Call for Papers: Wicazo Sa Review Special Issue: Indigenous Feminisms
Tue, Dec 15 2026 12:00pm
Call for Papers
Wicazo Sa Review Special Issue: Indigenous Feminisms
Co-edited by Megan Baker (Choctaw) and Stephanie A. Lumsden (Hupa)
Abstract deadline (500 words): December 15, 2026
Submit questions and abstracts to:
megan.baker@northwestern.edu and salumsden@ucdavis.edu
In 2009, Wicazo Sa Review published a landmark special issue titled “Native Feminism”, edited by Mishuana R. Goeman and Jennifer Nez Denetdale. Goeman and Denetdale’s emphasis on the political imperative of decolonization and diverse iterations of Native feminisms rooted in the epistemologies of unique Indigenous polities distinguished their framing of Native feminism from others. The special issue has since become foundational to emerging theories and methodologies in Native feminism within the US and Canada. However, as Native/Indigenous (NAIS) Studies further developed and gained traction with increasing uptake in mainstream scholarship, politics, and popular culture, the field’s relationship to Native feminism’s call for decolonization have shifted. This special issue reflects on the interim 20 years since the publication of “Native Feminism” and engages the current state of the field. It considers the various responses to Native feminisms including its expansion to a more capacious ‘Indigenous feminisms’; how individual communities have developed a Native feminism congruent with their own epistemological frameworks; and the liberalization of Indigenous feminisms – particularly through pandering forms of representation in literature, visual media, and public policy (also known as diversity, equity, inclusion). This special issue foregrounds tribally specific, landed analyses of gender, statecraft, and Indigenous politics writ large. We seek to elucidate new critical concepts in NAIS that foreground Native feminist theorizing that extends and revisits older concepts like tradition and nationhood into a broader Indigenous politics.
This special issue will consider how Native/Indigenous feminism has fared in the face of the political backlash against liberal (”woke”) politics that paved the way for resurgent authoritarianism and fascism in the US and across the globe in the late 2010s and early 2020s. For instance, while the importance of Native/Indigenous feminism within Native communities has been widely accepted in mainstream NAIS scholarship, patriarchal structures nevertheless remain and are often given cover under the umbrella of “tradition”. Therefore, much like “Native Feminism” before it, this special issue will attend to reclaiming and interrogating what traditional Indigenous values are and the role they play in decolonial theories and methods. From the disavowal and exclusion of queer, LGTQ2S+ people to the usage of coming-of-age ceremonies to reinscribe gender binaries, Native/Indigenous feminisms have been selectively cherrypicked to legitimate patriarchal practices. In light of such responses, this special issue reconsiders Goeman and Denetdale’s suggestion that there is no singular definition of Native feminisms. Rather, the co-editors reframe the need to define Native/Indigenous feminisms with a need to illustrate the multiplicity of resistance strategies that emerge from grounded Indigenous analyses of colonial gender violence that critique and resist ongoing occupation and conquest. In turn, the intellectual imperative of Indigenous/Native feminisms becomes foregrounding a decolonization that is an explicitly queer, internationalist, abolitionist form of liberation while simultaneously attending to the ontological and epistemological specificity of Indigenous polities.
The special issue co-editors welcome and invite contributions engaging diverse forms of intellectual production: poetry, non-fiction, letters, and other creative/visual media. Potential contributors should submit projects that respond to one or more of the following questions:
- What are the stakes of Native/Indigenous feminisms?
- How have Indigenous communities across the globe taken up the concept and configured it within their own epistemological and ontological frameworks?
- How has Native/Indigenous feminist writing today lived up to the 2009 special issue’s call for decolonization?
- How does the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the climate crisis, and the expansion of state surveillance via ICE, reshape our understanding of what Native/Indigenous feminisms should be?
- How does Native feminist praxis enable Indigenous communities to defend against the relentless violence of colonial invasion and occupation?
