Abstract: This article traces the recent growing contestation leveled against the discipline of gender studies in Pakistan. In 2020 a petition was filed in Lahore High Court against the teaching of gender studies in higher education institutions across Pakistan that should be seen as part of the national backlash initiated against feminist struggles/movements in Pakistan. Documenting the narratives of five founding heads of WGS departments through in-depth interviews, I have analyzed how WGS has not only historically but also in contemporary times encountered challenges at various levels. In addition to those interviews (primary data), I also relied on secondary sources to unearth those contestations against WGS. It is reflected in this research that WGS has journeyed through different phases, encountering antagonism and resistance, and eventually received acceptance as a field of study in a society like Pakistan, which is highly patriarchal. Though it has gained acceptance over the period, the struggle experienced by the practitioners and scholars of WGS has remained constant. They are labeled as anti-culturalists and anti-religious and stereotyped as "Westerners" toeing the Western philosophy being part of WGS. These allegations are augmented by the arguments around the scope and marketability of WGS reflecting the systemic realities of the neoliberal economic order, where education is valued on its market and commercial basis. Though the Aurat March of 2018, as theorized by feminist scholars, started the fourth wave of women's rights activism in Pakistan, it faced a huge backlash from the state and society alike. Since WGS vehemently supports women and gender rights activism and movements in general, in Pakistan the backlash was also directed against WGS. It is argued and theorized that the growing contestation and backlash to the Aurat March and WGS in Pakistan should be seen in a global context in recent years where anti-gender discourses (coupled with transphobia) are widely shared and disseminated. This article, therefore, situates these challenges faced by WGS within these local and global realities.

Abstract: This article examines the forthcoming South Feminist Manifesto spearheaded by South Feminist Futures, a transnational network of feminists from the Global South. Through extensive cross-regional consultations, the manifesto initiative promises to build solidarity and advance decolonial, anti-capitalist feminism across the Global South. It aims to center plural Southern voices and contexts, integrating diverse critical frameworks from Third World feminism to queer theory. By foregrounding lived realities of Southern women and trans and nonbinary people, the manifesto promises to generate fresh insights and creative South-South solidarities. Drawing inspiration from the pioneering Women's Manifesto for Ghana , it strives to catalyze feminist consciousness raising, movement revival, and more caring, just futures across borders. The article analyzes the manifesto's transformative promises.

Abstract: Recent populist rhetoric and politics seek to undermine existing democratic institutions and efforts to make them more inclusive. Connecting new feminist scholarship that confronts the multidisciplinary implications of post-truth populist politics and discourse, especially for higher education, with exemplary heterotopic feminist responses to pandemonia over the past century, this essay considers how previous tactics might be recast to disturb and provoke the existing status quo, creating new strategies for countering contemporary anti-democratic practices.

Abstract: Feminist studies scholars and those in related critical studies traditions have long encountered resistance arising from STEM disciplines and capitalist logics on our campuses and in the wider public discourse. The struggles to establish and preserve feminist studies and ethnic studies programs over the past five decades remind us that the present pandemonium has historical roots that can be traced, not only to identify patterns instructive for us in this moment, but also for a visceral resonance that buoys us in this time and place. We recognize our own outrage at injustice even as we feel the rage directed at feminist studies scholars from sites of elite power, sustained through false dualisms of left and right, minority and majority, woke and anti-woke, STEM and non-STEM. This piece explores the preservation of elite power through the examination of institutions and epistemics at the heart of contemporary wage capitalism: the world of engineering education and practice, and critical resistance within that world. We analyze (ostensibly nonidentitarian) projects such as technoscientific teaching, research, and production. We choose to analyze episodes from the "before times" that reveal a sustained pattern of misogyny, white supremacy, heterosexism, and ableism pervading society and the academy prior to current enactments of that kind. In so doing, we follow an emergent line of inquiry, tracing emotion as well as argument: these dynamics are now, and have long been, fraught with rage. It is the systematic, historically robust, and selective acceptance and denial of rage that we want to explore here as a foundational feature of the present pandemonium, common to feminist studies academic contexts and to engineering, as well as interactions between the two.