Concept
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Jean W. Sacks, Head of the Journals Division, with Catharine R. Stimpson as its first editor in Chief, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization. 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.
