Justice

Justice is undoubtedly a central, if rarely explicitly defined, concept in the institutional and intellectual life of gender and sexuality studies. Most feminist, gender, queer, sexuality, and women’s studies programs and departments across the United States name social justice as a foundational pillar of their curriculum and mission. Reflective of the significant number of scholars in the field who research, write, and teach about social justice movements, the National Women’s Studies Association themed its 2018 and 2019 annual meetings, respectively, “Just Imagine, Imagining Justice” and “Protest, Justice, and Transnational Organizing.” Such invocations of social justice index gender and sexuality studies’ roots in liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the field’s continued commitment to praxis (theory in and through action) and social transformation. Here we highlight only three of the critical imaginaries of justice that animate gender and sexuality studies scholarship and activism today: economic justice, reproductive justice, and prison industrial complex abolition.