“State violence is chronic,” writes Cynthia Wu in discussing institutionalized anti-Blackness and police killings. This issue of Feminist Studies brings together a range of essays that explore possibilities for challenging chronic forms of state-sponsored, institutionalized, sexual, intimate, and symbolic violence in a variety of transnational contexts. The first cluster of pieces in this issue responds to the current moment in US regulation of women’s reproduction, focusing on its chronic racialized, classed, and gendered aspects. Heather Latimer draws attention to how the US “slave episteme”—the system of thought that constructed enslaved women and their fetuses as competing commodities—enabled the rise of antiabortion attitudes in the nineteenth century and deeply informed the antiabortion rhetoric of early white feminists. Kenneth Carroll’s poem meditates on a twelve-year-old boy’s dawning awareness of such violence, and particularly a young woman’s unsuccessful and near-fatal abortion attempt. The second cluster of essays in this volume examines gender and sexual formation, foregrounding theoretical possibilities for reconceptualizing dominant gender and sexual subjectivities. Khanum Shaikh and Akanksha Misra both explore contexts in which children learn to comply with and to challenge gender and sexual scripts—Shaikh focuses on how intergenerational domestic spaces in Pakistan serve as sites of gender/sexual pedagogy and resistance, while Misra draws on her work as a middle-school teacher in Turkey and a child-sexual-abuse-prevention trainer in India to underscore the central role that schooling plays. Patricia de Santana Pinho elucidates how global commodity culture also shapes processes of gender and sexual formation, focusing on beauty products, services, and procedures marketed as “Brazilian” in the United States. The remaining two authors in this cluster of essays—Sally Robinson and Cassius Adair—analyze processes of gender formation that foster toxic masculinity and discipline those who, in Adair’s words, “take strange and unexpected and non-linear paths in pursuit of [them]selves.” Robinson reviews five recent books that explore how specific communities of men and boys understand their masculinity, while Adair considers the affordances and limitations of conceptualizing trans subjectivity as either a chronic or acute condition, proposing that we abandon temporal frameworks. The third and final cluster of essays in this volume engages with questions of violence and gendered embodiment in zones of political conflict: Sonal Khullar analyzes the work of two contemporary women artists who live and work in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and Ambika Satkunanathan provides a gendered analysis of the recent Sri Lankan protests that emerged in March 2022. Zainab Saleh reviews four recent books that explore state disciplining, recuperating, and/or disposing of raced and gendered bodies.

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Regulation of Women’s Reproductiocn

Heather Latimer
Abortion Regulation as the Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Or, a Call to Make Abortion Natural Again

Kenneth Carroll
the truth about karen (1972) (Poetry)

Gender and Sexual Formation

Khanum Shaikh
Intimate Critique: Toward a Feminism from Within

Akanksha Misra
Embodied Histories, Erotic Disruptions, and Sexuality Education in India and Turkey

Patricia de Santana Pinho
Labeling Brazil: A Nation’s Image on Beauty Products, Services, and Procedures

Sally Robinson
Making, Unmaking, and Remaking “Men”: New Work in Feminist Masculinity Studies (Review essay)

Cassius Adair
Is Transsexualism Chronic?

Violence and Gendered Corporeality in Zones of Political Conflict

Sonal Khullar
Journeys with Yal Devi: War, Peace, and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka (Art essay)

Ambika Satkunanathan
What Do Women Have to Do With It?: The Multi-Dimensional Nature of the Sri Lankan Crisis (News and Views)

Zainab Saleh
Gender Politics, Debility, and Violence (Review essay)