We are excited to announce a call for submissions for a special digital issue of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies focused on the role of youth in shaping the future of feminist movements. Youth have always been at the forefront of feminist and social change. From suffragists like Sylvia Pankhurst and Inez Milholland to contemporary youth-led movements like #MeToo,…
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Manufacturing Freedom
In Elena Shih’s pathbreaking book, she uncovers and offers a layered analysis of the moral economy of low-wage women’s work through a global ethnographic exploration of the rescue industry within the international movement of anti-trafficking. This wonderfully rich book contributes to anti-trafficking scholarship and activates diverse strategies for reading and understanding the moral economy of low-wage women’s work and notions…
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Pregnant at Work
Given the fact that service industry work requires flexible and round-the-clock availability (not to mention periods when workers are expected to be “on call”), the reality that many employers in that sector offer limited or no time off for sick or parental leaves, and the necessity for pregnant women to schedule and attend frequent medical appointments—where there can be long…
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New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century
Are women funny? Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, professor of English at the State University of New York, Empire State, and author of New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, asserts not only are women funny, but women humorists in the interwar period “used satire, irony, and wit as an indirect form of social protest” (p. 1). Examining the works…
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Voices Relevant for Our Times
In anticipation of the journal’s 50th anniversary in 2025, the Editorial Collective is featuring “Voices Relevant for Our Times,” a revisiting of past Frontiers essays that speak to current topics in culture, politics, and feminism. Women and Feminism in Palestine and the Arab & Middle Eastern Worlds Feminist & Gender Perspectives on Nation, Nationhood, & Nationalism Nikki Giovanni & Women…
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Introduction & Guide
In the nation languages of the English-speaking Caribbean, “fresh” indexes recentness and newness, but also the opportunity to come again, harder than before. It connotes boldness, impertinence, and promiscuity—a shameless disrespect for propriety, for knowing one’s place. Across the artwork and articles in the Frontiers print journal and the essays in Frontiers Augmented online, guest editors Tonya Haynes, Halimah A.…
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…when I come up for air
🌊 for the people below the surface trying to emerge[i] doing something illicit in secret with a public view[ii] things happening below the surface because they can’t happen above the surface can’t appear above the surface so make a difference below the surface community can’t happen above the surface so you bring community together below the surface doing something illicit…
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Who Catching the Power?
Part of my coming to terms with myself is understanding what motivates me to get involved in movements. It is a kind of possession that takes place, much like what I have witnessed in my spiritual practice. This piece explores the three women who shaped my spiritual consciousness and how their engagement with their own divinity continues to affect and…
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I, Mi, Ik: A Dreamscape Looking Inside-Out
Mi wang Ingi meisje, en Mi wang Blaka meisje Je kan het niet van mij verwijderen I am a Native girl, and I am a Black girl You cannot take that from me * Our two small feet speed across the white, hot sand. Countless times, our feet had become the home of tiny worms. We grimaced as a swollen…
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Ancestral Stiles: Caribbean Abolitionist Home Practices
The first time she went to church, she was a dewy six years old. Her grandmother wanting her safe and protected, in the tradition of many Jamaican matriarchs, believed the sooner her spirituality was developed the better her life would be. Grandma did not have much to give her, but she could make sure that for church she was clean…
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Mobility Matters: A Black/Caribbean-Canadian in the Midwest
It was in Canada, our home [on] Native land,[i] a white settler colony, that I realized I was Black, a process that developed over time spatially and temporally. Indeed, the journey to the “here and now” is marked by multiple migrations from Jamaica to Canada and then to the United States of America. Both forms of mobility set the stage…
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Skin
In New York, I feel naked without eyeliner. I wear fake glasses during my distance learning classes, and sunglasses when I go for walks. It is brief, but necessary. The trueness of my color belongs only to me. My partner asks me why I am so beautiful. I can never answer her, though I know it is love. The spots…
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The Master’s Tools, The Mother’s Tongue
Every morning, I wake up silently. Eyes dry. Already angry. Disappointed by the air in my lungs. I think I’m mad at the world. But I’m not. The world spins as it always has, indifferent to the suffering of all but the wealthiest people. I’m angry because I’ve woken up with someone who will spend the next 18 hours trying…
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Unraveling Colourism’s Hold
I was an ugly girl. Mainly, I agreed I was one because I didn’t believe people lied about ugly. People might lie and tell you that you look good, or they make like you enough that this colors their vision of you and thus, renders you pretty to them. But people usually call ugly as they see it fit to…
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For Ava-Grace
