Ask a Feminist

Today’s episode is a conversation about the feminist politics of regret. Discourses of regret have strangely come to play a key role in right-wing attacks on feminism, particularly when it comes to the Right’s anti-abortion and anti-trans campaigns. The notion that one will come to regret one’s abortion, or that one will come to regret gender transition, have been repeated ad nauseum. Contra this conservative framing, the conversation (which will appear in a full special issue of Signs devoted to the topic of regret) is at pains to address regret as a complex and potentially instructive emotion that’s worth attending to in a nuanced way. The guest editors of the special issue, Laura Green and Chris Bobel, asked leading feminist affect scholar Ann Cvetkovich to help us think through these thorny questions. Chris Bobel is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston. Her current project explores feminist activism inspired by grief and trauma. Laura Green is Professor of English at Northeastern University. In spring 2027, she will be the M. H. Abrams Visiting Professor of English at Cornell University. And Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include An Archive of Feelings and Depression; A Public Feeling. Her next book, Learning from the High Priestess: Affect, Femme Care, and Somatic Practice, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

This episode's conversation focuses on Palestinian feminism, both as a movement and a lens with which to analyze the extreme violence of Israel’s war on Gaza, as well as the quotidian violence of life under occupation. Whether addressing ever-expanding carceral apparatuses, West Bank settlements, human rights law, or the daily lives of Palestinians, our guest Sarah Ihmoud insists on Palestinian feminism as a life-affirming and future-oriented force that refuses defeat. Our interviewer is Zinaida Miller, a Professor of Law and International Affairs at Northeastern, whose research focuses on inequality, structural violence, and critical approaches to international law. She is a founding faculty codirector of the Center for Global Law & Justice. Sarah Ihmoud, our guest, is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research interests lie at the intersections of transnational feminisms; women of color theory; Indigenous and decolonial feminisms; critical race studies; carcerality; and Middle East and Arab American Studies. Her current book project is a feminist ethnography centering Palestinian women’s resistance to colonial and patriarchal violence in occupied East Jerusalem.

This episode of Ask a Feminist looks at how the Trump administration’s attacks on women’s and gender studies, and universities more broadly, are affecting the production of feminist scholarship. The editors of four interdisciplinary feminist journals (Frontiers, Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, and Signs) talk about the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the Trump administration’s crusade against gender ideology is affecting how feminist knowledge is produced. They talk about how these new attacks on women’s studies, in combination with the longer-term crises facing the university, might reshape journals’ relationship with the field. Our guests are Debjani Chakravarty, Patti Duncan, and Jennifer C. Nash. Chakravarty is the coeditor (with Sarita Gaytán and Wanda Pillow) of Frontiers and associate professor of gender studies at the University of Utah. Duncan is the editor of Feminist Formations and professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Oregon. And Nash is the editorial director of Feminist Studies and is Jean Fox O'Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Suzanna Walters of Signs facilitates the conversation.

This episode features a critical dissection of a political movement and philosophy that is unfortunately enjoying a global resurgence: pronatalism. Having successfully killed Roe, the Trump administration pursues policies incentivising certain groups to have more children. Many key administration figures—most prominently JD Vance and Elon Musk—are avid promoters of pronatalist worldviews, in which women’s efforts to exert control over their own reproductive capacities are portrayed as threats to “Western civilization” itself. This conversation offer a compelling deconstruction of the antifeminist underpinnings of pronatalism and explicates its historical links to nativism, eugenics, and other forms of racism.  Our interviewer for this episode is Signs Associate Editor Shoshanna Ehrlich, an expert on the legal regulation of reproduction and sexuality in the US and professor emerita of women's, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is joined by Nandita Bajaj and Michele Goodwin. Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, a US nonprofit that works to inspire narrative, behavioral, and systemic change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. Her research and advocacy work focuses on addressing the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. Michele is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy and Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. She is a sought after thought leader and public voice on matters of constitutional law, healthcare, bioethics, and civil liberties; she is also the Executive Producer of Ms. Studios and host of the popular podcast: On The Issues With Michele Goodwin.

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.