Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

The growing numbers of women living with HIV begged a question: Why and how were women contracting HIV? Chapter 4, “Sex Bargains,” tracks the emergence of a new logic that centered heterosexual sex as the site of women’s vulnerability. Focusing in on the interpersonal negotiation before surrounding sex had a powerful effect: It obfuscated the role of structural responses to the epidemic, from housing to harm reduction, and instead focused public health interventions on individual behavior. This chapter follows an influential debate between law and economics scholars and feminist activists on the question of the sex bargain.

This chapter explains the reasons for the popularity of the anti-Iranian movie Not Without My Daughter in 1990s Türkiye despite the country’s own harrowing experience with Hollywood’s Midnight Express (1977). In conjunction, I analyze a moment of failed outreach from Iranian woman reformists to a devout, US-educated Turkish woman politician called Merve Kavakçı, who was denied her seat in parliament because of her headscarf in 1999. The chapter demonstrates how US discourses and Iran–Türkiye comparisons influenced the work of Turkish and Iranian women’s activists who sought to expand Muslim women’s political participation and reform repressive clothing codes in the 1980s and 1990s.

Chapter 3, “Experiments in Risk: Women and Clinical Trials,” follows feminist advocates as they set out to use the law to mandate the inclusion of women in clinical trials. With the advent of HIV treatment, people with HIV began to survive longer. A new problem emerged: Women were being excluded from clinical trials due to a 1977 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guideline concerned about the impact of experimental drugs on women’s reproduction and the fetus. Not only did this mean that women could not access experimental treatments, it also resulted in confusion around how to treat women with HIV. Feminists began to advocate for a change in the FDA guidance which was excluding women from clinical trials. In keeping with the broader demands in the feminist movement at the time, feminists asserted that women should be able to choose to enroll in trials despite potential exposure to risks. Buoyed by ideas of choice and bodily autonomy, feminist AIDS activists were able to undo the FDA’s reticence to enroll women in clinical trials altering scientific research in HIV and beyond.

Chapter 1, “‘We Are Not Immune’: A New Branch of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement,” begins by describing the emergence of a new coalition of feminists who turned their attention to the HIV epidemic in an attempt to understand how the virus would impact women. Together they realized that HIV was killing women more often than the those in charge of the AIDS response acknowledged. The failure to recognize and respond to issues facing women with HIV was due, in part, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition of AIDS that did not include gynecological infections. The incomplete definition of AIDS resulted in a lack of data on women with HIV and impacted the Social Security Administration’s determinations of who should receive benefits. Allying with lawyers and fellow activists, feminists set out to challenge the law and science of the epidemic.

Chapter 2, “Litigating Risk: The Law and Politics of Disease in the Administrative State,” turns to the litigation and activism that resulted in the shift in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition of AIDS and turned attention to women’s risk of contracting HIV. The chapter tracks how litigation and advocacy were central to the shift in the CDC definition of AIDS. Feminist success would result in many more women being diagnosed with HIV, resulting in a greater ability to access benefits. This life-changing shift would mark a major victory for the feminist women’s health movement.

As heterosexual sex became a driving explanation, feminist debates about sex and power took center stage in the AIDS response. At the heart of this feminist struggle is the question of sex work. Some feminists, carceral antitrafficking feminists, saw sex work as the objectification and exploitation of women. Others saw it as a site of agency and power. Chapter 5, “The Sex Wars Come to AIDS: Risk and Consent,” follows these debates as they moved into public health and the AIDS response. Sex workers were (and continue to be) among the hardest hit with HIV. They were also some of the most powerful advocates of harm reduction. Empowering sex worker communities would turn out to be one of the most reliable ways to slow the spread of HIV. But for feminists who saw sex work as exploitation, these public health interventions were aiding in the exploitation of women. Buoyed by political conservatives and the antitrafficking movement, carceral antitrafficking feminists successfully lobbied for restrictions on funding sex worker projects. The consequences were deadly.

Over the last five years of the 1920s, Hemingway worked assiduously to consolidate his reputation, publishing stories in mainstream magazines and developing what would become a lifelong relationship with the Charles Scribner publishing company. He worked to balance literary experimentation and innovation in the short story and the novel (sometimes courting censorship by challenging the canons of “decency”) and to appeal to popular taste. His second collection of stories includes the classic “Hills like White Elephants,” a powerfully concise exploration of power dynamics and competing visions within a romantic relationship. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway brings a corrosive irony to the topoi of the wartime romance, complicating received notions of both martial heroism (the military centerpiece of the novel is a shambolic retreat) and heterosexual romance (suggested in Frederic Henry’s and Catherine Barkley’s repeated references to wanting not only to be with one another but to be one another). The novel also sees Hemingway experiment with new modes such as stream-of-consciousness narration.

