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Founded in 1975, Signs is recognized as the leading international journal in women's studies. Signs publishes articles from a wide range of disciplines in a variety of voices articles engaging gender, race, culture, class, sexuality, and / or nation. The focus of essays ranges from cross-disciplinary theorizing and methodologies to specific disciplinary issues, framed to enter conversations of interest across disciplines.

Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Merchandising the Sanitary Napkin: Lillian Gilbreth's 1927 Survey

L'A. montre de quelle maniere les premiers textes pornographiques modernes envisagent et mettent en scene le plaisir et la sexualite feminine. Elle passe en revue les livres pornographiques, publies entre 1655 et 1745 en France et en Grande-Bretagne, qui ont connu le plus de succes. Elle porte plus particulierement son attention sur «L'Ecole des filles» et sur l'ouvrage de Nicolas Chorier «Satyra sotadica». Ces deux ouvrages presentent differents recits, destines aux femmes, d'initiation sexuelle

The Representation of Female Desire in Early Modern Pornographic Texts, 1660-1745

Contraceptives are at the center of countless dramas of "everyday resistance" involving struggles for power between genders and generations (Scott 1985). In most demographic scholarship such dramas are obscured by emphasis on the "big picture" of broad demographic changes. This article is part of the intellectual movement toward the goal of viewing such huge social transformations from the ground on which they occur-the daily lives of men and women-in order to challenge existing demographic descriptions of fertility change that ignore conflict resistance and subversion in the ways fertility is regulated. (excerpt)

"Who Has Told You to Do This Thing?" Toward a Feminist Interpretation of Contraceptive Diffusion in Rhodesia, 1970-1980

Ibn ʿArabī and Mystical Disruptions of Gender: Theoretical Explorations in Islamic Feminism

Reclaiming Religious and Legal Authority: An Ethnography of the Women’s Shari’a Courts in India

Feminism in Spain is experiencing a paradox. On the one hand, the March 8 movement has held two feminist strikes, attended by multitudes. On the other hand, the far Right has entered representative politics, announcing a battle against feminism. With the rapid ascendency of the nationalist far-right party Vox, Spain joins other European countries where the far Right is on the rise. This article’s aim is to analyze the crucial role of gender in the rise of the nationalist far Right in Spain, arguing that gender is not a secondary issue but a primary field in which this political process is being articulated. The article examines the ways Vox mobilized gender during the national electoral campaign of April 2019 and during their first steps in the Andalusian Parliament. The analysis is twofold: it begins by exploring the framing of Vox’s electoral campaigns, including the national myth of the Reconquista of a Catholic Spain from Muslim rule and the militaristic representation of masculinity within this holy-war frame. It then examines Vox’s relentless antigender discourse, focusing on two prominent issues: first, the far-right opposition to gender violence policy through a variety of strategies, such as denying the gendered nature of violence against women and reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator, and second, the party’s representation of feminism, ranging from its straightforward delegitimization of feminism as an enemy of the Spanish nation to a parasitic-opportunistic appropriation through the defense of a “Spanish feminism.” The case study concludes that the Spanish far Right is gender dependent and that antagonism toward feminism is one of its key features.

Silencing Feminism? Gender and the Rise of the Nationalist Far Right in Spain

Herbivorous Men, Carnivorous Women: Doing Masculinity and Femininity in Japanese “Marriage Hunting”

This study focuses on digital activism against sexual misconduct in higher education in China. It demonstrates the dynamic of digital activism in an authoritarian regime, explicating how different stakeholders are involved in addressing sexual violence. While the hashtag #MeToo connotes the transnational effort to use social media to demonstrate the prevalence and magnitude of sexual violence, we also highlight the importance of local experience in the power struggle between grassroots digital advocacy and state institutions and within state institutions such as the news media, universities, and policy-making bodies, with their respective histories and development trajectories. Using social media to fight sexual violence creates possibilities for change in a situation where is difficult to act independently. The study not only contributes to our understanding of the complexity of digital activism against sexual violence in an authoritarian state but also highlights the strengths and weaknesses in each effort. © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press.

#MeToo in China: The Dynamic of Digital Activism against Sexual Assault and Harassment in Higher Education

Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration

The Body Politic: Representation and Reproductive Feminist Jurisprudence: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Memorial Essay

Sex Scenes, Television, and Disavowed Sex Work

Donald Trump, the Resistance, and the Queering of Democracy

A Social Reproduction Theory of Gender Violence

A Prosthetic Popular Feminism in Postfeminist Times: Mrs. America ’s Cool Feminism and Antifeminist Celebrity

Speaking of Failure: Modern Masculinity and Medieval Confession

This article argues that meaningful solidarity relies less on our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of others and more on our openness to encounter difference through the messy doing of care summoned by acuerpar. The verb acuerpar—to give one’s body—is a central political term in the vocabulary of decolonial feminist resistance in Central America. It names the collective care practices that bodies undertake to hold space for each other and the land in the face of capitalist extraction and rampant gendered and racialized violence. Against disembodied forms of solidarity that entreat us to bestow empathy on disadvantaged others by “putting ourselves in another’s shoes,” acuerpar invites us to stand side by side in our own bodies and remake the world through mutual aid. It is a call to be with rather than be in another’s shoes. Drawing on the work of Indigenous feminist thinkers from Central America, I show how acuerpar moves us away from colonizing models of coalition building that romanticize sentimental connection as the remedy for social ills. I do so by reflecting on the embodied support and radical self-care that took place at a feminist encampment in Honduras demanding justice for the murder of Indigenous Lenca organizer Berta Cáceres.

Acuerpar : The Decolonial Feminist Call for Embodied Solidarity

Confronting Servitude: Asian Immigrant Women Workers in State-Funded Homecare

Pre-publication abstract (before final edits and copy-editing): Amid a rising tide of misogyny and gender violence across the world, terms like "patriarchal backlash" have increased in use to describe similar trends in different settings. Yet, backlash remains contested as a concept, variably perceived as an expression of male resistance, a patriarchal restoration, or a mode in which a broader reactionary politics play out and coalesce. Recognising that the predominance of recent academic literature on backlash centres on Europe and the Americas, we explore a broader set of debates, questioning how we can better understand backlash in a global context. We argue that backlash can be framed as a form of crisis management, as a confluence of crises-political, economic, climate, and pandemic-create volatility in hierarchical social relations, threatening the reproduction of elite rule and capitalist growth. Patriarchal backlash serves to reimpose order through a series of spatial fixes in the individual space of the sexed body, the privatized space of the traditional family, and the bordered, ordered space of the ethnically imagined nation. Amid a felt sense of crisis and ensuing ontological insecurity, hierarchies are fixed in place through appeals to a naturalised gender order, itself structured by racialised, neocolonial relations of power operating within and across national borders. As sites of struggle over discursive meaning and material resources, the body, family, and nation are critical spaces in which to counter backlash and its fixing of hierarchies.

Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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