Abstract
ABSTRACT What happens to feminism when it stops challenging power and starts circulating within it? As feminist language enters government agendas, global indicators, and market strategy, it becomes harder to tell whether feminism is transforming those systems or being absorbed by them. This editorial argues that the two are not sequential. Across contributions from Central Asia and beyond, we show feminist voice, agency, and solidarity being produced and constrained in the same moment they are exercised; not first captured, then resisted, but reshaped and redirected at once, through the very terms power extends. A woman using entrepreneurial visibility to gain legitimacy in a male‐dominated market is not complying and then subverting; she is doing both in a single gesture. Tracing this dynamic across Soviet and post‐Soviet Kazakhstan, global development governance, education, women's entrepreneurship, and decolonial epistemology, we ask what forms of feminist voice become legitimate, whose knowledge counts, and what survives translation into policy, indicator, and curriculum. We turn to the margins not as places where feminism is absent, but as the sites where its capture and its reinvention are most visible at once, where empowerment is relational rather than individual, solidarity is built through care and interdependence rather than declared as a political stance, and feminist theory is not applied to lived experience but built from it. The task this editorial sets is not to recover feminism from power, but to rethink what feminism becomes once the distinction between the two no longer holds.