This essay meditates on the incoherence of the history of race and family through the lens of contemporary lesbian pregnancy. The presence of two mothers—in this case, one white and one black—alongside the simultaneous irrelevance and hyperrelevance of paternity tugs at the tangled American historical threads of race and family in ways that ultimately surface a variety of fantasies that shape both. Here I consider the ways that lesbian reproduction makes legible, and complicates, the historical feminization and racialization of reproduction, given that the extraneousness of paternity underscores at once a kind of chosen paternity, the necessity of paternity, and the irrelevance of paternity. If the double-mother scenario invokes the tiresome “who’s the father?” question, in which heteronormative models of familiality assert themselves even in the scene of queer kinship formations, then the real shadow of lesbian reproduction is another question: “Who’s the (real) mother?” I argue that the scene of lesbian pregnancy exposes histories and fictions of race, kinship, and legitimacy, and ultimately raises and recalls tensions between the political impulses of queerness and the histories of race.

In the theoretical literature on biocapitalism, commercial gestational surrogacy is often treated as a paradigm of the new forms of labor that have emerged with it. I begin by assessing Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s version of this idea in their influential 2014 book Clinical Labor. Their argument for understanding gestational surrogacy as labor can be interpreted as continuing the tradition of Marxist feminism that demands recognition and adequate compensation for women’s socially reproductive labor. My key aim is to show that once we submit commercial gestational surrogacy to a rigorous Marxist-feminist analysis, however, it becomes difficult to understand it as a form of labor. While I acknowledge some of the political advantages of the labor paradigm, I develop a sustained critique of it by focusing on its theoretical and political shortcomings. I analyze the functional role that commercial gestational surrogacy occupies in the dynamics of global capitalism and identify the aspects that distinguish it from other forms of waged care work. My main concern is not the correct application of Marx or his labor theory of value but rather the feminist political and ethical consequences that follow from the theoretical question of how we conceive of gestational surrogacy and how we theorize the processes of value production on which biocapitalism relies. The goal is to show how different theoretical understandings of gestational surrogacy have radically different political consequences for the feminist debates surrounding it.

This article explores media constructions of the 2007 murder of a Canadian teenager named Aqsa Parvez as a case of an honor killing that shocked Canada. While much has been written about her story in the Canadian press, considerably less attention has been paid to the ways in which this murder resonated far beyond the borders of the Canadian state. This article thus traces the travels of the narrative of Aqsa Parvez’s murder from Canada to the United States and then to Israel in order to show not only how stories of death gain meaning but also how they make meaning by reproducing national boundaries and by reconfiguring relations of dominance, resistance, and power. By charting the transnational routes of honor-related violence as they are exemplified in the Aqsa Parvez murder, the narratives or stories it generated, and the right-wing activism it mobilized, I aim to reveal connections between the discursive and political configurations of this crime. In mapping these stories’ movements and travels, as well as their tensions and contradictions, I show how the murder of (certain) Muslim women in crimes that become known as honor crimes is interpreted and deployed in a number of interconnected geopolitical sites and registers. Utilizing critical race and queer scholarship on the phenomenon and practices of pinkwashing, I argue that the production and commemoration of the honor crime as an instance of exceptional violence help authorize posthumous solidarities that serve to buttress right-wing forms of political activism.

This article discusses how perpetrators and victims are constructed in legal rape cases and how these constructions are informed by notions of gender, sexuality, race, and nation. It presents an in-depth frame analysis of two legal cases that were processed by Norwegian appellate courts in 2012. In so doing, I show how the allocation of shame and sympathy for victims and perpetrators is connected to citizenship through gender and race discrimination. The analysis suggests that whereas the perpetrator with a majority racial background was subject to so-called reintegrative shaming, the perpetrator with a minority racial background was subject to stigmatic shaming. The politics of shame in the context of rape thus manifests as an attribution of guilt (but to a lesser extent shame and stigmatization) to the majority perpetrator, whereas the minority perpetrator was constructed as a deviant outlaw deserving of public shame. Prior relationship with the perpetrator, sexually “risk-taking” behavior, and alcohol consumption were associated with negative stereotyping of victims. Moreover, the court regarded violence committed by the perpetrator from a racial-majority group as a deviation from the civilized and gender-equal mainstream culture. I therefore argue that geography constitutes a specific element in the legal processing of rape cases. With the prosecution of rape as a medium, the courts produce and reproduce a moral community in which some sexual citizens are admitted a share and others are not, while the legal process simultaneously manages the sexual rights of citizens in different physical and social spaces.