I met my niece, my only sister’s daughter on January 18th. She was three going on four months. I took in her tiny toes, and fingers, her facial features and wondered who she resembled most. I saw my sister’s eyes and her father’s nose, my mother’s lips and my dad’s ears. As I looked at her I whispered, “aunty has…
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First Night, Early Days
Tonight was the night – 10:13pm my cell phone showed. In just a few minutes, my partner Alison and I were going to meet an “animator” who would take us to meet the “ladies.” Standing by a corner in an infamous “red light district” area in Barbados, my palms were sweating and my heart raced. I looked at Ali every…
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A POWAFul Story
I know what sisterhood feels like, but I am not talking about what siblings should share. This is something deeper because it is a connection that exists among women regardless of biological relations. “Blood thicker than water,” they say in Belize, but sisterhood like this sometimes actually exemplifies what those who share DNA should have. It is that kind of…
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Diane Wong & Rachel Kuo
Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. For our recent double special issue on Asian American Abolition Feminisms (44.3 & 45.1), we highlight the two guest editors who conceived of and created these issues: Dr. Diane Wong, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University,…
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Announcement: Co-Editor Darius Bost Stepping Down
With a heavy heart, we are bidding Professor Darius Bost goodbye as he steps down from editing Frontiers and moves on to other projects. Darius started as a Coeditor in 2019 while he was Associate Professor in the Division of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah and continued editing the journal as he moved into his current position as…
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2024 NWSA Women of Color Caucus – Frontiers Student Essay Award
The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in partnership with Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies invites paper submissions for the 2024 NWSA Women of Color Caucus-Frontiers Student Essay Award. The purpose of this award is to discover, encourage, and promote the intellectual development of emerging scholars who engage in critical theoretical discussions and/or analyses about feminist/womanist issues concerning women and…
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Artwork for Frontiers at 50
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies is turning 50 next year & we are commemorating this important milestone with the publication of two special anniversary issues in May & September 2025. We are actively seeking artwork for these issues that visually captures our theme of “50 Years of Feminist Publishing.” Artwork can be for the cover image and/or for art…
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Who Would Believe a Prisoner?
Before readers even open its front cover, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? poses a powerful epistemological question about how institutions function through the repression of marginalized voices. The title quotes Harrie Banka, whose 1871 exposé of systematic corruption and sexual abuse at Indiana’s Jeffersonville State Prison accelerated Reconstruction Era calls to establish separate reformatories for women. In this book, members…
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Fierce and Fearless
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink (Patsy Mink’s daughter) bring Mink’s life and career front and center, placing their work squarely within the historiography of women’s history, civil rights history, and environmental history while recounting Mink’s legislative achievements and goals, primarily using a feminist lens of analysis.
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Speak the Lessons and Outlast All Haters! Asian American Women and Higher Ed Leadership
Factually, there are bars I must live under that other leaders do not. To lead as a woman of color means the guarantee that people belittle you no matter your pedigree, undermine you no matter your expertise and preparation, invalidate you no matter your beyond exceptional productivity.
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The Color Pynk
Through this work, Tinsley offers “a loving, lingering note on Black femmes’ poetics of survival in the Trump era and beyond."
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We Are Owed.
In her debut full-length poetry collection, We Are Owed., Ariana Brown steps into her own inheritance as a griot and medium as she weaves together vignettes of her experiences.
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America, Goddam
Treva B. Lindsey’s America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice provides an in-depth examination of the lived experiences of Black women throughout the history of the United States.
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Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty Six Years Since 1994
Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (Still Here) is an edited volume of interdisciplinary scholars who work on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. The strength of the edited volume lies in the authors’ commitment to what feminist scholar Amina Mama calls the idea of activist scholarship.
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Molly Benitez
Molly Benitez, PhD, is an assistant professor at Portland State University in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. Within their research they work to trace an alternative genealogy of affect theory through the work of women of color and queer of color theorists.
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Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again proceeds from a provocative premise: that, perhaps, too much emphasis is placed on women’s speech in our contemporary discussions about sex.
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Announcement: New Co-Editor Debjani Chakravarty
We announce that Professor Kimberly Jew is stepping down from the role of Co-Editor after 5 years at the journal. It is an honor to introduce a new partnership in the Frontiers Editorial Collective, Dr. Debjani Chakravarty.
