Enfleshing temporal insurgencies and decolonial times

ABSTRACT

Time and temporality often remain the unthought in our spaces, moments, and movements of radical political imagination and practice. In this contribution, we aim to open a dialogue between current queer/feminist/black/decolonial scholarship on time, and the praxis of feminist movements and women in movement in Cali, Colombia. We hope to nurture, in this way, a systematization of the role of decolonial times and insurgent temporalities in our anti-capitalist praxis and deepen the theorization of decolonial emancipation and/as healing. We develop this systematization through exploration of three moments of encounter; the first a women-only workshop ‘Finding Voice’, the second a workshop that was part of a diálogo de saberes between feminist/peace movements in the region, and the final a public talk-performance at the International Conference in Mental Health and Well-Being, all held in Cali. Exploration and excavation of these moments suggest-enflesh that embracing our untimely rhythms and that which is out-of-time in our subjectivities, excavating together the epistemological possibilities of silence and the pauses in-between speech, as well as reconfiguring ‘failure’ as a moment of possibility, open embodied pathways to decolonising and feminising the revolutionary political.     

(Un)Disciplined futures: Women of color feminism as a disruptive to white affect studies

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how women of color feminism predates and disrupts dominant dialogues in the field of White affect studies. I introduce the concept of White affect studies as an arena of inquiry that draws from Western-European theories and literatures and architects a sociopolitical structure of affect that positions White affects as universal. Scholars contributing to the field of White affect studies posit theories of affect, embodiment, subjectivity, phenomenology, violence, war, and more, while disregarding the theoretical contributions made by women of color feminism in thinking through these notions and social issues. This is done by engaging in a citational practice that results in an epistemic erasure of women of color feminist thought. The voices of women of color feminists are thus disqualified, and their theoretical contributions are not acknowledged as significant or relevant in conceptualizing affect, affective economies, and the social. By turning to the writings of women of color feminists, I demonstrate how their theories on embodiment, subjectivity, and social structures predate the institutionalization of White affect studies. Feminists of color from the past and present have and continue to theorize through a language of self their experiences as subjects embedded within matrices of violence, power, and pleasure. Lorde, Martinez, and Chinchilla write about the ways in which lesbian and queer women of color institute different affects that counter dominant structures of emotion, systems of power, and heterosexual modes of being. In developing conceptual methodologies, Lorde, Martinez, and Chinchilla are able to weave into the dominant discursive logic a language of self that both introduces new queer subjectivities, while reinterpreting existing forms of thought, thereby contesting mainstream economies of White affects and White affect studies. It is through a language of self that Lorde, Martinez, and Chinchilla develop an ethic of survival that countermobilizes against White hegemonic apparatuses.     

Adelina Anthony Interview with Aimee Carrillo Rowe

ABSTRACT

This interview explores how performing artist, activist, writer, director, performer Adelina Anthony stages queer women of color affects as a complex terrain to mobilize a decolonial imaginary. Anthony's characters are complex, contradictory, surly, and resilient with whom audience members connect and feel deeply. Especially for queer women of color, who rarely get to see their own experiences on film or on stage, Anthony's work provides a critical forum for discussing, imagining, naming, and envisioning the connections between our personal struggles and broader forces of imperialism, heterosexual capitalism, and settler colonialism. Through the “medicina” of gritty truth-telling and side-splitting laughter, Anthony discusses her own positionality as a coyote curandera. Through the exploratory genre of the interview, Anthony helps readers palpably engage a queer woman of color “theory in the flesh” to imagine their own creative potentialities through a compassionate lens of humility and humor.     

Mobilizing betrayal: Black feminist pedagogy and Black women graduate student educators

This article addresses Black women graduate students' educational labor in higher education teacher training programs. We ground this reflective account of our respective teaching praxis in the educational betrayal we endured as younger students, connecting it to our engagement of Black feminist pedagogy. We illustrate how this praxis empowered us as undergraduate educators to implement pedagogies of equity and justice. Employing a structured vignette analysis framework, we draw on a Black feminist paradigm and Black feminist autoethnography to examine field notes of our teaching praxis. These two field notes, one from Francena and one from ArCasia, demonstrate challenges that emerged in our instruction of mostly white undergraduates. Despite the precarious nature of our political and professional positions, we discuss why working toward an anti‐oppression praxis remains our ultimate pedagogical aim.     

