Vol. 2 (2024)

Recent years hosted major attempts by conservative ruling circles to take back women’s rights, long fought for by feminist movements. The Supreme Court in the United States decided against the right to abortion; a considerable number of states banned abortion clinics, some states tended to criminalize the aid to abortion, including driving someone to the designation of abortion. In Turkey, the Erdoğan government withdrew from the İstanbul Convention, the convention that the very same ruling bloc took credit for being the first signatory. In the same country women’s marches on 8 March have been systematically disrupted by police violence. In Hungary the Orbán government enacted an additional requirement for women’s right to abortion - the sign of the foetus heartbeat before the procedure. Worse still, LGBTIQ+ movements all around the world have been facing threats in different forms and degrees from conservative governments. Turkey, Russia, Poland are among the countries with conspicuous examples. The incessant bans on Pride in Turkey in the past decade, the demoralization and criminalization of LGBTIQ+ identities in Yeltsin’s authoritarian rule and the increasing ‘LGBT free zones’ in Poland are symbolic in this respect.

This issue, hosts works that relate to  feminist activism, opposing state actions to oppress, control, and exclude women and LGBTIQ+ people in any part of the world. We especially underline works from the periphery, from the margins, the ghettos, and the non-gender binary places and dispositions that represent, live, enliven and (re-)produce the counter-knowledge against boundaries, fixed by, for and with manly powers.

Here, by works, again, we mean written and visual texts, academic and non-academic genres of knowledge production, artworks (including photographs and videos).