Feminist Studies honors the most theoretically innovative article published in the journal year with our annual Claire G. Moses Award. The award was created to honor Claire Goldberg Moses on her retirement as the editorial director of Feminist Studies, a position she held from 1977 to 2011. The winner receives a prize of $500.00.
“(De)Constructing the Vulva: Locating the Labia in Trans ‘Vaginoplasty’”
Volume 50, Number 1 (2024)
Lind turns attention toward the surgical construction of a vulva in vaginoplasty, arguing that the surgical procedure offers a rich opportunity to explore and deconstruct the social meanings surrounding the vulva more generally.
HONORABLE MENTION
Marlena Gittleman
“Tuning Toward Feminist Feeling: María Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends”
Volume 50, Number 2 (2024)
Gittleman examines Fornés’s 1977 play for its representation of embodied sensations, tracing how Fefu cultivates shared feminist feelings centered on the possibility of political resistance.
Award was not given for this year.
“Pleasures of the Hunt/We Must Be Creatures: Toward an Ecofeminist Hunting Ethic”
Volume 48, Number 2–3 (2023):
Autotheory/Autoethnography
Special Double Issue
Belmont reflects on deer hunting as an ecofeminist practice, arguing that vegans and subsistence hunters might find common ground in grappling with the complexities and complicities of our relationships to the land and creatures that enable us to live. Writing from a “rural queer ecological perspective,” Belmont challenges three common moves in contemporary ecofeminist vegan theory: indiscriminate categorization of “hunting”; reductive views of the human as eater; and erasure of Indigenous hunting while instrumentalizing Native people in service of abstract arguments. She argues that an ecofeminist ethic of subsistence hunting pushes us to face the direct and indirect forms of killing in which each of us participates; conscientious eating requires the painful recognition that “beings die for our food.” Belmont also advocates adopting a “creaturely” way of living, which means “living in place, in appreciation of place, being responsible to my place, including to the others who live here; all other free creatures on Earth.” A creaturely way of living means foregrounding our dependence on other lives, recognizing and accepting “the death we face, the deaths we cause,” and revering food as a sacred site of pleasure and connection with the land and its creatures.
Adair: “Is Transsexualism Chronic?”
Shaikh: “Intimate Critique: Toward a Feminism from Within”
Both published in Volume 48, Number 2 (2022)
Adair explores a temporal contradiction at the heart of current US understandings of trans subjectivity: between being framed as both chronic (long-lasting) and acute (curable through access to appropriate medical resources). As an alternative to these prevailing temporal logics of transness, Adair suggests that we view transness as “a type of experience” rather than “a type of personhood,” and as “robust, omnipresent, and potentially showing itself at any time.”
Shaikh theorizes an “intimate critique” of how heteropatriarchal spaces provoke girls and young women to question, navigate, and even resist the gendered expectations that structure their lives. Her form of intimate critique renders visible how resistant feminist subjects come into being within contexts that do not prioritize the discourses of autonomy, choice, self-empowerment, and “the freedom-seeking individual” that continue to animate many Western-centric feminist discussions.
Ellapen: “Siyakaka Feminism: Intersectionality, African Anality, and the Politics of Deviance in FAKA’s Performance Art Praxis”
Volume 47, Number 1 (2021)
Ramamurthy and Gidwani: “Punctuated Violence, the Intertwining of Violence and Care, and the Gender of Value”
Volume 47, Number 3 (2021)
Ellapen describes FAKA, a black queer femme performance duo from South Africa, who are on a mission to reconfigure the feminist and queer agenda in the African diaspora. Through Siyakaka feminism, FAKA engages with their intersectional experiences of being black, queer, femme, gender nonconforming, and working class. Ellapen celebrates how FAKA’s performance art breaks down the postcolonial suture of Africanness to cis-heteronormativity. He also explores how FAKA’s cultural work, centered in radical vulnerability, is more liberating and fertile than a normative, human-rights-based political agenda.
Ramamurthy and Gidwani’s essay, which is based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin in India, theorizes how violence shapes the everyday lives of working-class women who straddle the urban and rural in translocal households in contemporary India. The essay conceptualizes the relationship between violence, carework, and aspirations for the future, theorizing violence as a punctuating vector. Drawing on the life history of one woman, Usha, the authors illustrate how violence “punctuates,” by both marking inflection points in narrating life stories and by causing upheavals.
“Left of #MeToo”
Volume 46, Number 2 (2020)
Berg draws on Black Left feminism and sex-worker feminism as resources for escaping what she calls the “dead ends” of the #MeToo movement and calls for a position that emphasizes working people’s organizing rather than “remedies from a violent state.”
“Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger”
Volume 45, Number 1 (2019)
Judd engages the trope of the angry black woman, offering a “methodology” for dealing with the dilemma produced by the figure of Sapphire, who is, for many black women, both heroine and adversary. Her essay beautifully weaves together poetic responses to current events, autobiography, television, and music, offering an illuminating example of the varied registers in which Black feminist theory is practiced.
“MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism”
Volume 44, Number 3 (2018)
Giardina assigns black feminism a more central place in the chronology of US feminism by arguing that black women’s organizing against sexism in planning the 1963 March on Washington (MOW) was pivotal to later feminist efforts such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). Giardina traces how experienced civil rights activists such as Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman demanded greater attention to women’s lives in formulating the objectives of the MOW, especially in the area of wages and employment. Giardina traces how they established feminist protest models that they subsequently used in the formation of the National Organization for Women in 1966.
“Christian Bendayán: Queering the Archive from Iquitos, Peru”
Volume 43, Number 2 (2017)
Daly focuses on Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán, a visual artist who is of a cohort of Peruvian artists assembling a “counterarchive” that contests the heteronormative frame that has shaped how the Amazon has been imagined and represented. Daly shows how Bendayán effectively queers the archive and provides a compelling counterpoint to the way Iquitos has been historically understood.
Mesok: “Sexual Violence and the US Military: Feminism, US Empire, and the Failure of Liberal Equality”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian: “Infiltrated Intimacies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees”
Both published in Volume 42, Number 1 (2016)
Mesok critiques the gendered personnel practices of US militaries. By interrogating the quest for equal rights in the military, Mesok simultaneously clarifies the limitations of a framework of liberal equality and the principles of liberal feminism, both of which seek equality through a “sameness” narrative.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian explores Israel’s criminalization of the return of Palestinian refugees through an analysis of Palestinian women’s life histories between 1948 and 1953. Shalhoub-Kevorkian shows how the Israeli state fractured Palestinians’ homes at the levels of nation, land, community, and family. In doing so, she demonstrates how the Israeli state in fact infiltrated the most intimate spaces of those who had been labeled “infiltrators” themselves.
“Deconstructing Sita’s Blues: Questions of Mis/representation, Cultural Property, and Feminist Critique in Nina Paley’s Ramayana”
Volume 41, Number 2 (2015)
Lodhia advances the understanding of commodification and appropriation of culture—key concepts in cultural studies—by elaborating these terms in a transnational frame and diagnosing the patriarchal anxieties that erupt from the circulation of religious culture. We applaud her skillful self-reflexive critique of both popular US appropriations of South Asian religious symbols as well as of right-wing claims to culture as property.
“Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balance”
Volume 40, Number 1 (2014)
Rottenberg tracks a shift in contemporary popular feminism from claiming greater power for women to an emphasis on work-life balance, well-roundedness, and well-being. This ideal represents a possibility available only to a highly privileged minority of women in the United States, but it is upheld as a new normative model for all women. Rottenberg analyzes how affect plays a role in the discursive shift from women’s rights and freedom to work-life balance and harmony and how this shift resonates with neoliberalism. Rottenberg offers particularly insightful commentary on popular feminist writing such as Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 article in the Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” as well as Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In.
“Vulnerable Vulvas: Female Genital Integrity in Health and Dis-ease”
Volume 39, Number 1 (2013)
Labuski examines collective practices and ideas surrounding vulvas, especially in contexts where gynecological cancers are inadequately detected. She documents and reflects on how women attend to their bodies in alienated ways, often undergoing cosmetic surgeries that are presented as pragmatic solutions to “vulvar excess.” We believe the article is destined to become a classic in the field of women’s health and in feminist medical anthropology.
“Sue E. Generous: Notes Toward a Theory of Non-Transexuality”
Volume 38, Number 1 (2012)
Valentine stakes out new positions in conceptualizing non-transexuality and takes thoughtful risks in revisiting older certitudes.
“When the Devi Is Your Husband: Sacred Marriage and Sexual Economy in South India”
Volume 37, Number 1 (Spring 2011)
Ramberg extends feminist anthropology’s classic theories of marriage as exchange to formulate marriage “as a conduit of value.” Drawing on the case of southern Indian Yellamma devotees who marry the goddess, Ramberg also creatively detaches marriage from its conventional gender moorings to theorize conjugality in fresh ways.
“Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance”
Volume 36, Number 3 (2010)
Through an examination of three autobiographical performances by Harriet Jacobs, Rigoberta Menchú, and Marjane Satrapi, Gilmore and Marshall discuss how women in a range of national and transnational locations use their own girlhood in first-person testimonial narratives to speak about race, to alter the politics of rescue, and to teach about social injustice.