Borderlands Studies and Border Theory: Linking Activism and Scholarship for Social Justice

This article traces contemporary trends in borderlands studies and border theory and argues for a feminist revisioning of border studies as a mode of praxis, linking activism, and scholarship. I trace the trends from early borderland studies and Gloria Anzaldúa’s analysis of la frontera to the institutionalization of border theory in the academy. Scholars influenced by Anzaldúa’s work view borderlands as sites that can enable those dwelling there to negotiate the contradictions and tensions found in diverse cultural, class, and other settings. Critical perspectives of this view include concerns that there is ‘the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid … into a new privileged subject of history’ (Vila 2003. Ethnography at the Border, University of Minnesota Press). I examine tension between social science based borderlands studies and cultural studies-oriented border theory, address the limits and possibilities of an interdisciplinary border studies, and discuss the dilemmas associated with academic institutionalization and interdisciplinarity. I illustrate the feminist revisioning I recommend with three case examples chosen from contemporary feminist and queer border studies that link local struggles with cross-border organizing against violence against women, labor rights, and sexual citizenship.     

Sustaining Democracy: Localization,Globalization, and Feminist Praxis

Following contemporary discussions of environmental sustainability, I view sustainable democracy as an approach that remains open to diversity, promotes well‐being for all social actors, and advances social justice. The notion of sustaining democracy that I adopt foregrounds everyday practical and participatory strategies that are self‐consciously tied to a vision of the future which will be more economically equitable, peaceful, inclusive, and socially just. However, I argue, a political vision cannot be enacted without an epistemological articulation that informs political practice. Feminist praxis contains, in its epistemological formulation, a reflexive process by which lessons from past activist engagements are incorporated into contemporary efforts, which, in turn, are further reflected upon in changing political and cultural contexts. Feminist praxis is further deepened by incorporating epistemological insights from feminist theories of intersectionality to inform its political methodology. I illustrate the possibilities of intersectional feminist praxis for sustaining democratic practice with attention to five different dimensions: strategies for inclusion, methods of empowerment, countering power imbalances, organizing across differences, and processes of reflexivity.     

AMBIGUOUS IDENTITY IN AN UNAMBIGUOUS SEX/GENDER STRUCTURE:

This article explores bisexual identity as an ambiguous social category within the dominant dualistic sex/gender structure. The article documents the stigmatization of the bisexual category in the discourse of both the Religious Right and lesbian feminist communities, then examines the impact of dual stigmatization on bisexual women, who often see bi identity as disrupting the dominant sexual binary. Drawing from interviews with bisexual women, the article argues that bisexual women's discourse on sexual subjectivity does not escape the influence of binary structures, although it does at times reconfigure the binary along the queer/nonqueer and bisexual/monosexual axes. While the bisexual identity category may work as a discursive stabilizing device during the sex/gender crisis provoked by the AIDS epidemic, its politicization by bi feminists also allows the category to be strategically deployed for feminist and queer political projects.
At the present time, the regions where the grid is tightest, where the black squares are most numerous, are those of sexuality and politics; as if discourse, far from being that transparent or neutral element in which sexuality is disarmed and politics pacified, is in fact one of the places where sexuality and politics exercise in a privileged way some of their most formidable powers.
-Michel Foucault
No wonder people think we [bisexual women] are all sleazy.
-Bisexual woman     

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo

Abstract

Feminist studies of political economy have long pointed to the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered economic practices at the everyday level. Nonetheless, the increased analytical focus on the everyday within the study of international political economy (IPE) frequently fails to connect with feminist theories and gendered approaches. In this introductory essay, we argue that any discussion of a ‘turn’ towards the everyday in IPE must acknowledge the role of feminist contributions that predate, and indeed make possible, this shift in IPE scholarship's analytical gaze towards the everyday. We map out what might be understood as feminist political economies of the everyday—highlighting the points of connection between feminist scholarship on the everyday, as well as the ways in which feminist scholars engage with the notion of an everyday political economy in quite distinct and diverse ways—a diversity that reflects the methodological and theoretical pluralism of feminist political economy scholarship as well as the ever broadening geographical scope of feminist research.     

Feminist methods in a “post-truth” political climate: objectives,strategies, and divisions

Abstract

The legitimacy of feminist ways of knowing and the well-being of marginalized identities they attend to are endangered by a “post-truth,” North American political climate. There thus arises an urgent need to examine and vindicate the significance of feminist methods (FM) for women and people of color (WPC). This article contributes to this goal by critically examining the themes that have hitherto organized FM as a category of efforts to reverse WPC’s historical dispossession in the academy. This article identifies three thematic objectives of FM (symbolic, social, and economic empowerment of WPC to reverse their historical dispossession), three thematic strategies of FM to accomplish these objectives in research design (centering WPC in the research agenda, designing more inclusive methods, innovating new theoretical concepts to analyze findings), and two thematic debates that continue to divide FM (styles of intersectionality and identity in the feminist movement as an analytical approach and political effort at large). This article concludes by situating these thematic distinctions in Lamont and Swidler’s broader articulation of methodological tribalism, opening dialogue on the political and analytical advantages of and need for superior methodological pluralism in FM.     

