This article examines how three recent Anglophone novels of early motherhood, namely, Szilvia Molnar's The Nursery (as Sit Lekesi), Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch (as Gece Kanc & imath;& gbreve;& imath;), and Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor (as Asker ile Denizci), circulate in Turkish translation in a context shaped by pronatalist moral economies. Pairing peritextual analysis (covers, back-cover copy, blurbs, and bio notes) with close readings of selected key scenes of postpartum crisis, feral transformation, and toddler-year burnout, I show how Turkish editions both render and manage maternal negativity: translation choices modulate voice, affect, and register, while peritexts frame these mothers for local readability through medicalization, prestige satire, or a universalizing language of love and identity. I argue that, in these editions, "bad motherhood" does not simply travel; it is rewritten through translation and packaging, becoming at once marketable, recognizable, and carefully contained. I suggest the foreignness of these "bad moms" may provide a form of political insurance, allowing publishers to market maternal transgression as a global literary commodity while bypassing local scripts of sacred motherhood.
This article examines how the figure-or genre-of "woman" is produced and contested within the traditionally masculine action film through the critical reception of Mad Max: Fury Road. While debates over whether the film is feminist appear to center on representation, they reveal a deeper investment in stabilizing "woman" as a coherent political object. Drawing on feminist film theory, I argue that if the film seems nostalgic for a regenerative birth mother at a moment when sexual difference is reconfigured by queer and trans studies, feminist criticism's investment in what Robyn Wiegman calls "the world-making stakes of identity knowledge" (2012, 35) ultimately reveals a similar shortcoming in its conceptualization of sex and feminism, limited by a binary conceptualization of gender and the demand that Furiosa's feminist status ties legibility to political value. The interpretive instability surrounding Furiosa-variously read as empowerment, objectification, sexualization, or resistance-exposes the labor required to render sexual difference intelligible within a binary framework. Just as genre actively shapes the film, feminist criticism shapes the woman it claims to describe, producing the illusion of standing outside its object. At stake in the film's interpretability is not simply gender representation but the citational and epistemological authority of "woman" itself.
In the wake of Trump's second election, the liberal fantasy of a benevolent state reared its head: the right policy, politician, or police officer will end anti-trans oppression. This article heeds the warning from generations of abolitionists before us that violence is not a defect of the state but endemic to it. By consequence, reforms that strengthen the state by expanding avenues for criminalization, resourcing the police, and incorporating more people into the military further jeopardize those subject to premature death, trans or otherwise. The current US political regime's overt cruelty provides an opening for widespread reckoning with the state's legitimacy and empty promises of reform. This article reenvisions this moment as an urgent opportunity to: 1) raise awareness about intersectional oppression across and beyond trans people; 2) nourish broad-based solidarity movements; and 3) cultivate strong networks of care in our communities outside of and against the state. Rather than pursuing a liberal politics that incorporates more of us as police and imperial soldiers and expands the state's capacity for violence domestically and abroad, we call for an abolitionist commitment to gender, sexual, social, and political liberation via an end to state control over our bodies and lives everywhere.
This article examines the afterlives of Nefertiti's Bust as performances that stage the intersections of gender, empire, and visual culture. Moving beyond biographical reconstruction, it argues that the Bust operates as a repertoire of performances continually re-scripted across cultural sites. Three case studies structure the analysis: the staging of Nefertiti in Berlin's Neues Museum, which performs colonial possession and the aestheticization of feminine beauty; the digital intervention The Other Nefertiti (2015), which performs resistance through the circulation of unauthorized 3D scans; and the cosmetic "Nefertiti lift," which performs the queen's visage through contemporary bodies, inscribing antiquity as a template for modern beauty. Guided by performance studies and six feminist frameworks-radical, Marxist, postcolonial, ecofeminist, post-feminist, and corporeal-the article demonstrates how Nefertiti is continually enacted as sovereign, erased, appropriated, extracted, fragmented, and embodied. It argues that these performances reproduce patriarchal and colonial logics while simultaneously opening possibilities for feminist resistance. By treating Nefertiti not as a static artifact but as a performative repertoire, the article contributes to feminist performance studies, museum and heritage debates, and visual culture analysis. It concludes by calling for feminist curatorial and cultural practices that embrace multiplicity, foreground sovereignty, and resist the immobilization of iconic figures.
Hansa Wadkar was a popular film star of Marathi cinema, who had established herself as an actress with considerable histrionic skills, essaying a range of roles in films belonging to a variety of genres during a career spanning several decades, before and after Indian Independence. Despite the success, Wadkar's unconventional personal life was troubled and difficult. In the early seventies her autobiography, Sangate Aika (1970), was published. Subsequently, Shyam Benegal, a stalwart of the Indian New Wave, made Bhumika (1977) broadly based on Wadkar's autobiography. The film's realist framework underscored by its critique of patriarchy, succeeded in bringing Wadkar's journey into the national discourse of women empowerment. This article is an attempt to read Sangate Aika and Bhumika together with the view to "finding" Hansa Wadkar, the female professional working in mid-century Marathi film industry, even as she participated in and contributed to the imagination and the making of the cinematic modernity of the region.
