This is the fiftieth anniversary issue of Feminist Studies. We celebrate a half century of groundbreaking scholarship and research, creative expression, and political commentary. Since 1972, our founding year, women around the globe have gained considerably greater access to higher education, professional occupations, and political participation. But apparent advances for women have occurred in contradictory contexts to which we can too often be inattentive. In 1972, too many people in the United States had only begun to recognize its deeply entrenched heritage of racism, and the country was embroiled in a cruel and misguided imperialist war in Vietnam. Average wages were at an inflation-adjusted peak then, but increased inequality means that they have eroded since. And many technologies devised in past decades have contributed to a series of climate emergencies harming our planet. In other words, in celebrating the journal’s past, we also look somewhat soberly toward the future in this issue.
  As we write in 2022, Iranian women and men are heroically protesting a repressive theocratic state’s effort to strip them of their rights to education, work, and bodily autonomy. The Kurdish revolutionary slogan “Woman, life, freedom!”—is also an aspiration for others around the globe. For us in the United States, the terms “woman,” “life,” and “freedom” reverberate with questions. We now understand “women” as a vital but ambiguous category variously dissected by old debates about culture versus biology and more recently divided by changes in our categories and systems of gender and sexuality. What “life” means is very differently interpreted by “pro-life” crusaders, advocates for women’s reproductive choices, and again by those who decry humanity’s arrogance in usurping the claims and opportunities of non-human entities. And “freedom” confronts the devastating persistence of wars and the too-feeble institutions dedicated to peace and justice. In the face of such challenges, the essays published in this issue clarify our categories, illuminate the struggles we face, and interrogate our efforts toward solutions.

{READ MORE OF PREFACE as PDF}

Clare Hemmings
“But I thought we’d already won that argument!”: “Anti-gender” Mobilizations, Affect, and Temporality

Robyn Wiegman
Loss, Hope: The University in Ruins, Again

Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Laura Charney
Feminism and Geopolitics: A Collaborative Project on the Cunning of Gender Violence

Celebrating Fifty Years of Feminist Studies: Notes of Appreciation from Authors

Bibiana Obler
Fifty Years of Art in Feminist Studies: A Retrospective (Art essay)

Jennifer C. Nash
Masochistic Feminism, or Reflections on the White Feminist Industrial Complex (Review essay)

Hemangini Gupta and Carly Thomsen With Jennifer D. Ortegren, Karin Hanta, Jessyka Finley, Kristin Bright, Laurie Essig, Catharine Wright, Patricia Saldarriaga, and Fernando Rocha
What’s the Use of Feminist and Queer Theory?: On Messy Methods, Archives, and Objects (Forum)

Anna Chatillon
Intersectional Saturation: Toward a Theory of Feminist Organizations’ Intersectionality

Cara K. Snyder
Navigating Online Misogyny: Strategies, Methods, and Debates in Digital Feminism (Review essay)

Meg Wesling
“Gay Genes” and the Contested Origins of Same-Sex Desire

Matt Richardson, editor, with Eve Brown, Trystan Cotten, Che Gossett, LaVelle Ridley, and C. Riley Snorton
Between Inconceivable and Criminal: Black Trans Feminism and the History of the Present (Forum)

Karen Weingarten
Fifty Years since Roe v. Wade: Forum

Johanna Schoen
The End of Roe

Belinda Waller-Peterson
The Power of Storytelling in a Post-Roe America

Heather Latimer
Roe and our Dystopic Imagination

Melissa Huerta
Latina/x Abortion Narratives in Popular Culture

Leslie J. Reagan
Abortion Is Made a Crime Again in the United States

Amy Obermeyer
Moving Mountains and Uprooting Weeds: Literary Subjectivity, First Wave Feminism, and Women’s Magazines in Latin America and Japan

Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Creation (Introduction)

Minnie Bruce Pratt
Bog, South of Choctaw County; Watch Where You Put Your Feet (Poetry)

Evie Shockley
facing south; MATTI LEE (Poetry)

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Prepositions; My Brain on Szymborska (Poetry)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Plexiglass; Several Cosmological Turns; Available Choices (Poetry)

Nazanin Shahrokni
In Her Name: (Re)Imagining Feminist Solidarities in the Aftermath of the Iran Protests (News and Views)