Editors' Note: The Personal Is Political

The ten essays in this volume echo this feminist call, covering women's sexual health and reproduction, addressing performances and commodification of women's gender roles, and detailing feminist pedagogies. The personal is political is a reminder that systemic inequalities impact women across mind, body, and spirit and that woman as a category remains key to nation-state control. As this issue goes to press, a Hulu television series has sparked renewed interest in Margaret Atwood's 1984 The Handmaid's Tale with commentators noting that the dystopian show feels too real, too possible. While powerful, this commentary ignores that dystopian violences have occurred, have been authorized, through colonial genocide, slavery, and continued globalized control of women's education, health, sexuality, and reproduction. Feminist studies remain necessary to remember, to point out privileged gaps in what is remembered, as well as providing insights for going forward. Meanwhile, the personal is political is also about daily well-being and resistance; not just survival, but what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor terms survivance—an active sense of presence, active survival. We hope these pages support active feminist presences for many futures.

The issue begins with essays focused on reproduction and women's sexual health. Sophie Lewis's paper takes up the complexities of global reproductive surrogacy while questioning an assumed injustice in surrogacy. Lewis asks: can there be "surrogacy with the goal of reproductive justice in mind"? Focusing on Dr. Nayna Patel, India's premier surrogacy reproductive doctor, Lewis examines how Patel negotiates philanthrocapitalism surrogacy, supporting dual messages of a fantasy of altruism by Indian women, surrogacy as "a labor of love," while creating a profitable business model based on "lifting up" low income women through meaningful work. The issues raised in the paper are timely and key to global discussions of women's bodies and reproduction. In contrast, Jennifer Nelson's essay focuses on white women artists and activists of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s, specifically the "body knowledge" work of a feminist health movement. Nelson argues that essentializing and dismissing 1970s US white feminist activism leaves a gap in understanding feminist movements. Whether or not readers agree with her characterization of essentialism, Nelson provides a close reading of feminist efforts to address patriarchal and misogynist health care knowledge and practices, discussing how these movements addressed intersectionality and offering insight into how past and present-day race and class demarcations continue to mark women's experiences differently. Nelson concludes with analysis of two filmmakers, Culpepper and Hammer, whose approaches remain radically relevant to challenging oppressive negative perceptions about women's bodies and supporting women's embodied reknowing.

Sri Devi Thakkilapati's essay takes up abortion as a reproductive justice issue caught in a struggle over the meanings of "hegemonic femininity." Thakkilapati argues abortion is central to dominant discourses and recentralizes privileged patriarchal femininity. Thakkilapati is interested in how women seeking abortion navigate structural ideologies to form differing self-constructions, and the ethnographic research conducted at a non-profit abortion clinic in Ohio is powerful. Whether women spoke narratives of selfblame or contamination, race and status played significant roles in abortion experiences and self-constructions of femininity. Clearly, as Thakkilapati notes, "race and class boundaries and inequalities are re-drawn through abortion," but alternative narratives about pregnancy, spirituality, motherhood, and the embodied self allowed women to critique inequalities. Thakkilapati concludes with a call for feminist abortion praxis focused on "everyday practices of compassion and critical resistance."

The call for everyday practices of compassion and critical resistance is compellingly highlighted in Gwen D'Arcangelis's essay. Focused on imperial health policies, namely the US National Smallpox Vaccination Program developed by the 2002 President Bush administration as a preemptive solution to bio-terrorism, D'Arcangelis examines how nurses, an underpaid mostly female workforce, resisted NSVP. D'Arcangelis details how nurses "enacted a model of transnational feminist praxis" holding the global North accountable for imperial practices in the global South. Nursing organizations reframed predominant discourses about the nursing field, challenged masculinist authority in medicine, advocated on behalf of persons they were supposed to vaccinate, and spoke out against a bio-terror health policy. This...