What truths of this moment are being overlooked? How does the proliferation of abortion laws affect different groups of people differently? What have we done in the past? How can we learn from that past? What should we be doing right now? What plans should we be making for the future?

What does it mean for a person or a country to heal? How does reconstruction apply to communities, to families, to global relationships? How does the history of racial division that led to Reconstruction as a period and a process figure into our current ambitions to heal and be healed?

Who is most in need of care? Who should provide it? Who is “good” at it? What does “good care” look like? Questions like these have long animated feminist thought, and COVID-19 has brought them once again to the center of global conversations.

Protest has long been a key tool of feminist work, and more recently also of intersectional social justice work. In that vein, we also welcome discussions of other protests from the long history of civil disobedience, especially those that highlight the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. What can we learn from prior protests and the lives of the people we associate with them, among them Fannie Lou Hamer, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mahatma Gandhi, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Marsha P. Johnson, Johnny Tillmon, Zhou Yongjun or more recent figures like Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi? Essays might also address protest by focusing on key words and concepts associated with them—from “witness” and “ally” to “rioting,” “looting,” and “battlespace.”

Feminists have long focused attention on the concepts of boundaries and safety. These central ideas take on new dimensions as we voluntarily curtail social contacts and as governments mandate closing key social institutions. How does community function in virtual spaces? What new socialities could we generate in this present moment? What systems of power and privilege structure who has the capacity to reach out for human connection virtually from the safety of a domestic sanctuary? Who can afford to make that retreat, and who must instead risk exposure, willingly or not? How do lived experiences of loneliness and isolation interact with other aspects of our social being, including the political? Can collective writing projects like this blog in fact help to preserve and reproduce the communities we desire?

In this Rice Feminist Forum, we invite submissions around the topic of “hearing” as the Center sponsors a year-long program on the theme of “Understanding #MeToo,” leading up to a visit to Rice by Anita Hill.

Over the past month, borders and boundaries have been very much in the news.  We welcome essays on inclusion and exclusion more generally, on bodily rights and limits, on assaults, attacks, and protections. Contributors might also like to  think of the political boundaries between people and the issue of consensus, alliance, and division.

Chosen before the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, this collection of essays explores what it means to be “presidential.”

The current election has made made painfully visible the issue of sexual assault: the candidates, right and left-leaning media, and literally millions of people on social media have argued over issues of sexual assault.

This topic was inspired by conversations surrounding gender at the recent Olympics in Rio de Janeiro

Trump accuses Clinton of “playing the woman card.” She says “deal me in.” What does it mean to play the woman card?