To honor half a century of publication, our fiftieth anniversary issue aims to generate new questions and critical discussion around “Big Feminism,” around the role and power of feminist theory, today and into the future. These fifty years have witnessed consequential feminist debates and the emergence of new analytical and theoretical frames. Yet the ground beneath our feet is collapsing. We are witnessing attacks on all we hold dear, including sovereignty over our own bodies and a global upsurge of fascism in which misogyny figures centrally. And, #MeToo notwithstanding, violence against women continues unabated. From this moment of profound triumph and profound precarity, how do we, as feminists, imagine the next fifty years? What are our feminist visions (utopias and dystopias) for 2075? What work will it take to bend the arc toward gender justice? The contributors to this special issue take up the challenge of diagnosing the perilous now and imagining a more feminist future.

Antiracist, anticapitalist feminist protests are at the forefront of contemporary mass protest in the Americas and beyond. As an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, international collective of feminist activist-intellectuals, we have been engaging with and analyzing contemporary protest since the global uprisings of the 2010s. Few things are bigger in feminism today than mass protest, yet there has been scant theorizing about it. Our manifesto accounts for the ubiquity of feminist epistemologies and practices marking an epochal shift in activism around the world. It proceeds in three parts. First, we analyze the current moment as a feminist conjuncture. Second, we conceptualize contemporary feminist protest, which we maintain must be theorized in itself rather than subsumed within the study of feminist movements. Finally, we advance an agenda for a feminist theory of protest, concluding that as activist assemblages, protest processes rearrange the ever-more diverse components of feminist fields, creating informal, fluid, if sometimes ephemeral, rhizomatic, and recombinant collectivities, articulations, and agglomerations. Feminist and other popular protests produce new organizational forms and generate realignments in activist fields. We propose that today’s generative forms of protest presage the future shape of what we have conventionally called “social movements.” We thereby address what we believe are big and largely unexplored feminist questions about protest and movements that should inspire new directions in feminist and critical social theory for years to come.

The conflict surrounding gender categories in Britain between proponents of immutable sex-based rights and those advocating for diversity and self-identification is, at its heart, a conceptual conflict about what gender is, with the “real” deployed to confer authority and status on both sides. This is largely a mainstream conception of the real as independent existence and truth. While it can support different gender politics, it inclines toward protecting and validating existing common sense in ways that can impede transformative understandings. Does this mean, then, that the real should be dropped from progressive gender discourse? This article explores a different path, one that retains the real while reorienting its use. Focusing on the resistance that understandings of gender categories as plural, elective, and mutable face, it traces a conception of the real that can support rather than thwart the development and enactment of progressive institutional meanings—a project described as “conceptual prefiguration” (taking up meanings as if they were otherwise). To explore this revised account of the real, the article focuses on four issues: gender’s key contested qualities; the importance of imagining to the realization of gender; the relationship between realizing gender and other uses of gender, including representation; and the failed realizations and derealizations that also contribute to conceptual prefiguration. In concluding, the article argues for the real to be jettisoned as a gold standard when it comes to what gender means and is—to focus instead on gender projects worth realizing.

Throughout feminist histories, both the wife and prostitute have been evoked as symbols of women’s shared experiences under patriarchy or of a common female condition. Yet even as various feminist currents have put pressure on marriage and prostitution alike as pillars of male domination, these are decisively held to be not quite the same: the feminist movement today has produced a global campaign toward the immediate abolition of prostitution, but not of marriage. This means that the contemporary feminist pursuit of the abolition of prostitution is perfectly compatible with hegemonic ways of seeing “female” bodies in at least one important way: prostitutes are criminalized, or penalized in other direct or indirect ways by criminal justice structures, in the name of the abolition of their sexual labor; wives are not. Given this intersection between certain currents of contemporary feminism and the state, this article will ask how we might account for the fact that there has been no large-scale feminist movement toward the abolition of marriage or the family, as there exists now for the abolition of prostitution. Is it possible to theorize the abolition of prostitution—as well as marriage—within a feminist framework that does not seek to do so via increasing state control of laboring bodies? In exploring these questions, I argue that to misunderstand sexual labor and the people who do sexual labor—both in and out of the home—will, until corrected, ultimately defeat the crucial feminist project of reclaiming our bodies and abolishing the exploitation of our work.

Recent debates over public school curricula, including “anti-CRT” initiatives and attacks on “gender ideology,” have led to a reinvigoration of maternalist politics in the United States. “Moms,” whether “for Liberty,” “Rising,” or “Demanding Action,” are entering the political arena to advocate for everything from red-flag laws to book bans. This recent uptick in the politicization of “moms” presents a challenge for feminists, who have long been divided over maternalist political strategies. While some have seen great feminist potential in maternalist politics, others have critiqued it as insufficiently political or dangerously essentialist. We revive these debates to urge feminists to undertake a strategic reclamation of motherhood to counter the mom-led campaigns of the far right. While we concede that some forms of maternalist politics are ill-suited to feminist ends insofar as they impose on all women, by dint of a specious maternal essence, an obligation to mother, we argue that alternative, anti-essentialist forms of maternalism are viable. For a model, we look to the writings and speeches of nineteenth-century feminist Victoria Woodhull. In a moment when reactionary politicizations of motherhood abound, contemporary feminists can be well served by a concrete historical example of a feminist who cast “maternal duty” as an obligation to fight against intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, sex, and class and for robust alternatives to the private patriarchal family.

