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.
