This manifesto explores the intersections of crip feminism, disability activism and queer politics, articulating a collective vision of resistance, solidarity and reimagined futures for people with physical disabilities, particularly disabled women. Our work challenges mechanisms that marginalise non-normative bodies through poetic expression and critical reflection, advocating for self-determination, accessibility and intimate citizenship. Drawing on the lived experiences and sociopolitical activism of Chien-Ju Chou, Chun-Chieh Lin and Ya-Wen Huang, the manifesto highlights the struggles against structural and everyday exclusions compounded by ableism and hetero-patriarchy while emphasising the consciousness of ‘co-dependency’ as both a principle and a praxis within feminist and disability justice movements. By centring these women’s voices and their agency in knowledge production, the manifesto resists the ableist tendency to objectify disability and instead fosters transformative politics rooted in mutual care. Ultimately, it asserts crip feminism as both a theoretical framework and an embodied practice of reclaiming space and authorship for disabled communities.

Shambu is a member of staff at the MSM branch of a non-profit organisation in urban Bangalore, India, who works on HIV/STI awareness and prevention. His daily life is a careful balance between family responsibilities, his job, multiple sexual partners and sex work. This piece shares Shambu’s reflections on his early experiences with sexuality, his engagement in cruising sites, gender performance, engagement with male sex workers, non-consensual sex and the financial realities that shape his life, including his involvement in activism. Defying rigid identity boundaries and societal expectations, he openly discusses his relationships with both men and his wife while expressing a desire to be transgender. He recalls a significant relationship with a man he called his ‘panthi’, marked by an intricate dynamic of emotions, sex, dominance, economic exchange and silence. His narrative offers a nuanced exploration of identity, gender, sexuality, activism, consent, morality and economic survival in Bangalore. It defies the hegemonic structure of society by challenging the binary construction of gender and sexuality.

This article examines how Catholics for the Right to Decide Mexico (CDD México), Catholics for the Right to Decide Argentina (CDD Argentina) and US-based Catholics for Choice (CFC) rethink Catholicism in relationship to feminism, particularly with regard to reproductive justice. This rethinking occurs in a context in which transnational feminism has tended to only consider Catholicism in its fundamentalist and institutional expressions, an approach which places Catholicism and feminism in opposition. An analysis of these organisations’ activist and advocacy tools from 2019 through 2023 reveals that these groups employ a two-pronged approach to challenge dominant understandings of Catholicism. First, they demonstrate and make visible the widening gap between the Catholic hierarchy and everyday parishioners, often through survey data and storytelling. Second, and simultaneously, they emphasise the plurality and diversity that characterise the Catholic tradition, articulated through the vast textual production of a diverse cast of notable Catholic actors. These two moves point to convergences between feminism and Catholicism and provide an example for how transnational feminism can combat religious fundamentalisms and construct a feminism of the masses.

This article offers a critical reflection on my community-based participatory action research (CBPR) with a migrant women’s collective based in South China. I situate this self-reflexive account within the current conjuncture of post-Cold War neoliberal globalisation, where the US–China geopolitical confrontation looms large, giving rise to new authoritarian realities that compel Chinese feminists across domestic and transnational networks to envision and enact alternative forms of solidarity, activism and scholarship. Against this backdrop, I ask: How can we practise community-based research in solidarity with grassroots partners amid divisive and repressive political conditions? How can ethically accountable and politically attentive research relationships be co-nurtured to confront epistemic injustice and withstand political risk? Drawing on the migrant women’s solidarity praxis of ‘walking together’, I conceptualise my CBPR as an ongoing transborder feminist crossing, where community and scholarly partners cultivate dissident companionship and walk across structural divides to co-produce knowledge for meaningful social impact. Through an autoethnographic account of my contingent border-crossing CBPR during the Covid-19 pandemic–trade war crisis, I discuss how the migrant women’s ethics of solidarity, including mindful gatekeeping and meaningful reciprocity, resist hegemonic knowledge production and inform transborder feminist research engagement amid geopolitical uncertainty. By foregrounding Chinese grassroots women’s solidarity politics, this text contributes to Global South feminist epistemologies and methodologies and calls for new forms of transborder political intimacy in resistance to the global refashioning of authoritarian regimes.

This piece sketches out how migrant Chinese women massage workers define their massage labour as health work rather than sex work to negotiate the oversexualisation of their labour. Centring migrant Chinese women massage workers’ narratives of how they define their labour, I show how these women understand their healing labour as cultivating health and wellness rather than erotic pleasure, even if clients might experience pleasure. I argue that the impulse to distance such labour as categorically not sex work – in order to gain legitimacy as a worker under gendered, racial capitalism – is both smart and harmful. Drawing on Chinese migrant women massage workers’ narratives, I analyse and push back against moral narratives of ‘proper’ work and workers that affirm a binary view of work as morally just and proper or immoral and corrupt. I ask, why do migrant Chinese women massage workers have to rely on scripts of respectability to receive respect as workers, and what does this say about the nature of gendered, racial capitalism?

