The question of how to theorize power and the state has been a central concern of the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and the long history of privatization woven into state governance has shaped the form of activism addressing work, sexuality, political power, kinship, care, and much more. This special issue of WSQ examines how social movements have theorized, organized, and otherwise strategized around state formations, with a focus on the US and an understanding that state power and strategies of resistance are not limited by national borders.

Dr. Dayo F. Gore is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Her research interests include Black Women’s Intellectual History; U.S. Political and Cultural Activism; African Diasporic Politics; and Women, Gender and Sexuality studies. She is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (2011) and co-editor of Want to Start A Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (2009). Professor Gore is currently working on a book length study of African American women’s transnational travels and activism in the long twentieth century. 

Christina B. Hanhardt is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on post-WWII U.S. social movements and cities, with particular attention to the politics of sexuality, race, and political economy. She is the author of Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013). She is now working on a new project that traces a genealogy of queer activism that has mobilized around non-normative or criminalized pleasures, kinship, and sex/ gender roles but is not restricted to the dominant terms of social movements in this period.