More Than A Magazine, A Movement
A fast-paced Sundance documentary, Ghost in the Machine traces how modern AI’s obsession with “intelligence” and innovation is rooted in the eugenicist, sexist and racial hierarchies that have long shaped Silicon Valley and its technologies.
(This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.)
Like many of the women in my family, I had early menopause and had completed the process by the age of 50, the same as my mother.
The alarming truth is that we know more about reproductive organs in other species than we do our own. Our limited societal understanding of the lifespan of ovarian function is a casualty of the intersection of medical racism, patriarchy and white empiricism.
The story will remain incomplete until we have our research and clinical care guided by the menopausal experiences of those who experience it.
(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, published in the middle of Black History Month, in partnership with Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause. Menopause is not only a physical transition—it is also cultural, social and political. Recognizing its full scope is essential to advancing true health and civic equity.)
There is a shift happening in the labor force that favors men in general, and white men in particular. And Black women—who historically have found more job security and upward mobility in federal employment—are now seeing those federal jobs slip away in record numbers.
“What we are seeing happening is a federal government that is intent on creating a DEI boogeyman to radically change how workplaces operate in ways that disadvantage women, people of color and LGBTQ workers,” says Gaylynn Burroughs, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.
Afghanistan. Myanmar. Syria. The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Over the last 80 years, there has rarely been a situation of atrocity that has not been marked by the commission of crimes against humanity. These crimes, defined by their widespread or systematic nature, target civilians and devastate societies.
Yet, while the international community has created legal regimes to address war crimes and genocide, we lack a global legal architecture for the prevention, suppression and punishment of crimes against humanity, leaving millions across the globe at risk and justice elusive for survivors.
The start of negotiations for such a treaty is not just overdue; it is of historic importance. Late last month, the United Nations General Assembly launched a four-year process to prepare for and negotiate a new global treaty to prevent and punish crimes against humanity by 2028. If it is crafted with ambition and resolve, it can be a game-changer for international accountability, strengthen the rules-based order and offer hope and justice to victims and survivors.
Texas A&M University announced it is eliminating its women’s and gender studies degree program. University leaders made the announcement alongside the results of a campus-wide course review launched after a video of a student confronting a professor over gender identity content went viral last fall and sparked political backlash.
“Limiting what can be taught in a university classroom is not education,” said Amy Reid, program director for Freedom to Learn at PEN America. “It’s ideological control.”
The canceled courses the university announced Friday were spread across the Bush School of Government and Public Service and the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Education and Human Development. The university later identified canceled courses as “Introduction to Race and Ethnicity”; “Religions of the World”; “Ethics in Public Policy”; “Diversity in Sport Organizations”; “Cultural Leadership and Exploration for Society”; and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Youth Development Organizations.”
Texas A&M has made similar cuts in recent years. In 2024, regents voted to eliminate dozens of low-enrollment minors and certificates, including an LGBTQ+ studies minor, a decision faculty said was made in response to conservative criticism and with limited faculty input.
It feels like things in the U.S. have finally tipped over an invisible edge. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot an unarmed woman in the face, muttering “fucking bitch” as he walked away. The Trump regime has not only defended him, it has leveraged the full weight of the U.S. government to support its false narrative. The Department of Justice is investigating the victim, Renee Good, and her wife—not the officer who killed her. Various officials, including Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, have told the public demonstrable, flat-out lies about the incident, things that flatly contradict widely-available videos.
A few days before Christmas, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo featured an abhorrent caricature of esteemed journalist, author, filmmaker, and activist Rokhaya Diallo. The grotesque image, which we will not reproduce here, shows a half-naked Diallo dancing on stage dressed in a banana skirt. Her features were exaggerated in the manner of time worn racist propaganda—contorting her nose, mouth, and eyes for a minstrel-like effect. Next to the image was an audience pointing and jeering underneath a sign that read “The Rokhaya Diallo Show: she ridicules the separation of church and state all over the world.” There is no question that Diallo was targeted for her widespread international success and renown as an antiracist activist, as well as her prominence as a Black feminist voice decrying racial injustice, sexism, and misogynoir in France and abroad. The timing felt insidiously intentional— the magazine chose to end the year with a decidedly harmful message to Black French women as a holiday send off.
On the day bell hooks became an ancestor, four years ago today, my beloved friend, comrade and co-conspirator Black feminist sociologist Shawn McGuffey and I were consoling one another over text when he wrote, “We should do something.” “Say less,” I replied.
We had institutional support from Northeastern University at a time when universities and other institutions were publicly and ceremoniously committing to funding DEI related initiatives in the tidal wave of so-called racial reckoning that occurred in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. The first symposium took place two months later on a cold and clear February morning in 2022. This annual gathering became an important tradition that we looked forward to each year.
This week, we mark four years since the woman born Gloria Jean Watkins, a Black feminist writer, academic, professor and activist became an ancestor. But in 2026, there will be no bell hooks symposium at my university. Due to university wide fiscal austerity, we will not mark the anniversary this year in any official way. It is a tremendous loss, for our students and for our community locally, nationally and internationally.
As I grappled with my own grief over this loss, I had to also reflect deeply about what it means to be a Black feminist scholar in the academy today.
When The Heritage Foundation released its new policy blueprint for 2026 this week—an extension of the now-infamous Project 2025—it did so with the calm confidence of an institution convinced no one will stop it. The document is shorter than last year’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” but no less dangerous. It is, in fact, more candid.
Project 2026 lays out a government redesigned to control women’s bodies, erase LGBTQ+ lives, dismantle civil rights protections and roll back decades of hard-won progress. Wrapped in the language of “family,” “sovereignty” and “restoring America,” it is a direct attempt to impose a narrow, rigid ideology on an entire nation.
Make no mistake: This is a plan for forced motherhood, government-policed gender and the end of women’s equality as we know it.
But Project 2026 is not destiny. It is a warning—and one we must answer with the full force of a movement that has never accepted a future written for us by someone else.
Another year of feminist struggles, another year of feminist triumphs. Our pop culture pushed back and provided many glimpses into feminist resistance throughout the culture.
This year’s top feminist moments reveal how artists, storytellers and creators confronted regressive politics with imagination, joy, righteous anger and expansive visions of humanity.