At a time when we see in the United States and elsewhere the rise of a virulent right wing, with its outspoken defense of white supremacy and explicit criminalization of transgender and gay people along with the criminalization of abortion, this Feminist Studies issue focuses on histories of US racial formations, gender/sexual embodiment, transgender and cripqueer activism, and exile. The review essay by Candice Lyons describes new approaches to the history of nineteenth-century racial formations. Joy Ellison, Jess Waggoner, Jessica Lee Mathiason, Adam Ostolski, and Sonja Mackenzie center gender/sexual embodiment and nonnormative people’s experience by exploring, respectively, transgender radical activism in the face of police violence targeting mainly Black transgender individuals in the Midwest, the cripqueer challenges to the exclusions of disabled people from the lesbian community, the corporate construction of reproductive risk, the right-wing invocation in Poland of resonant anti-Semitic tropes to demonize gay people, and a creative autoethnography about the challenges faced by queer parents raising children in homophobic societies. The art essay by Eva HD elicits another notion of “trans” in examining Iranian photographer Gohar Dashti’s images evoking migration, exile, and the transhuman life of plants.

Kathryn Moeller and Lisa Rofel
Preface
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901591

Candice Lyons
On Imagined Innocence: Emerging Black Feminist Approaches to Slavery Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901592

Joy Ellison
“Wear Your Most Daring Clothes, Honey”: The Transvestite/Transsexual Legal Committee and the Emergence of Trans-feminine Feminist Movements
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901593

Jess Waggoner
Dykes, Disability & Stuff: Queer Ableisms and the Work of Cripqueer Print Cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901594

Eva HD
Transplant(n)ations: Gohar Dashti’s Land/s and Uprooted Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901595

Jessica Lee Mathiason
Femtech: The “Smart” Business of Menstruation, Hormone Tracking, and the Corporate Construction of Risk
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901596

Adam Ostolski
Conspirators, Corruptors, Pariahs: The Judaization of Gay People in Polish Right-Wing Discourse
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901597

Sonja Mackenzie
More Than a Blue Sky: On Being a Queer Parent Researcher and “Uncomfortable Reflexivity”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a901598