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William Mosley
William Mosley is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Mosley’s research on Black queer expressive culture addresses the feminist and political implications of transgender and genderfluid art, activism, and literature.
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The Divorce Colony
April White’s The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier tells the stories of four elite women who, when they moved to North Dakota in order to obtain divorces, found themselves at the center of controversy and gossip.
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2023 NWSA Women of Color Caucus – Frontiers Student Essay Award
The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in partnership with Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies invites paper submissions for the 2023 NWSA Women of Color Caucus-Frontiers Student Essay Award. The purpose of this award is to discover, encourage, and promote the intellectual development of emerging scholars who engage in critical theoretical discussions and/or analyses about feminist/womanist issues concerning women and…
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**DEADLINE EXTENDED** Frontiers at 50: The Past, Present, and Future of Feminist Knowledge Production
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies was founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975 and was housed in the Women’s Studies department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Frontiers began as a volunteer-based organization to bridge academic and community-based feminist knowledge and corresponded with a local movement among students, faculty, and community members to develop a women’s studies program at the University…
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Honour-based Violence and Forced Marriages
Honour-based Violence and Forced Marriages: Community and Restorative Practices in Europe by Clara Rigoni explains issues that are truly relevant in our modern world. The book is mostly about such urgent matters as violation of human rights (especially those of women and children) in gender-based violence.
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Hossein Nazari & Fateme Nazari
Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. Issue 43.3 highlights authors Hossein Nazari, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Tehran, and Fateme Nazari, M.A., University of Tehran.
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Dressed for Freedom
This fascinating and timely work will have you think twice about the clothes you put on every day. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox asks readers to take another look at twentieth-century fashion – this time, with a feminist lens.
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Cara Delay & Beth Sundstrom
Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. Issue 43.2 highlights authors Cara Delay, Professor of History at the College of Charleston, and Beth Sundstrom, Associate Professor of Communication and Public Health at the College of Charleston.
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Book Review: Glitch Feminism & Wild Things in Conversation
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell and Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire by Professor Jack Halberstam are two texts that you would not initially draw comparisons between. Russell’s primary focus is on the digital world, whereas Halberstam’s is on the natural. These two worlds have traditionally occupied separate sides of the natural/digital binary, its variations including the wild/logic,…
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Ruby Chacón
Ruby Chacón is a community muralist, artist and teacher. She co founded Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts-MICA in 2003 in Salt Lake City. Through the organization she worked in partnership with University of Utah faculty as an artist in residence with Mestizo Arts and Activism-MAA, a youth collective.
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Desert Chrome
Wilder’s Desert Chrome has a similar power that other memoirs have had in feminist theorizing, in that she uses the personal - writing as a witness - to build the threads that run through her narrative and guides her advocacy on the land.
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Clelia O. Rodríguez
Clelia O. Rodríguez Ph.D., is a global scholar, speaker, mom and auntie, born and raised in the ancestral lands of the Nawat, the Chorti-Maya and the Lenka Peoples, what is presently El Salvador. She is the founder of SEEDS for Change, an educational transnational collective bringing together Black, Indigenous and People of Colour to co-create pedagogies of liberation.
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Call for Papers: 2022 NWSA Women of Color Caucus – Frontiers Student Essay Award
Application Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2022 The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in partnership with Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies invites paper submissions for the 2022 NWSA Women of Color Caucus-Frontiers Student Essay Award. The purpose of this award is to discover, encourage, and promote the intellectual development of emerging scholars who engage in critical theoretical discussions and/or analyses…
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Special Issue: Asian American Abolition Feminisms **DEADLINE EXTENDED**
Call for Papers: Asian American Abolition Feminisms Special Issue Editors: Diane Wong (Rutgers University-Newark) and Rachel Kuo (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) Time zones apart, we listened to the news unfold — learning and grieving the names of the eight victims of the March 2021 Atlanta shootings at massage parlors that sounded intimately familiar to the names of our sisters, aunties,…
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Medicine Stories
Aurora Levins Morales’s book sets the reader up on a journey through her teachings and knowledges that she has gained over the years as a Puerto Rican Ashkenazi Jewish activist. This newly revised edition that expands on the original 1998 version, takes into consideration and subtly comments on the current political, social and activists’ climate.
