This issue continues a longstanding Feminist Studies commitment to publishing critical scholarship that explores the changing national and transnational contours of feminism and feminist activism. Raewyn Connell revisits the importance of taking seriously the problem of Eurocentrism, which limits access to feminist theoretical contributions from the global South, and she points to the possibilities of circulating translated texts (see links to sample texts below). Tomomi Yamaguchi’s essay addresses a transnational translational dilemma: how a phrase — “gender free” — imported into Japan ostensibly from the global North, can be marshaled to resist feminist political gains through deliberate misrepresentation. Kathryn Moeller also traces the trajectory of a category—this time “adolescent girl” — as it is used in social marketing campaigns by the Nike Foundation in urban Brazil. Srila Roy’s article reads the current moment of the Indian women’s movement in the context of debates about its decline owing to neoliberalism and the role of NGO-based activism. Astrid Henry’s essay explores parallels and contrasts between US Third Wave feminist thinking and Fittstim-feminists in Scandinavia, particularly in terms of their relationship to the state and their critiques of postfeminism and neoliberalism. In our concluding article, the winner of this year’s Feminist Studies’ Graduate Student Award, Heather Berg traces the varied politics attached to the sex trade in the United States, closely interrogating the emergence of the term “sex work” in the United States in the 1970s as a means of organizing labor in commercial sex industries. These essays all sketch feminism’s changing position within the nation-state, even as they index the play of transnational feminist ideas through liberal and neoliberal discourses. They also point to the importance of Marxist or socialist feminism as an ongoing agonist for contemporary feminist analysis: Berg describes how “sex work” comes to have a liberal meaning as an “equal exchange,” obscuring it as another form of exploitative labor, while Roy and Henry pose leftist-feminist critiques of neoliberalization with a critical eye on the expanding space of feminist NGOs in India and Scandinavia; Japanese feminism in Yamaguchi’s account, on the other hand, is cast by its opponents as a “Marxist, evil scheme.” Flaudette May Datuin’s art essay dwells on how feminist interventions also occur in the context of nationalist struggle, and she highlights questions of violence and its representation. Themes of violence, gender, and representation are also reflected in this issue’s featured poetry by Claudia M. Reder, Helena Boberg, and Kim Hyesoon.

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Raewyn Connell
Rethinking Gender from the South
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Tomomi Yamaguchi
“Gender Free” Feminism in Japan: A Story of Mainstreaming and Backlash
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Kathryn Moeller
Searching for Adolescent Girls in Brazil: The Transnational Politics of Poverty in “The Girl Effect”
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Flaudette May Datuin
Piecing Together a World in Which We Can Dwell Again: The Art of Imelda Cajipe Endaya (Art Essay)
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Srila Roy
New Activist Subjects: The Changing Feminist Field of Kolkata, India
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Astrid Henry
Fittstim Feminists and Third Wave Feminists: A Shared Identity between Scandinavia and the United States?
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Heather Berg
Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism
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Creative work
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• Helena Boberg
   Sense Violence (Poetry)
   Translated by Johannes Göransson
• Kim Hyesoon
   Moonrise; Bright Rags (Poetry)
   Translated by Don Mee Choi
• Claudia M. Reder
   Imago Mundi (Poetry)

Cover Art

Front cover: Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Walang Lihim (No Secret), 2011.

Back cover: Imelda Cajipe Endaya, Ang Bayaning Oriang (The Hero Oriang), 2010.