Women’s prison zines in the 1970s represent a pivotal moment in the evolution of feminist grassroots media, marking a sustained effort by incarcerated women to create their own platforms for self-expression and political organizing. Emerging from Black Power, queer liberation, and prison abolition movements, zines challenged dominant narratives about crime, punishment, and women’s experiences of incarceration. Historically, the carceral state and its monopoly over the bodies of imprisoned individuals played crucial roles in suppressing the voices and experiences of incarcerated women, particularly women of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Zines like Through the Looking Glass, No More Cages, and Bar None were consequential to incarcerated women’s ability to forge solidarity networks, articulate anti-carceral feminist perspectives, and imagine alternatives to incarceration. The chapter utilizes literary analysis to delineate the impact of these zines, demonstrating how these publications functioned as tools for activism, self-expression, and community-building within the constraints of the carceral system.

In her chapter, Pilar Villar-Argáiz shows how the poetry of Eavan Boland often invokes the very revivalism she seems at times to critique. Villar-Argáiz examines a number of Boland’s poetic predecessors in order to show her multiple points of contact with the Irish past. Though Boland engaged critically with W. B. Yeats’s revivalism, particularly as reflected in the “lyric imperative” that runs throughout his work, her posthumous published collection The Historians represents a partial reconciliation with Yeats’s work and poetic example. This reconciliation allows Boland to celebrate what she inherits from Yeats – particularly his use of use poetry to create a sense of community, not only among other writers but more broadly among the Irish people at large. Boland’s work strives for this sense of community, of belonging through relationships with landscape and “domestic interiors. In her late twentieth century revivalism, Boland thus revitalizes the bardic function so important to Yeats.

In her chapter, Heather Laird examines twenty-first century commemorations, such as the bicentennial of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the centennial of the Easter Rising of 1916. From the time of the peak era of Revival to the present, a vision of Ireland has emerged that values tradition but that also reckons with the failures of tradition to govern modern lives. The statues and exhibitions that arose in preparation for these celebrations are the visible signs of the very future envisioned in 1798 and 1916. Laird’s examination of twenty-first century commemorations of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and the commemoration of it in 2013 suggests that revivalism resists this idea of cultural salvage and actively serves a world to come. She discusses two 2013 commemoration projects, Living the Lockout and the 1913 Lockout Tapestry, latter-day manifestations of a persistent revivalist impulse to make the past productive of the future.

In her chapter, Rosie Lavan explores Eavan Boland’s relationship to two post-Revival poets, Padraic Fallon and Sheila Wingfield. These under-studied writers occupy an insecure position with respect to the legacies of the literary revival, particularly the work of Yeats. This was especially true of Fallon who believed Yeats’s influence to be deleterious to poets who followed him. As many critics have pointed out, Boland’s engagement with the Irish poetic tradition, particularly its emphasis on male mastery, is both powerful and ambivalent, for despite the critical gaze she trains on this tradition she is able to recognize and make use of Yeats’s poetic bequest. As Lavan shows, Wingfield provided a counter influence in the sense that her work depicted the struggle with the pressures of time. To resign herself to time, Boland came to understand, is to come to a fuller understanding of how she defines herself as a poet.

In this chapter, Catherine Morris focuses on the Revival as part of a revolutionary era in Irish history, an era that saw the formation of national identity and national institutions. She shows how revival feminism links the freedom of Ireland to the freedom of women by focusing on the artistic work and social and political thought of neglected or under-studied feminists and activists such as Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, and Helena Molony. Prominent in this group of activist feminists was Alice Milligan. Milligan’s writings offer a rich context for grasping the idea that activist feminists shaped the Revival and provided an intersectional political space for women. She provides a way to reconsider the importance of the Irish Revival and to emphasize forgotten or neglected elements of it. Morris’s research on revival feminism, but especially her work on Milligan, becomes itself part of the revivalist continuum of political engagement.

In her chapter, Maureen O’Connor shows how feminist revivalists, in their writings and political work, experienced the Irish landscape and nature as powerful forces in the conception of “Irishness.” Revival feminists give voice and prominence to the supernatural, which has long been a component of Irish folklore. While writers such as Alice Milligan, Ethna Carbery, Eva Gore-Booth, and Hannah Lynch were critical of the dominant revival narrative – particularly when it romanticized rural Ireland and its “rustic” landscape or created gendered stereotypes about the land and Irishness generally – their work nevertheless embodied the revival insofar as it focuses on how time and political struggle are embedded in the landscape. The critique of violence and masculine power is especially important in works by latter-day revivalists such as Eilís Dillon and Edna O’Brien, who take aim at masculinist conceptions of the struggle for Irish freedom in the War of Independence and in late-twentieth century conflicts in Northern Ireland.

