Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

@signsjournal.org

2110 Followers 462 Following

The leading international journal in women's studies, Signs has since 1975 been at the forefront of new directions in feminist scholarship. | http://signsjournal.org | Published by @uchicagopress.bsky.social linktr.ee/signsjournal

CALL FOR PAPERS Deadline: March 1, 2026 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. Guest Editors: Jih-Fei Cheng (Scripps College), Cati Connell (Boston University), and Gowri Vijayakumar (Brandeis University). For the full call for papers and submission instructions, visit www.signsjournal.org/cfp
Cover of the Signs Special Issue "Lesbian Studies Now" featuring Nicole Eisenman's "Lesbian Recruitment Booth."
Audio clip of Libby Adler saying: "Can I just add one big harm that I think should not go forgotten? That has to do with the military. The military is the biggest employer of trans people in the country. If the ban continues, it’s going to have a huge impact on a population that faces massive, massive obstacles to employment—pushing people into underground employment, including sex work, which then in turn subjects them to an excess of police attention, which brings us back exactly to where K.J. started about incarceration, including both placement and denial of medical care."
Feminism, Antifeminism, and the Mobilization of Regret Guest edited by Laura Green (Northeastern University) and Chris Bobel (University of Massachusetts Boston) Feminism is forward-looking and world-building. Feminists everywhere can call to mind the manifestos, mobilizations, solidarities, creative inspirations, legal propositions, and revolutionary paradigms that inspire us to action and move us toward more just futures. At the same time, we may also be haunted by obstacles encountered, losses experienced, and regrets felt along the way. With over fifty years of feminist history behind the journal—and, we hope, another fifty years of feminist troublemaking ahead—Signs seeks essays that delineate both how feminists may experience, theorize, and productively apply the concept of regret and how it may, alternatively, thwart the development of feminist futures. We seek essays that make theoretical, analytical, and/or activist interventions. We welcome papers that engage the complex dynamics and larger contexts of regret, from the personal, emotional, and creative realms to the social, political, and empirical; or that consider how regret converges with or departs from related affective terrains of shame, guilt, grief, or nostalgia. 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. Scan the QR code or visit www.signsjournal.org/cfps for the full call for papers and submission instructions.
A flyer version of the call for papers that is available as text at the link (https://signsjournal.org/for-authors/calls-for-papers/)
Video of Catharine Stimpson speaking on Zoom.