Review essay: Disentangling feminisms from the cold war

Abstract

Feminist thinkers have long argued for the centrality of sexuality, gender and women to the Cold War. They have critiqued the sexual language of ‘deep penetration’ and ‘orgasmic whumps’ used to describe nuclear arms race technology and argued that sexuality and gender were central to high‐level political decision‐making and everyday experiences of the conflict.1 Scholars have also begun to question the inverse relationship: they have used the politics of the Cold War as a lens into the history of feminist knowledge production itself. Kelly Coogan‐Gehr's 2011 monograph, for example, challenges conventional genealogies tracing feminist scholarship in the ‘West’ back to the ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and to women's movements, in particular.2 She argues Cold War pressures have privileged certain ideologies (neoliberal capitalism) and knowledge producers (white women) at the expense of others (socialism, communism and black feminist thinkers) in the preeminent feminist journal, Signs, since its inception in 1975.