This article transports femme from a relational reference to Femme as a character/apparition who revels in a vast array of femme and feminist subjectivities while also providing queer feminist guidance on how to—when need be—dissolve and be made again.

How should we read the Black femme body? What practices must we take on to explore the desires and survival written on, and expelled from, her body? To approach with renewed attention the sensory regimes, perhaps in a Wynterian sense, in which the Black femme body is situated? These questions inform how this article thinks within Black feminisms’ interest in sensation as knowing wrapped in flesh. I turn to the U.S. South and how it makes racialization ordinary, clarifying where and how Black femme sensation intervenes. Using African American folklorist J. Mason Brewer's 1956 text, the Aunt Dicy Tales as a case study, folklore is revealed as a racial project where history becomes fiction and fiction history. Folklore shapes what emerges as a mode of Black social thought in Texas, but in the erasure and absence of Black femmes, it remained a tool for state and Black male folklorists to create the Black femme body. By turning to Aunt Dicy's obsession with spitting, I argue that what Brewer intends as an exemplar of Black femme humiliation and masculinization in the immediate afterlives of enslavement, instead, exposes the fissures of Black Texan folklore and the modes of survival Black femme bodies sensate toward.

This paper traces how femme circulates in (post)colonial geographies of interiority, to mark loci of excess: places where the archive oozes, failing containment. Drawing on ethnography, historical research, ghost stories, personal experience, and family memory, this essay thinks across geographies of homemaking and girlhood to locate femme in the affects of clinging, desperation, refusal: attachments to futures that have to be left behind for the making of colonial modernity. Femme, I argue, undermines caste-colonial-nationalist formations of authority in its stubbornness, in its insistence on the excessive stories of unreliable narrators.

In this themed issue, we examine the life and implication of the proliferation of ‘automated infrastructure’ in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on the ways in which automation of various kinds – in labour processes, commerce and office spaces, border control, and even caregiving – have warped, (re)regulated and securitized the time-spaces in which people live, through infrastructure. While not treating the pandemic as an epochal event, the editorial highlights the significant technological ruptures that it has wrought, arguing that it has initiated an acute re-organization of space that society is still grappling with (if not reeling from). We consider the (dis)continuities of these automated infrastructures in relation to the past, the contingencies in their current use and adoption, as well as the spatialities that result from them. Using the papers in this issue as points of departure, we contemplate how, and why, life after COVID has become more political, uneven, unequal and restless, thanks to a renewed concentration of power in the hands of capital and governments, through automated infrastructure.

In this article, I analyze the formation of a labor ethos of acceleration in the context of the postpandemic, when tourism businesses experienced the pressure to reactivate the local economy in coastal Talamanca, Costa Rica. Using ethnographic methods and bringing to the fore conversations around “the Caribbean rhythm” and time, that appeared as a way of talking about race without stating it, I argue that the postpandemic provides a scenario through which we can understand the ways racial capitalism works by weaving crises and different temporalities to organize and sort out labor. Tourism, as a labor-intensive activity that seeks to produce leisure and pleasure for rest-seeking bodies, works as the analytical site for understanding the intricacies of racial capitalism. In the touristic beach towns of Talamanca, the call for acceleration and caring attention to customers that the half-staffed businesses demanded from their workers after the COVID-19 pandemic functioned to recreate hierarchies of employment and employability. This, in turn, deepened existing racialized and gendered inequalities, which are particularly useful for tourism's functioning as a form of commodified social reproduction.

This paper introduces the concept of ‘signal territory’ to explore how telecommunication infrastructures, particularly undersea cables, are reshaping the geopolitics of sovereignty, affect and digital connectivity. Focusing on Taiwan's Matsu Islands, a geopolitically sensitive frontier near China, the study examines how signal disruptions caused by cable damage produce affective responses and reconfigure notions of national security and belonging. Drawing on interviews, media analysis and official documents, the paper traces how affective nationalism and anticipatory governance converge in state-led efforts to re-territorialise invisible signal transmissions across land, sea, air and outer space. These efforts include satellite back-ups, microwave systems and legal proposals to protect undersea infrastructure. However, they are continually challenged by turbulent ecologies – ranging from oceanic forces and geomorphology to the geopolitical complexities of submarine cable governance. The paper situates these dynamics within broader literatures on volumetric politics, infrastructure studies and digital sovereignty, arguing that the territorialisation of signals marks a shift in how sovereignty is exercised in the digital age. By conceptualising signal territory as a socio-technical and affective assemblage, this study offers a new framework for understanding how states confront infrastructural vulnerabilities in contested geopolitical environments.

Femme interiorities is a series of provocations and essays – methodological, creative, and theoretical – devoted to thinking about femininity and its multiple interior forms, iterations, and archives. How do we tell the story of femininities, take it back, tell it anew, from feminist, queer, raced, diasporic, decolonial modes of being? Femme, as we define it, assembles and fissures an irreverent and fugitive femininity, and in so doing, gestures to femininity’s oblique relation to the libidinous, to immodesty, to eroticism, to sensation, and to flesh just as it too signals to other knowledges, memories, stories, hapticities, hauntings, and socialities. We find interiorities to be a compelling spatial metaphor because, on the one hand, it gestures to that which is inside, enclosed, private, hidden, inaccessible, and introspective, while on the other hand, it signals to the very act(s) of penetrating/entering the femme. At its core, then, this special forum considers the question: What does it mean to be inside the femme?

This article revisits Henri Lefebvre's sociospatial theories to illuminate contemporary sociopolitical dynamics shaped by neo-illiberalism, financialization, digital platforms, and the far right. It argues that Lefebvre's notion of abstract space helps explain the shift from industrial to financial dominance and, recently, to digital networks whose algorithmic mediation organizes fragmentation, homogenization, and new forms of social control. These digital abstract spaces extend capitalism's capacity to reproduce itself by transforming communication into a site of manipulation, value extraction, and political mobilization. Parallels are drawn between Lefebvre's analysis of fascism in the 1930s—particularly its exploitation of new media such as radio for nationalist mystification and “fake news”—and the far right's use of social media, with attention to the Brazilian case under Jair Bolsonaro. In both moments, technological infrastructures amplify authoritarian politics by reshaping the public sphere. The article concludes by highlighting Lefebvre's concept of differential space as a framework for resistance: a means to reclaim political agency and to cultivate democratic alternatives within and beyond digital environments. Revisiting Lefebvre thus clarifies how spatial logics underpin current authoritarian trends and suggests pathways for transformative praxis.

This paper examines the racialization processes within the US prison system through the lens of site ontology. We argue that racial formation in prison cannot be understood through universalizing or structuralist notions of race alone. Rather, the prison as a site of racialization demonstrates that such processes are spatially contingent and actively negotiated. Drawing in part on personal experience, we reveal how prisoners engage in “running” race; that is, opting into specific racial affiliations as social and existential survival strategies that reflect both individual agency and site-specific prison “politics.” In elucidating this process, we contend that hierarchical conceptualizations and structuralist theories do not sufficiently account for spatially contingent racial categorization experienced by prisoners. We instead advance an ontologically flat, theoretically grounded, and relational understanding of racialization that is informed by experiential data and agentic discourse. Beyond this present paper, we argue that this ontological approach can also be applied to understanding processes of racialization and other forms of identity construction in sites far afield from the prison.