The forum below came into being out of a curiosity to learn more about feminist scholars' creation and use of digital humanities projects, platforms, and media to forward their research and teaching. Participants discussed the possibilities and perils of feminist digital humanities projects as they shared their unique experiences and perspectives. Larger trends in the conception, design, and operation of feminist digital humanities are visible in the conversation that follows-notably all three participants expressed a desire to work with digital media as a means of producing and sharing feminist knowledge and resistance narratives with broader audiences.
This paper is about The Feminist Digital Center (FDC). We begin by briefly theoretically situating our project in discussions of feminist and open pedagogy, high impact practices, and digital scholarship. Next, we discuss how the FDC came to be, institutionally and digitally, with particular emphasis on the assignments students did to fill the site. We close with why the site matters. We hope readers will attempt some version of this project at your institutions and find value in the model we share.
This article focuses on a curriculum research collaboration among students (high school, undergraduate and graduate) and faculty to create college-level courses that focus on feminist media studies. As a reflection and extension of our work, we tell our polyvocal story of this collaboration while arguing that this work is a feminist methodology that could be used in pedagogical and other academic and public contexts.
In this paper, we use a feminist dialogue to query publication deaths that haunt us. We ruminate on respective past publications that remain unread and uncited, despite encapsulating defining events in our development as scholars. For Author Kaye Hare this was an affective narrative that troubled a seemingly ideal moment of public scholarship; for Author Amber Moore, this was a hard-fought analysis of precarious intersectional feminist resistance in popular culture. Inspired by the horror-film genre "spectral incognizance," we methodologically deploy a multivocal dialogical structure based on multiple revisitings that attenuate anxieties of metaphorical publication death, before revealing that this death is imminent. Through re-examining our past works, this project invites consideration of how our publications' f(l)ailings can draw out a particular haunting temporality that holds the present open to provocative questions that are difficult to pose and sustain within current institutional, academic processes.
Feminist scholars in the discipline of geography have noted the ways that routine activities at the household and neighborhood scales contribute to power relations and identity formation. Geographic information systems (GIS), with their ability to create multiple visual representations of people's experiences in space at any scale, hold great potential for revealing these local processes and patterns that are often lost or invisible in broader historical narratives, especially when they pertain to women and children. This article contributes an example by using GIS to encode and map everyday events in a diary kept by Elisabeth Koren, a nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrant to the midwestern United States. Combining GIS methods with a careful cataloging of the text, I create maps showing social and economic connections developed during Elisabeth's routine walks; geographic realms of pleasant and unpleasant emotions she encountered while traversing the landscape; and differing ways that women, men, and children used domestic space in the home where she boarded. I demonstrate that even highly computational GIS methods, such as kernel density estimation, can be appropriated toward the portrayal of nuanced and uncertain types of phenomena such as feelings, wanderings, and sites of household chores. This case study is intended to inspire researchers of social topics to look closely for ways that life writings, interviews, or other personal data may contain themes that could be better understood using GIS and mapping tools.
The gender spectrum, a continuum ranging from "male" to "female," is a huge improvement over the traditional binary model, according to which one can be either one or the other, and no degrees are allowed. However, the model still suffers from some inadequacies, most notably the inability to represent other genders and agender identities. This is accounted for in the new "spectral" models of gender, which use independent scales to measure the degree to which a person identifies with a given gender category. However, by conceiving the amounts of gender dimensions to be mutually independent, these models invite other difficulties, most notably the inability to account for agender identities in a straightforward fashion. In this paper, I argue that a way to solve the problems with the new models (and not to have the old problems re-appear) is to take a step back, of sorts, towards the initial gender spectrum. I explore from a perspective of philosophical logic the types of relations among gender categories in the spectral models of gender and argue that the initial spectrum construes gender categories to be in the logical opposition of "fuzzy contradiction," while the models with more than one spectrum do not construe gender categories to be in any kind of logical opposition. I propose a weaker opposition (namely, "fuzzy contrariety") between gender categories, as well as the "fuzzy gender hexagon"-an application of a particular abstract logical diagram to gender terms-as a model of gender identity.
In pronatalist societies, the decision to remain childfree creates a conflict-laden scenario. This article explores how childfree women confront social hostility and defend their reproductive autonomy through resistance strategies and tactics. With this aim, the results of a feminist research, positioned from feminist Standpoint theory and digital ethnography, are presented. The researcher conducted biographical narrative interviews with sixteen voluntary childless women from Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and the United Kingdom, all of whom were members of a childfree Facebook group. This research revealed that there is a persistent tension between societal pressure placed on these women in pronatalist societies and their exercise of reproductive autonomy. This tension compels them to adopt four resistance strategies: questioning socialization and societal expectations surrounding motherhood; coping with social pressure; assuming a transgressive identity; and projecting a positive future. Each one of these strategies entails specific tactics employed by the participants. This paper highlights the connections between these strategies, their associated tactics, and the agentic skills involved.