This article examines how Xiaohongshu, a fashion- and lifestyle-orientated online social commerce platform with a predominantly female user base (70%), simultaneously challenges and reinforces conventional beauty standards. While users are positioned within the discourse of ‘she power’, the platform’s framing of empowerment remains deeply contradictory. Drawing on six months of online ethnography and in-depth interviews, this article explores how Xiaohongshu constructs and commercialises stylised femininity as a form of spectacle. Analysing aesthetic practices through three dimensions – norms, dual gazes and resistance – the findings reveal that user engagement (e.g. likes, comments, shares) drives algorithmic learning. This process transforms beauty pressures into data, reinforcing platform-defined ideals while promoting ‘relatable’ influencers who mirror everyday users. Such dynamics offer surface-level relief from beauty norms yet deepen entrenchment in consumerist algorithmic culture. The article extends Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle by demonstrating how platform participation sustains aesthetic standards through interactive visibility. It also contributes to scholarship on gendered platform economies by uncovering the socio-technical mechanisms shaping women’s engagement with digital beauty cultures. As the data primarily reflect urban, youth-orientated experiences, future research should investigate non-urban and cross-platform variations.

This project theorises with the Blues Women epistemology by evaluating the agentic potential found in Black women blues musicians’ affective tools. More specifically, I use Sister Rosetta Tharpe as a theoretical case study for how the Blues Women were able to subvert their genre and exercise agency. This writing carefully investigates these subversions in the form of Tharpe’s soundscape (her musical choices) and landscape (the geography of her stage) through elements of Black feminist theory, such as sensorial protest and Black geographical thinking, illuminating the complexity of her affective choices like amalgamating different musical genre conventions and developing a new, spiritually informed star persona. Consequently, such analyses reveal the meaningful agentic potential found in these affective tools, as the Blues Women demonstrate a commitment to a politics of refusal in their creative choices, a practice that is central to the blues epistemology and genre. This project, therefore, posits the Blues Women as sophisticated meaning-makers in their ability to challenge defining aspects of the blues genre through affective appeals of bodily sensibilities like sound and staging. In going beyond traditional sites of knowledge production and methods of meaning-making, I assert that examining the contributions of the Blues Women also demands finding new ways to document agentic potential, such as through elements of radical feminist storytelling.

This Open Space piece critically engages with the experiences of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) women navigating urban spaces in Scotland, examining the tensions between visibility, belonging and exclusion. Drawing on photovoice as a feminist participatory methodology, the project brings together visual letters and reflective narratives that capture how moments of temporary inclusion often coexist with enduring neglect and invisibility. Through a series of visual correspondences, this piece foregrounds the ways in which ESEA women encounter public spaces that are alternately inviting and alienating. Temporary cultural events and community-led gatherings may offer brief moments of belonging, but these often contrast with a pervasive sense of conditional recognition. The project highlights how the city’s willingness to embrace diversity can feel borrowed and fragile, welcoming when culturally convenient and withdrawn once the event ends. By weaving together personal testimonies and critical reflections, this piece challenges the notion that visibility alone constitutes genuine inclusion, calling for a deeper understanding of how urban spaces shape the lived experiences of ESEA women.

Although the spread of intersectionality is inherently positive, several thinkers have highlighted problems associated with its popularity, which can lead to forms of co-optation and/or appropriation by white feminisms, both within and outside academia. These critiques have resonated among certain Western feminists who face a complex situation. On the one hand, intersectionality has broadened the analytical horizons of feminism, revealing the limitations of the ‘starting-from-self’ approach in favour of a more systemic analysis of oppression. On the other hand, Black and decolonial thinkers have exposed the ventriloquist dynamics often at work in Western feminism. This article examines this tension, seeking to address questions such as: How can a balance be struck between violent universalism and the personalism of struggles? What research methodologies could enable the recognition of sociocultural differences while fostering the creation of a common ground for defining a collective political subject? Drawing on feminist and decolonial perspectives, this article addresses one of the central aporias of contemporary feminism, aiming to contribute to feminist theory and practice by offering conceptual and methodological tools that deepen the understanding of power relations within feminisms themselves. In order to do that, the article begins by critically examining recurring concepts in mainstream feminism such as privilege and alliance, and it secondly identifies two trajectories that may support the development of a more grounded intersectional research model: decolonising the concept of alliance and glitching academia through feminist solidarity.

Shortwave Collective draws from a feminist perspective to learn about sound technology together with others as equal non-experts, bypassing the often hierarchical culture and gendered learning experienced in amateur radio and tech clubs. As an international collective, we spend time together in each other’s company remotely and in hybrid forms – making, testing and sharing DIY open wave-receivers, antennas and other pieces of radio-related technologies, often by reusing various components from found and everyday objects and materials. Our distributed group practice reveals different modes of listening to the electromagnetic transmissions embedded within a soundscape. These draw attention to the position of each listener within a wider constellation of bodies, positionalities, skills, acoustic environments and technologies. We’ve discovered that material innovation, time of day, group dynamics, location, reception and other factors contribute to the outcomes. These are unique to the time and place of each listening and each soundscape. As a group, we combine these individual and topical experiences into a collective network of listenings, which are expressed through performances, installations, recorded works and compositions, as well as in educational activities such as workshops, presentations and commissions. Our collaboratively written text ‘Collective listening across distance’ shares the praxis and thinking behind our collective’s listening methodology and demonstrates its unique ability to create a constellation of fragile, uncertain pluralities.