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Beyond the Periphery of the Skin
In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, Federici looks at the ways in which the appropriation of women’s bodies is not merely supplementary to the regime of capitalism, but it is only by embedding women’s bodies within debates of reproduction, social organisation and workforce discipline, that capitalism can perform its hegemony.
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Jennifer E. Cossyleon
Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. The most recent general issue 42.2 highlights author Jennifer E. Cossyleon, Ph.D., winner of the 2018 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Women of Color Caucus-Frontiers Student Essay Award.
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K. Allison Hammer
Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. The most recent special issue Black Performance 42.1 highlights author K. Allison Hammer Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, The Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Vanderbilt University.
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Staging Black Fugitivity
McCormick presents a case for a deep investigation of how black theatre and performance discusses the remnants of slavery, questioning “the tensions of American citizenship and the limits of black freedom.”
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A Frontiers Conversation in the aftermath of the Atlanta Shootings
A conversation between Frontiers co-editors Kimberly M. Jew and Darius Bost in the aftermath of the March 16, 2021 Atlanta shootings that left 8 people dead, 6 of them Asian women.
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Staging Feminist Futures
From the general collection, Marjorie Maddox Hafer, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, published Four Poems under pen name Marjorie Maddox, "Age-Based Connotations", "In the Company of Women", "Pro-Choice", and "Re-Vision". In Frontiers Augmented we present "Hyphen", a fifth poem as part of her collection with Frontiers.
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Thinking, Talking, Writing Collectively
Frontiers is pleased to present Krista Benson, April Petillo, Shy Pacheco Hamilton, and Maia Butler, the authors of “A Hopeful Decolonial Rhizome: An Invitation” (Frontiers 41.2), as they describe their individual and collective contributions to the colloquium in a 20 min video.
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The Making of The Celine Archive Movie
In celebration of Filipinx American History Month, scholar and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu discusses her new film, The Celine Archive, set for international release October 15th.
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Beauty Diplomacy
Oluwakemi M. Balogun’s Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, however, examines beauty pageants in their full complexity by recognizing aspects of pageantry that some scholars deem troublesome while simultaneously honing-in on the industry’s role in diplomacy, nationalism, and international politics.
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Hot off the Press: Volume 41 Issue 2
The Frontiers Editorial Collective invite you to our most recent issue 41.2. "This issue includes individual papers with two curated conversations: a round-table, "Staging Feminist Futures," and a colloquium, "Sowing the Seeds: Decolonial Practices and Pedagogies."
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Gender Politics in Iran and the Last Forty Years: Eleven Stories
Frontiers is pleased to present a special online issue addressing gender politics in Iran in the last forty years following the 1979 Iran Revolution.
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Announcement: New Co-Editor Darius Bost
2020 marks change at Frontiers, a Women Studies Journal. It is an honor to introduce a new partnership in the Frontiers Editorial Collective, Professor Darius Bost.
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“World”-Making and “World”-Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color
Guest Editors: Wanda Alarcón, Dalida María Benfield, Annie Isabel Fukushima, Marcelle Maese
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You’re Dead – So What?
This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their…
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As We Have Always Done
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. She makes clear that the goal of Indigenous resistance can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic, calling for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.
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Evidence of Being
Evidence of Being is an important book that should impact the contours of Black and Queer Studies. Bost’s recuperation of the history of black gay cultural expression opens new lines of inquiry for scholars concerned with black sexuality, loss, history, and memory. Readers will find Evidence of Being moving, theoretically rich, and original.
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Reproductive Justice and Health
Reproductive justice health remains a top priority globally and requires proactive involvement, voice, protest, leadership, policy advocacy, research and scholarship to activate and maintain reproductive health access, information, and rights.
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Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century
"Perceptions" joins the burgeoning dialogue about how we see women’s reproductive potential and engagement as manifested both socially and culturally.
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Staging Feminist Futures
This special volume seeks essays that explore possibilities for staging feminist futurities through performance-based forms of theatre, film and video, dance, music, performance art, solo performance and community engaged performance.
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Eli Erlick
Eli Erlick, author of "Technologizing Gender: Trans Youth Activism on the Internet", is the director of a national youth-led organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans students, where her work emphasizes transgender youth activism, education, and media.
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World-Making and World-Traveling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color
This special issue invites contributions of works that share diverse modes of decolonial feminist praxis in relation to the lifeworks of philosopher María Lugones.