This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

This chapter examines the work of a generation of women poets born in the 1860s whose rural childhood became fundamental in shaping their understandings of the intersections between class, gender and nation. Mary Fullerton, Marie E. J. Pitt and Mary Gilmore combined their socialist ideals with first-wave feminism, and Gilmore could become the first woman member of the Australian Workers, Union and participate in the utopic socialist venture to establish a ‘New Australia’ in South America. The chapter critiques the role of nostalgia in the racial blindspots of their vision of social transformation. It also considers the role of literary clubs, feminist periodicals and women’s magazines in encouraging a subsequent generation of women’s voices. With a critique of the institution of marriage, a growing legitimation of professional women writers and the articulation of female desire, there emerged a New Woman who challenged traditional gender conventions and defied divisions of class. The chapter also considers how this newer generation of women revised traditional poetic forms and embraced free verse, but were still limited by what was deemed acceptable for publication.

This chapter analyses the role of anthologies in the documentation and shaping of feminist poetries. It considers how they perform cultural, political and aesthetic work for communities of writers and readers, and exist both within and beyond institutions. The chapter considers the engagement with feminism as developing in different generations but also as having important inter-generational connections. The chapter also undertakes close readings of major feminist poets in the late twentieth century to today.

This chapter considers the increased opportunities for women writers to travel and relocate in the early to mid twentieth century. It analyses the possible impact that living in Australia could have on their writing but also how increased mobility generated a sense of independence that led to an experimentation with form. It would also embolden some to protest against social injustice, as well as enable more unconventional life paths. The chapter also considers how these writers navigated a sense of displacement and liminality in their writing. Lastly, it demonstrates how national categories were delimiting for these writers’ careers and had a negative effect on the later reception of their work.

This chapter surveys the history of Pan-Africanism as an aesthetic current that paralleled more formalized political solidarity. The chapter asserts that differences across languages and periods complicate Pan-Africanism’s intellectual history. With particular attention to the diversity of origins, it shows how pre-independence African ties with the diaspora fed into continental initiatives along linguistic lines. While the anglophone tradition emerged in close alignment with African American writers, particularly Langston Hughes, the shared roots in negritude between francophone African and Caribbean writers were productive and provocative, lusophone alignments emerged through continent-based anthologies, and arabophone literatures were interpreted through Pan-Arab as well as Pan-African formations. Given the transnational dimension, African languages have figured less prominently in Pan-African literature. In more recent times, feminism, decolonial imperatives, and changes in publishing and educational institutions have been influential. The tensions between Pan-Africanism and other intellectual traditions remain fertile ground for future scholarship.

The conclusion addresses how to broaden the framework of the three economic enlightenments by examining overlooked or unresolved matters, like the initial conditions of the exchange participants and the role of third parties. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how these three economic enlightenments may face challenges from alternative frameworks rooted in non-Western, Marxist, or feminist perspectives.

Critical Security Studies (CSS) is a diverse and multidisciplinary field that approaches traditional security studies through a critical lens and examines the ways in which security discourses and practices reify and reinforce existing power relations and contribute to the marginalization, oppression, and precarity of various groups of people. CSS scholars ask whose security we center when we talk “Security,” and whose security we neglect or sacrifice, what issues are present/absent, who is afforded agency, and who appear only as voiceless victims. They examine the ways in which security and power are intertwined so that evoking security can generate power, enable various kinds of interventions, perpetuate relations of domination and subjugation, and reproduce social hierarchies. Many CSS scholars adopt an interpretivist methodology and normative approach to scientific knowledge; they are interested in analysis not just for the sake of it but for bringing about change to the status quo.

