Women's Studies Quarterly – serie

This special issue of WSQ takes the contemporary phenomenon of long COVID as its point of departure to consider the social, affective, and political consequences of living with chronic illness.

The articles and hybrid work included in the issue map the critical and scholarly intersections of chronic illness with disability and critical race studies, care, affect, and feminist eco-theory. WSQ: Chronic explores new ways to live with and understand the challenges of chronic illness, and in the process, following activism and scholarship in the fields of health humanities and graphic medicine, proposes new paradigms of health and healthcare.

First published in 1972, Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2022. Originally printed as Women’s Studies Newsletter, the inaugural issue declared itself a “clearinghouse on Women’s Studies,” and soon became a key part of the Feminist Press’s mission to advance women’s scholarship in higher education. Over the past five decades, the journal has become a mainstay in the production of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, continuing to challenge and adapt to the ever-evolving field. 

In WSQ 50!, academics critically reflect on the legacy of the longest-running feminist scholarly journal, tracing the history of the journal in conversation with other knowledge and activist projects and interdisciplinary fields, revisiting key pieces of writing from the past fifty years, and considering WSQ within the broad institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In doing so, WSQ 50! charts a way forward for the next fifty years of interdisciplinary feminist knowledge projects.