The range of topics examined in this issue of Feminist Studies includes neoliberalism in contemporary Brazil and in post-Soviet Cuba, laws regulating women’s speech in early twentieth-century Ireland, classical liberal Western influences on Egyptian street literature, and competing hypotheses about the apparent rise in violent crimes by women in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia.

Woven throughout are people’s innovative responses to forces that appear beyond their immediate control: from the highly politicized Brazilian feminist attempts to construct coalitions across widening class divides, to Cuban discourses of nostalgia as a means to reassert dearly held moral values, to Irish women’s use of “uncharitable” speech to assert themselves in the context of family and community conflicts, to Martha Rosler's striking vision of art in the interstices of everyday life. Our featured fiction and poetry grapple with problems related to racism, destructive relationships, and deteriorating health. This issue’s book review essay on posthumanism and race challenges us to rethink agency by incorporating nonhuman matter and animals, while also remaining vigilant against colonial conceptual frameworks.