagogical practices enable us to survive crises? For those positioned in the academy, how might we prepare our students to navigate crises, model democratic engagement, and build better worlds?  

• What is the role of feminist teaching in a time of increasing attacks against higher education; repression of campus protest; and increasing student precarity, particularly for minoritized, refugee, or dissident students? 

• How do feminist and queer activism respond to crisis? How does crisis reconfigure activism? What lessons might we glean from prior crisis points in feminist, queer, and trans histories that could be useful for responding to contemporary conditions of crisis? 

• How does art respond to crisis? How does art reconfigure crisis?  

• What forms of joy and pleasure emerge during crises, or in the context of a crisis?  

 As always, Signs encourages transdisciplinary and transnational essays that address substantive feminist questions, debates, and forms of literary, artistic, and cultural representation and that minimize disciplinary or academic jargon. 

The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2026. Jih-Fei Cheng (Scripps College), Cati Connell (Boston University), and Gowri Vijayakumar (Brandeis University) will serve as guest editors. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through Signs’ Editorial Manager system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/signs/default.aspx and must conform to the guidelines for submission available at http://signsjournal.org/for-authors/author-guidelines/. 

References

Lauren Berlant. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.