The chapter argues that the population control movement employed new policy approaches from the late 1970s onward, and that these changes originated from an internal critique of past policies. The emergence of international networks and organizations such as the International Women’s Health Coalition is highlighted, along with the debates at the UN symposium on "Population and Human Rights" in Vienna in 1981. The chapter outlines the diverse feminist perspectives after the Reagan administration stopped funding organizations that supported abortions, which also affected advocates of global population control programs. It argues that feminist organizations struggled whether they should defend these organizations despite the sometimes coercive character of their programs given that they expanded contraceptive choices. The chapter points out that the increased pressure from the conservative right against organizations like the IPPF, together with new approaches in global family planning, led to a muted critique from the political left and the normalization of family planning programs on a global scale.

The way in which our understanding of and approaches to Bloomsbury have been changed by feminist and gender scholarship is under discussion in this chapter. In the main, however, it addresses the gender politics of Bloomsbury itself primarily through how Bloomsbury artists engaged with feminism and gender in their creative endeavors and in their personal relationships, and how their gender politics accorded with or diverged from what was happening in the broader public sphere in terms of social movements such as suffrage, and cultural institutions such as marriage. The chapter discusses Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and E. M. Forster, among others. Far from seeking to present a coherent position among the group, this chapter teases out the contradictory and shifting views of various members. It ends by considering the group’s legacy in terms of whether and how Bloomsbury contributed, artistically and politically, to the reorientation of gender in its day, and ours.

Often regarded as comprehensive, impartial and authoritative works, monolingual dictionaries of the standard variety of English have never been neutral repositories of vocabulary. Instead, they have acted as vehicles for ideologies of one sort or another, transmitting societal values as well as linguistic information. All dictionary-makers make decisions on whose and which words to include and to exclude; equally all gather and process these words in ways that influence their presentation to the dictionary-user, employing editorial methods and technological means that have varied from one period to another. This chapter focuses on Johnson’s Dictionary and successive versions of the Oxford English Dictionary in an historically organised account of dictionaries to the present day, noting the under-representation in these two works of women as language-producers. It also discusses editions of the Webster dictionaries, of twentieth-century desk dictionaries before and after the introduction of corpus-based lexicography, and online dictionaries.

Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

The growing numbers of women living with HIV begged a question: Why and how were women contracting HIV? Chapter 4, “Sex Bargains,” tracks the emergence of a new logic that centered heterosexual sex as the site of women’s vulnerability. Focusing in on the interpersonal negotiation before surrounding sex had a powerful effect: It obfuscated the role of structural responses to the epidemic, from housing to harm reduction, and instead focused public health interventions on individual behavior. This chapter follows an influential debate between law and economics scholars and feminist activists on the question of the sex bargain.

This chapter explains the reasons for the popularity of the anti-Iranian movie Not Without My Daughter in 1990s Türkiye despite the country’s own harrowing experience with Hollywood’s Midnight Express (1977). In conjunction, I analyze a moment of failed outreach from Iranian woman reformists to a devout, US-educated Turkish woman politician called Merve Kavakçı, who was denied her seat in parliament because of her headscarf in 1999. The chapter demonstrates how US discourses and Iran–Türkiye comparisons influenced the work of Turkish and Iranian women’s activists who sought to expand Muslim women’s political participation and reform repressive clothing codes in the 1980s and 1990s.

Chapter 3, “Experiments in Risk: Women and Clinical Trials,” follows feminist advocates as they set out to use the law to mandate the inclusion of women in clinical trials. With the advent of HIV treatment, people with HIV began to survive longer. A new problem emerged: Women were being excluded from clinical trials due to a 1977 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guideline concerned about the impact of experimental drugs on women’s reproduction and the fetus. Not only did this mean that women could not access experimental treatments, it also resulted in confusion around how to treat women with HIV. Feminists began to advocate for a change in the FDA guidance which was excluding women from clinical trials. In keeping with the broader demands in the feminist movement at the time, feminists asserted that women should be able to choose to enroll in trials despite potential exposure to risks. Buoyed by ideas of choice and bodily autonomy, feminist AIDS activists were able to undo the FDA’s reticence to enroll women in clinical trials altering scientific research in HIV and beyond.