Ask a Feminist

This episode focuses on the harassment and abuse that women—particularly women in politics—face online. Signs associate editor Sarah Sobieraj, an expert on US political culture and digital media, speaks with Professors Moya Bailey and Nina Jankowicz. The conversation delves into the strategies used by misogynists online, the racialized abuse faced by women of color, and the role that digital harassment and misinformation played in the 2024 election. And crucially, they emphasize that this abuse, at the systemic level, is a massive barrier to women’s equal political participation and functions to push women in general out of political discourse and even public life.  Moya Bailey is a professor of communication studies at Northwestern and is an expert on Black women’s digital resistance. She also coined the term “misogynoir.” Nina Jankowicz is the cofounder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit focused on countering disinformation. She has advised governments, international organizations, and tech companies on the effects of disinformation, particularly on people from historically marginalized groups. And Sarah Sobieraj is a professor of sociology at Tufts University. Her latest book is Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy.

For our first episode of the second Trump Administration, Carla Kaplan (chair of the Signs editorial board) speaks to Libby Adler and K.J. Rawson about the administration's anti-trans, anti-gender executive orders. While we’ve known for quite some time that the anti-trans attacks would be coming, their speed and breadth have still been breathtaking. Adler and Rawson tease out the implications of these executive orders and demonstrate what they reveal about the Trump regime’s understandings of sex and gender. Adler is Professor of Law and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is the author of the book Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform from Duke University Press. And Rawson is Professor of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning collection of trans-related historical materials.

Ask a Feminist is back after a long hiatus with an episode about the current state of public feminism! Signs editor Suzanna Walters is joined by Marcie Bianco and Andi Zeisler. Andi is the cofounder of Bitch Media and the author of the book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrl to CoverGirl, and Marcie is the author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom. Their experiences writing and editing for feminist publics and building feminist platforms give them unique insights into the difficulties faced by those trying to reach or create feminist publics today. What happens when feminism becomes part of a “personal brand”? What are the pitfalls of anointing a few individuals as the public representatives of a movement as broad and diverse as feminism? Why do there seem to be so many feminist public intellectuals and so few feminist spaces?

Three esteemed feminist science-studies scholars—Sarah Richardson, Rene Almeling, and Natali Valdez—discuss reproduction in the age of epigenetics. They offer a critical appraisal of recent developments in the much-hyped field of epigenetics, particularly as those developments have focused on reproduction. Their discussion provides a crucial corrective as the biological sciences push for more epigenetic and high-tech approaches to reproductive health. Their feminist lens allows them to ask new questions and push back against scientific approaches that continue to place responsibility for managing reproductive risk onto individual women. They ask why these new epigenetic approaches—which even feminists had hoped might lead to more capacious or holistic understandings of reproduction—ultimately fail to live up to their own hype.

On this episode, Sandra McEvoy speaks to Jennifer Fluri about what the United States’s withdrawal from Afghanistan means for Afghan women and for the feminist movement in Afghanistan. Jennifer’s expertise as a geographer and her transnational feminist perspective are sorely needed in this perilous moment. As the withdrawal was under way, we heard familiar concerns--voiced by pundits and politicians--about the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban. But the broader context of the long US occupation, its effects on gender relations, and the history of women’s organizing in Afghanistan makes for a much more complicated picture, as you’ll hear. Jennifer--a professor of geography at University of Colorado Boulder who has worked in and on Afghanistan for almost twenty years--illuminates this complex history in this conversation with Sandra, who is clinical associate professor of political science at Boston University and a member of the Signs editorial board.