Circa 1975, radical feminists theorized rape as an issue of gender, not just crime, by centering the stories of acquaintance and family rape that had been neglected by a law-and-order focus on stranger rape. For 2075, we need once more to expand the cultural repertoire of rape stories in order to better understand the larger structures that incubate rape, this time centering stories of state violence that politicize it as an issue of racial capitalism. These stories include such uncounted events of sexual violence as prison rape, strip searches at border control, and forced sterilization in ICE detention. Attending to these stories exercises an art historical way of knowing that disrupts the state monopoly on rape knowledge, whether in its legal prerogative to define what rape is or in its public health prerogative to count where and to whom rape happens. This essay begins by recovering the aesthetic instincts of 1970s radical feminist work, then complicates its racial and transnational dimensions to articulate an abolitionist movement against rape grounded in cultural transformation. Acting as examples and as theories in their own right, threaded through the essay are readings of three art-historical episodes devoted to the Rape of the Sabines: Nicolas Poussin in the colonial 1600s, Pablo Picasso and the decolonial moment of the 1960s, and Andres Serrano and the neocolonialist moment of the neoliberal 1990s. This colonial history brings out the structural function of rape to conscript labor. And it foregrounds an anti-rape strategy adapted from labor’s toolkit: the strike.

This essay examines consciousness-raising (CR) as it was developed during the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1960s. It offers a history of CR from Southern labor organizing and Black liberation struggles to the first radical feminist groups of the 1960s, then subsequently tracks its spread after it was proliferated by liberal, mainstream organizations like the National Organization of Women (NOW). Today, CR is often conceived as a relic of a naive past or a liberal project aimed at reifying the liberal subject. But this essay suggests that its watering down—due to incorporation by liberal organizations like NOW, and hegemony in general—led to the erasure of a more radical project, resulting in liberal CR metonymically standing in for CR practice as a whole. Ultimately, the essay offers a critical reappraisal of second-wave feminist consciousness-raising and why it was significant.

This article seeks to revitalize feminist engagement with citizenship by articulating the concept of reproductive citizenship. Drawing upon the work of feminist and queer citizenship theorists, among others, it argues that a feminist conceptualization of citizenship with reproduction at its core is a useful tool for identifying, exploring, and addressing women’s ongoing exclusion from and subordination by the Western liberal intellectual and legal tradition. Citizenship, understood as a contested process around the right to have rights and to determine the scope of those rights, has long operated to exclude and oppress liberalism’s others on the basis of bodily difference, reproduction, and sexuality. Focusing on abortion access and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), this article will argue that the framework of reproductive citizenship is a helpful and effective means of understanding why abortion and SRHR are so viscerally contested and is helpful for navigating the difficult conceptual and real-world terrain that limits their full realization.

In her pathbreaking 1989 book, The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild introduced the idea of the “stalled revolution.” In the years since, the phrase has gained prominence and influence among scholars of gender, many of whom now use the term to describe the pace of change in arenas far beyond its original referent: the division of labor at home. Given its outsized role in feminist theory, it is due time to subject the metaphor to an examination. I do so in three parts. First, I trace the history of the feminist literature about the family leading up to Hochschild’s introduction of the phrase, explaining how and why the metaphor resonated so strongly with academics studying the family. Second, I empirically demonstrate the subsequent rise of the phrase in academic discourse, showing that it became a prominent discourse metaphor used to capture change and lack of change in gender relations across many social arenas. Finally, I examine the metaphor itself. I note roots in modernist thinking, the assumption of a linear model of time, the passive nature of mechanical metaphors, and the presumption of the inevitability of progressive change. With these observations in place, I offer alternatives for both stall and revolution, noting the changes in US society and feminist theory since 1989. I conclude with a call for further exploration of alternative metaphors and more critical reflection on the metaphors we use to diagnose the present and devise new futures.

The question that animates this article is what feminists ought to do once they find themselves in the wreckage of internal feminist critique brought on by Women of Color and deconstructive feminism. What I seek to do here is controversial, and this is because the argument I will make, in its simplest form, is in keeping with Flavia Dzodan’s provocative words that contemporary feminism “will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.” More boldly, my argument also rests on an even more divisive feminist position, especially for feminists appearing in Judith Butler and Joan Scott’s 1992 edited volume Feminists Theorize the Political: that feminism needs foundations. While purporting to disavow feminist foundations outright, even deconstructive feminists embrace a form of antifoundational foundationalism, or the foundational commitment to antifoundationalism as feminism’s normative and methodological imperative. In place of this faux antifoundationalism, I turn to early Women of Color feminists to advance an unabashed, and far more promising, feminist foundation—a political foundation rooted in intersectional feminist commitment buoyed by a traveling and dialogical epistemology. Advancing this uncompromising definition of feminism is a particularly pressing exercise because, in addition to withstanding internal blows since the 1970s, we find ourselves bearing witness to the culmination of a decades-long external onslaught against the feminist gains of the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. The intersectional feminism of early Women of Color feminism, I argue, is vital to meeting contemporary challenges such as these.

In a large event with audience participation at the University of Oxford, organized by Ruth Chang, Catharine A. MacKinnon, together with commentators Finn Mackay, Mischa Shuman, and Sandra Fredman, engage crucial issues of transgender identity, experience, and treatment in the context of requirements for the liberation of women, and evaluate current debates by feminist standards. Legal, social, political, and philosophical questions are documented and explored.