My aim in this article is both to identify and move beyond what I argue is a dominant interpretive practice in feminist debates on gender and culture: centering liberalism as a condition of and for feminist interventions. This preoccupation with liberalism constitutes a method of inquiry in and of itself, functioning as a starting point for scholarly work: liberalism has become a textual anchor in the gender/culture debate. Where scholars rely on liberalism as a point of departure for analysis, divisions between liberal/nonliberal, West/non-West, will unavoidably be established at the outset. This has problematic consequences for the ways in which scholars are able to respond not only to each other but also to the appropriation of feminist discourses by the state and in public deliberations—from the recent “travel ban” in the United States to the “burkini ban” in France. I offer an alternative to this entrenched vocabulary through a comparative textual analysis of two authors: Susan Moller Okin and Saba Mahmood. I first illustrate how a shared reliance on liberalism locks both authors in an oppositional binary between liberal West and nonliberal non-West. To unsettle this framework, I show that suspending their reliance on a liberal referent reveals points for negotiation between their considerations of autonomy, selfhood, and deliberation. These opportunities for negotiation are precisely what get buried beneath their mutual focus on liberalism. My reading thus suggests that possibilities for cross-cultural collaboration might well require a shift beyond feminist preoccupations with liberalism.

The relationship between feminism and drag king performance is complicated. While many drag kings hail their performances as feminist, feminists critical of drag king performance often accuse drag kings of valorizing hegemonic masculinity, reinforcing patriarchal norms, or engaging in the subjugation of femininity through performances that use masculine tropes. In particular, strains of radical feminism that reify the connection between gender presentation and biological sex are unable to imagine a female-born person’s relationship to masculinity that is not about access to male privilege and the assertion of patriarchal ideologies within lesbian spaces. In opposition to this trend, many drag kings understand their performances as specifically feminist because they create a subcultural language and feminist-centered spaces. This counters the claim that femininity and biology correlate directly to each other and rejects the impulse to draw strict boundaries around the category of “woman.” This article intervenes in this conversation by asserting that drag king masculinity has aspects of feminist performance embedded in its structure. Drag kings manipulate gendered agency through both parody and reappropriations of hegemonic masculinity in ways that have the potential to act as subversive feminist performances. In light of these factors, I contend that even dominant masculinities can do the work of feminism when written onto the bodies of drag kings. Further, I propose that we reimagine the language we use to talk about drag king identity more generally. Most analyses of drag king culture follow J. Jack Halberstam’s understanding of drag kings as a representation of female masculinity. I suggest, instead, that we shift from talking about drag kings as embodying female masculinity to talking about drag kings as engaging feminist masculinities.

More individuals in the United States identify as evangelical than any other religious group, yet we have sparse empirical data on the gendered and sexual practices and understandings within this population. Attending to evangelical constructions of gender and sexuality can tell us quite a bit about the cultural and political agendas at the fore of American life. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article critically investigates contemporary evangelical responses to feminism. I argue that the church grapples with changes in understandings of gender and sexuality against the backdrop of what I call an “imagined secular world.” Evangelicals evoke the imagined secular in their debates about gender and sexuality in the church today as a way of defining their own contemporary religious identities. This article details the construction of the imagined secular through three evangelical responses to feminism: constructions of an evangelical feminism, seeking a middle ground, and rejecting feminism. I argue that the church creates space for and encourages a type of messiness that allows for these varied responses to feminist beliefs but that these varied responses all seem to suggest that evangelicals are not very willing to budge when it comes to gendered change. I suggest that feminist scholars must recognize this messiness to understand the modern religious Right, as evangelical understandings about sex and families have shaped a political movement that has remade the Republican Party and transformed American politics.

Feminist legal scholar, writer, teacher, and activist Catharine A. MacKinnon discusses the #MeToo movement with Durba Mitra. They discuss the genesis of sexual harassment law; the relationship between the law and social movements; the particular vulnerabilities faced by women of color, immigrant women, and trans people; contemporary applications of Title IX; and harassment in international law.