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The mid-1990s saw the rise of a new sub-genre of political magazine in the United States: the “third-wave” feminist periodical. A key feature of these publications is that they promote reclaiming and repoliticizing activities traditionally associated with the domestic sphere, particularly knitting. This paper critically examines and historically contextualizes the discourses on the “new” knitting in the letters to the editor, editorials, articles, and advertisements of third-wave feminist periodicals and argues that contemporary feminist craft cultures sit at a politically ambiguous nexus of privilege, complicity, and resistance. By historicizing third-wave periodicals' promotion of knitting, this paper sheds light on changing ways in which the domestic sphere has figured within the broader history of US feminism and suggests that, despite their appeals to the “new,” these periodicals are very much in conversation with what is, to some extent, an imagined feminist “past.”

On Friday 17 August 2012, members of the feminist collective Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail after their staging of a musical protest in a Russian Orthodox church. This article analyses Western news media responses to the Pussy Riot affair. It first examines how the event has resonated across various news media, activist, and social media networks. Focusing on the phrase, ‘We are all Pussy Riot’, which became a Twitter hashtag following the incarceration of Pussy Riot members, I argue that narratives of feminist return (Hemmings, 2011) and of US exceptionalism have shaped the eventfulness of the Pussy Riot affair in the West. While not dismissing the activism of Pussy Riot, this article asserts that the discourses of transnational solidarity and feminist renewal that the arrests engendered rely on the perceived whiteness and non-Western identities of the members who were incarcerated.

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