Call for Applications:
2023 Feminist Formations and NWSA Paper Award (NWSA Membership is required)

Feminist Formations is proud to announce a new award, in collaboration with the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). The Feminist Formations - NWSA Scholarly and Creative Work Competition is now open.

The Feminist Formations - National Women’s Studies Association annual competition will select one winner whose work will be published in Feminist Formations and receive an award of $500. The competition is open to scholars at all ranks, including independent scholars and artists. Multiple modes of knowledge production will be considered, including, but not limited to traditional scholarly articles, essays, poetry, and visual imagery. We are particularly interested in work that contributes to Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; trans feminist studies; critical disability studies; and transnational feminisms. We also seek work that contributes to the journal’s mission to support “robust interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational feminist scholarship that can inspire incisive and politically meaningful analyses and action.”

Submissions are due by June 15th at 2023 at Feminist Formations and NWSA Paper Award. Applicants must be current NWSA members. We cannot consider submissions that have been previously published or are currently being reviewed by other journals.

Manuscripts must adhere to the publishing guidelines of Feminist Formations, found at: https://feministformations.submittable.com/submit. Please contact the Feminist Formations Editorial Assistant (email: feministformations@oregonstate.edu) with questions or concerns about the submission process.

Feminist Formations is housed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University. It is published three times a year by the John Hopkins University Press. For more information, visit www.feministformations.org

The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), established in 1977, is a professional organization dedicated to leading the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. For more information, visit www.nwsa.org

Feminist Formations invites submissions that reflect the journal’s mission to cultivate a forum where feminists from around the world articulate research, theory, activism, teaching, and learning.   

An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, we publish innovative work by scholars, activists, artists, poets, and practitioners in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Our subject matter includes national, global, and transnational feminist thought and practice; the cultural and social politics of genders and sexualities; and historical and contemporary studies of gendered experience. The journal values established and emerging lines of inquiry and methods that engage the complexities of gender as implicated in forms of power such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, migration, ability, and religion.


We are particularly interested in cutting-edge feminist work in the following areas:  

BIPOC Feminisms • Asian and Asian American Feminisms • Pacific Islander/Oceanic Feminisms • Black Feminisms • Borderlands Studies • Chicanx/Latinx/Chicane/Latine Feminisms • Critical Ethnic Studies • Critical Youth Studies • Critical Geography • Cultural Studies • Disability Justice and Crip Feminisms • Indigenous Feminisms • Performance Studies • Posthuman Studies • Public Scholarship • Queer of Color Critique • Queer Theory • Feminist Affect Theory • Rhetoric • Trans Feminisms • Transnational Feminisms • Visual Cultures


For any questions about the journal in general or about submitting, please feel free to contact our Editorial Assistant, aman agah, at feministformations@oregonstate.edu.

Submissions should be prepared in the following manner:   

• Check to make sure that your manuscript falls within the Feminist Formations guidelines of 8,000-11,000 words. The word count includes notes. 
• Anonymize: remove all identifying information from the document, and document 'headers.' The exception is the cover page, which should contain the author’s institutional affiliation and contact information (i.e. postal address, phone number, and e-mail address). 
• Submit your complete manuscript through Submittable in three files as follows:  1st file) Cover page in the text box provided;  2nd file) Abstract and keywords to be anonymized and uploaded;  3rd file) Complete manuscript, including the abstract and keywords.  Files must be in Word .doc (NOT .docx or .rtf). 
• Follow the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) 17 author-date system with parenthetical citations. All text, including quotations, must be double-spaced. 

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Feminist Formations

"Writing African Feminist Subjectivities"

Guest edited by Maha Marouan and Alicia C. Decker

African feminist subjectivities are complex, and often contradictory. They are always in flux and necessarily connected to transnational and global processes and movements, but also grounded in specific histories and locales. We seek essays that address subjectivity as an analytical category that troubles essentialist conceptions of belonging and raises critical questions about feminism as resistance politics. Specifically, we invite essays that explore how feminists of Africa write and articulate African feminist subjectivities (Cis, Queer and Transgender); how they negotiate power and build feminist communities; how they mobilize against domestic and sexual repression and violence; how they address politics of knowledge production and its embedded hierarchies of power (geographical, economic, cultural, racial and linguistic); and how they navigate essentialist renditions of African identity and what it means to be African and write feminisms in Africa.

The special issue will address the following themes and questions:

• How do African feminist subjectivities critically engage with historical and institutional operations of power? What do micro-histories (of the individual) tell us about the larger philosophical possibilities of African feminisms as a worldview and as a political instrument of collective transformation?
• Who narrates African feminist subjectivities both within and outside the continent? How has the continent’s colonial legacy and its ties to Western feminism impacted upon knowledge production of African feminist subjectivities? How are transnational collaborations among African feminist thinkers and activists cross-continently and across the Global South opening new sites for the articulation of African feminist subjectivities?
• How do feminists of Africa write and experience home? How do they trouble the notion of ‘authenticity’ and challenge nationalist and territorial ideologies of belonging? How have mobility, migration, and transnational experiences challenged fixed notions of home and belonging?
• How do feminists of Africa challenge misogynist violence and hate-crimes? What are the tools they use to challenge sexualized violence, from rape and domestic abuse, to hate crimes against those who identify as queer and/or transgender? 
How do they challenge Right Wing Religious Fundamentalisms and the persistence of feudal infrastructures that compound the isolation and vilification of non-binary people?
• How do feminists of Africa articulate their experiences of COVID-19, from economic uncertainty, to social strife to racial violence? How do they re- imagine social safety, mobility and borders?
• How do African ontologies and epistemologies inform African feminist subjectivities (cis, transgender, and queer)? How do they challenge normative understandings of gender identities and sexual difference?
• How are African feminist lineages charted, sustained and celebrated? What is the role of collective memory in sustaining this lineage? Who are our feminist ancestors? How are they claimed? How are they remembered?
• How do African feminists conceptualize spirituality and/or practices of self-Care? What are the ontological and epistemological frameworks they deploy to help them in carrying out their intellectual and activist work?

Submission Process: Manuscripts should be submitted to the Feminist Formations Submittable page by September 1st, 2023.

Following the deadline, guest editors will review the manuscripts and determine those to be sent for full review. Citations should follow the Chicago Manual of Style. For more details, please see Feminist Formations submission guidelines. Manuscripts will be subject to anonymous review and must adhere to the publishing guidelines of Feminist Formations, found at: https://feministformations.org/. Scholarly essays should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes and references. Files must be in Word .doc (NOT .docx or .rtf).

Anticipated Publication Date: Winter 2024

For information on submission preparation, download a Feminist Formations style guide, submission checklist, and anonymization guide.

Questions about the submission process may be sent to editorial assistant Miranda Findlay at feministformations@oregonstate.edu.   

Feminist Formations is a leading journal of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, published three times a year by the Johns Hopkins University Press. It is housed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University, under the editorship of Patti Duncan. For more information, see www.feministformations.org.