Celebrating Fifty Years of Feminist Studies: Notes of Appreciation from Authors

In celebration of fifty years since Feminist Studies began publishing, in 1972, we asked a selection of authors to convey what having their work published in Feminist Studies has meant for them, both professionally as well as personally. Following are their responses.

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Feminist Studies has been a welcoming home for my work at two pivotal stages in my career. The journal published "Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism" (volume 40, number 3, 2014), an essay I submitted during my first year of graduate school. The essay represents a very early stage in my thinking on sex work politics and having Feminist Studies as a place to work through those ideas was invaluable. Feedback from anonymous reviewers and the Feminist Studies editorial team, especially Ashwini Tambe, helped shape the essay and the thinking that would inform later writing and eventually my book, Porn Work. The editorial process helped me understand the publication process as an opportunity to experiment with ideas that can and should change later (it's good to come to disagree with yourself on some things!). I think back to those editorial comments as a push to do the kind of dialectical thinking I aspire to, leaving more space for contradiction while also being full throated in stating your case. I try to model this spirit of feminist generosity, one that believes something is worth saying enough to push the author to say it more fully, in the special issue editing and review work I do now.

The editorial process was also infused with a lot of feminist care, crucial for a graduate student's first attempt. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and Feminist Studies editors, together with UCSB's Leila Rupp, shepherded me through the process with a lot of grace. That essay was later awarded best article submitted by a graduate student, a vote of confidence that meant a lot to me and, I imagine, helped turn what had been meager initial funding into fellowships that gave me protected time for dissertation research. It also meant I had people to say "hello" to at my first nwsa meeting, a gift to anyone new on the scene.

Later, during my first year on the tenure track, Feminist Studies became a home for my essay, "Left of #MeToo" (volume 46, number 2, 2020), which won the Claire Goldberg Moses Award for most theoretically innovative article. It's an essay fueled by rage at the non-sexual abuses I saw in the academy (daily cruelty to custodians, administrative staff, and contingent faculty), all quietly endorsed (or perpetrated) by some of the same feminists who loudly protested women's vulnerability to sexual harassment in the workplace. Feminist Studies made a place for the piece, and again connected me with reviewers who helped deepen its argument. This time, reviewers' and Feminist Studies editors' sense that the claims were worth making gave me the confidence to publish a politically risky piece even at a career stage when we are often told to keep quiet. It was a powerful kind of feminist mentorship that works like a comrade hyping you up before a political battle worth having.

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So much has transpired since we last wrote together—a global pandemic, a death blow to reproductive rights, and a political landscape fueled by exclusion and cruelty. This invitation has prompted us to reflect on why we do what we do and the place that Feminist Studies, now in its fiftieth year, holds in that work.

The journal's interdisciplinarity and focus on feminist praxis help us track how the early framing of the women's studies field was shaped by disciplinary scholars asking the "woman question," and how that question also revolutionized so many other areas of study. From our respective transnational experiences, we know that women...