The androcentric tropes typical of modernist narratives distort Schoenberg’s story and the interpretation of his compositions by eliding his engagement with women and the feminine. Yet his social circle included a number of progressive women, including the educator Eugenie Schwarzwald and medical doctor Marie Pappenheim. This study considers two operas Schoenberg composed twenty years apart, each based on a libretto written by a woman and featuring a female protagonist who reflects the social situation of women in her milieu. Moreover, each opera was a vehicle for a distinctive compositional innovation, Erwartung (1909) marking the pinnacle of Schoenberg’s ‘intuitive aesthetic’ in its freely non-tonal, non-repetitive style, and Von heute auf morgan (1929) the first twelve-tone opera.

This chapter considers how gender as a social framework has shaped and informed stand-up comedy, with a particular focus on the UK. Gender identities entail certain cultural expectations, especially when these identities interact with race, class, and sexuality. The chapter explores how gender impacts on all stand-up performers, addressing the unavoidable nature of gender stereotypes as well as historical and contemporary debates about feminism, femininity, and the role of women within the comedy industry. In addition to considering how gender is represented in stand-up material, the chapter examines how wider power structures influence the business of comedy, specifically problems faced by women stand-ups in terms of their access to comedy venues and their treatment by audiences. This chapter tracks the evolution of comedy’s relationship to gender from music hall to working men’s clubs through to the ‘alternative’ comedy boom of the 1980s and stand-up on television.

This chapter argues that stand-up comedy events are never apolitical. Politics are expressed and embedded not only in the words that are said but also in the production decisions that shape the context in which they are delivered. The Guilty Feminist podcast is used as an example through which to demonstrate this principle. The podcast presents segments of stand-up comedy within an unconventional format: one that has been designed to serve the political aims and principles of its creators. Key creative decisions are interpreted through the stated political philosophy of the podcast’s co-creator and permanent host, Deborah Frances-White. Her intersectional, feminist politics underpin three important aspects of the podcast’s creative policy: the decision to prioritise women and minority performers, an emphasis on collaboration over competition, and a challenge to conventional wisdoms regarding the nature of comic licence.

This chapter explores the intersection of antifascism and South American women’s activism in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis focuses on Mi guerra de España (My Spanish War, 1976) by Argentine Mika Etchebéhère, an account of her experiences as a captain of a Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) militia, and the feminist political magazines Vida Femenina (Buenos Aires, 1933–42) and Acción Femenina (Santiago, 1922–39). From different genres such as the memoir, the essay, or the journal article, and from varied platforms including political and non-political associations and publications, women expressed their will to contribute to the global discussion and struggle against fascism.

The dictatorial regime of Jorge Ubico silenced virtually all internal sociopolitical opposition in Guatemala during the interwar period (1931–44). To circumvent this restrictive political terrain, journalists Luz Valle and Gloria Menéndez Mina created literary journals ostensibly published with advice on home making and personal style which furtively cultivated an intellectual space that reflected transnational antifascist conversations. These journals served as incubators for antifascist, democratic ideals during a period of intense intellectual repression, ideals that revolutionary reformers translated directly into social and political democracy created by the October Revolution in 1944. Within a deeply patriarchal society, the journals’ gender analysis also expanded revolutionary vision of justice to include the political and social inclusion of women. Therefore, the extent to which the Guatemalan Revolution embraced antifascist ideals can be traced in part to the ideas published in Nosotras and Azul.

Gwendolyn Alker considers particular aspects of Fornés’s work – including the way she asked her students to do yoga before writing, her various exercises developed to bypass the frontal cortex, and her prescient connections to the animal world – to argue for a “Fornésian ecology” and to evince its lessons for our collective futures on a damaged planet. Alker argues that the characters in Mud (alongside many of Fornés’s plays) must be understood through their relationship with each other and with their environment. Alker submits that Fornesian world-making prompts us to see the environment within the world of her plays, to be aware that we are outside that world and will never fully understand it, just as we cannot ever fully understand the animals that we encounter, even as Fornés’s plays challenge us to cultivate empathy for animals, understand their relevance, and believe in their truths, despite their otherness from ourselves.