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Signs (journal)

Feminist academic journal

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History and significance

The founding of Signs in 1975 was part of the early development of the field of women's studies, born of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The journal had two founding purposes, as stated in the inaugural editorial: (1) "to publish the new scholarship about women" in the U.S. and around the globe, and (2) "to be interdisciplinary." The goal was for readers of the journal to "grasp a sense of the totality of women's lives and the realities of which they have been a part." The meaning behind the name Signs is that signs "represent" and "point": the original editors wanted the journal to "represent the originality and rigor" of women's studies and to "point" to new directions for feminist scholarship.

Former editor-in-chief Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres said in an article in the Yale Journal of Criticism that Signs, from its inception, was meant to be "something different, even insurgent... an agent for change," because it emerged from the "grassroots" feminist movement. Joeres explored the "paradox" of how a journal can be both an "agent for change" and regarded as "respectable in the academy," and concluded with the hope that Signs could retain its activist roots and transform the academy.

In the effort to avoid the tendency of the academy to "codify" and limit scholarship, Signs rotates institutional homes roughly every five years. It is currently based at Northeastern University, with Suzanna Danuta Walters, Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology, serving as editor-in-chief. In her inaugural editorial, Walters laid out five "core concerns" for Signs: (1) for the field of women's studies to "substantively reckon" with gender and sexuality studies and queer studies; (2) to focus on "racial and ethnic difference"; (3) to re-emphasize "inter- or transdisciplinarity"; (4) to not lose sight of "the big questions about gender and sexuality" by getting too narrow in scope; and (5) to expand the journal's "digital presence."

The history of Signs is explored extensively in Kelly Coogan-Gehr's 2011 book The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. Coogan-Gehr uses Signs as a case study to complicate what she calls the "stock narrative of feminist field formation". She argues that dominant histories of the development of academic feminism, in focusing solely on the women's movement and other radical movements of the 1960s, fail to take into account the role of "changes the Cold War produced in higher education." In the book, she calls Signs a "premier academic feminist journal".

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