: Global right-wing anti -gender movements have developed a transnational pattern in their uses of language as a means of subjugation and of control, and this article examines manifestations of this pattern in two specific states: Brazil and Russia. By exploring the anti -gender languaging, rhetoric, and legislation advanced by Jair Bolsonaro (President of Brazil 2019 - 2022) and Vladimir Putin (President of Russia 2000 - 2008 and 2012 to the present) and their supporters, we find that, in both contexts, antigender campaigns are reactions to and also drivers for increasingly dramatic political and social conflicts, and in each case, anti -gender ideologies are embedded in larger right-wing authoritarian aims. The anti-gender discourse advanced by these leaders and their pivotal supporters arises not from simple personal feelings but are, instead, targeted political strategies, similar aims embedded in different languages. Our examination begins by contextualizing Bolsonaro's Brazil and Putin's Russia within the larger landscape of anti -gender campaigns and the global growth of right-wing authoritarianism. We then move to the two case studies and their respective enactments of anti -gender languaging and rhetoric within their specific political, social, and discursive landscapes, demonstrating the transnational nature of such projects despite differences in local contexts. Finally, we synthesize these case studies and consider the roles of Feminist Translation Studies and transnational feminist exchange in responding to the rise of such right-wing antigender movements in both local and global manifestations.
: In this introduction to part two of the special issue "Translating Transnational Feminisms," we examine the position of feminist translation practices and the theories of Feminist Translation Studies within transnational cultural and geopolitical contexts. We again explore translation as a core component of transnational feminist solidarities, focusing particularly on Feminist Translation Studies (FTS) as containing frameworks that allow for forms of and approaches to analysis that, due to the multidisciplinarity of the field, offer sight and insights that are unique in their depth and breadth.
This roundtable article features a conversation among the five scholars who delivered keynotes at the Warwick School of Feminist Translation, held at the University of Warwick, UK, in May 2023: Olga Castro, Emek Ergun, Maud Anne Bracke, William J. Spurlin, and Luciana Carvalho Fonseca. Drawing on their uniquely interdisciplinary expertise on the politics of translation and interpreting, the authors explore the urgent role that translation and translators, as well as the fields and scholars of feminist and queer translation and interpretation studies, play in distrupting and dismantling heteropatriarchal, racist, homonationalist, and colonial regimes of power. Their conversations reveal the urgent need to decolonize intersectionally and globally and to transnationalize (and eventually denationalize) the feminist and queer praxes of translation beyond contemporary geopolitical, linguistic, institutional, and cultural borders; and also beyond normative binary regimes that largely demarcate the contemporary theories, actions, and future possibilities of feminist and queer translation. While doing that, the scholars unpack the notion of transnationality, which cannot be conceived without translation and lives a dynamic polysemic life in translation, yet remains an undertheorized term in much of contemporary scholarship, as the roundtable discussion attests. In exploring the intricate interplay between transnationality and translation (particularly in regard to processes of queer migrations, translocal coalitions, and feminist genealogies), the scholars invite further conversations on how Feminist Translation Studies can transnationalize, decolonize, and queer both the world and itself while operating within the disciplinary boundaries of the globalized neoliberal university.
When "gender" was translated to Icelandic in 1998 as kyngervi , the notion of performative gender had been circulating in Icelandic academia for a little over a year. The introduction and dissemination of the term inside academia then became quite rapid, with the help of diverse professional fields such as art, literary, history and gender studies, but criticism on the translation did not appear until well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, when it was pointed out that the translated term conveys a difference between "sex" and "gender," with the possible consequence of perpetuating this dichotomy although it had been under scrutiny within English speaking feminist debates since the beginning of the 1990s. Notwithstanding this difference, the term had by then gained ground in academia. It was widely used in feminist and queer activism, and it had found its way into public institutions and regulations. This article sheds light on how key terms travel in translation and possibly break barriers between disciplines and people. What has the confusion between the signifier and the signified led to, given that the notion of performative gender-as a notion emphasizing a socially constructed reality rather than a biological given-has gained ground and come to be widely accepted in Icelandic society? Can we possibly say that the term's translation history is in itself a proof of Judith Butler's theory, since the unstable meaning of the sign does not seem to have much to do with its acceptance? It is rather the repetition and iteration of a unique Icelandic queering of the concept that has secured its dissemination.
This conversation featuring four scholars-Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin-took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin's book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book and its translation allow us to see Beauvoir anew.