The woman writer's body: Multiplicity,neoliberalism, and feminist resistance

What goes behind the scene of a woman writer's writing process? Beneath shiny finished writing products lies an arduous writing process often remain unseen to readers. The article makes visible two women writers' bodies and our embodied writing experiences through an intersectional feminist lens. Writer One is a Singapore-born, ethnic Chinese, queer migrant woman academic residing in Australia with her long-term partner. Writer Two is an England-born, Australian-British dual citizen, white heterosexual married mother of young twin children ready to kick start her academic career after her recent PhD conferment. Writer One with her fibromyalgic, traumatized, and othered bodies and Writer Two with her vulvodynia, mothering, and gendered bodies write themselves, their bodies and embodied writing experiences into existence in this article. Using autoethnographic accounts, they discuss how their multiple, chronically ill, and pained bodies influence their writing process and choice of writing topics. Specifically, they reveal how their bodies negotiate the tension between neoliberal demands imposed on their bodies and their feminist resistance efforts against constrictive forces in the knowledge production economy. Using this piece of writing as feminist resistance, they seek to reject dominant discourses, hold space, inscribe their own narratives, and call for collective feminist action with fellow women writers.     

Traveling from Feminism to Mainstream Sociology and Back: One Woman's Tale of Tenure and the Politics of Backlash

Within disciplines, the 1980s were an especially heady intellectual time for feminist graduate students. Not only did second wave scholarship prove to be inspirational for dissertation projects, but new books and articles published by women of color, lesbian feminists, postcolonial theorists and poststructuralists posed serious challenges to the ethnocentric assumptions of white, middle-class and Western feminism. Yet, despite over a decade of social movement activism and the creation of feminist institutions and organizations, this generation of feminist scholars worked against a cultural backdrop marked by a dramatic move to the political right. My personal narrative begins in this historical moment charting my political and intellectual trajectory from graduate school to the present. My positioning as a queer feminist between the second and third waves of feminist scholarship carried with it a rewarding intellectual legacy as well as a number of painful contradictions.¹ Further, I argue that these contradictions arose as a consequence of the uneven diffusion and reception of feminist scholarship, particularly the politics of backlash, within institutions and academic departments across the country from the 1980s to the present.     

Brokenheartedness and accountability

ABSTRACT

In this article, I reflect on relationship and movement building across power lines that I have experienced or witnessed in and outside of academia. I argue that the “anesthetic aesthetic” of whiteness, as illuminated by Mab Segrest, compels those like myself who are trained to be white to distance ourselves from the pain and suffering of others (as well as our own) in order to accept and assimilate into the hegemonic normative systems of power. I offer stories from my experience of feminist and queer organizing that demonstrate how this distancing looks and feels, and places of where it might be transformed. Then, I turn to healing justice as a praxis that creates communal spaces for naming, recognizing, and healing from violence, spaces to share our brokenheartedness, and to serve as a way of breaking up the gravitational pulls of white supremacist patriarchy.     

Bingo Regulation and the Feminist Political Economy of Everyday Gambling: In Search of the Anti-Heroic

Abstract

This paper uses bingo—a lottery-style game particularly popular with older working-class women—to take forward feminist political economy debates about the everyday. It highlights consumption and regulation as key to research on everyday political economy, and aims to contribute to studies of gambling as a marker of the everyday within critical political economy. Rather than seeing gambling primarily in terms of vernacular risk-taking, however, it argues that gambling is also a pathway into exploring other, more self-effacing political economies—of entertainment, fundraising, sharing, and ‘having a laugh’. Focusing on three key areas of regulatory dispute (over how to win bingo; who can participate; and what defines the game), the research suggests that players and workers are (re)enabling the diverse, plural nature of bingo as a political economic formulation—involving winning; entertainment; fundraising; care; flirting; and playful speculation—in the face of technological and legal processes aiming to standardize the game’s meaning as commercial gambling.     

“Brown girls can’t be gay”: Racism experienced by queer South Asian women in the Toronto LGBTQ community

Abstract

The absence of scholarship on South Asian discrimination in Western queer discourse contributes to a narrative that South Asians are not subjected to racially charged forms of discrimination in the LGBTQ community, which is fundamentally untrue. This article presents narrative-based accounts of nine queer South Asian women in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which they experience racial discrimination in the LGBTQ community, and the impact that this mistreatment has on identity formation and connectivity to queer spheres. It finds that queer South Asian women experience racial discrimination in the form of racially charged microaggressions, which are evidenced through expectations of assimilation to Western-normative performances of queer identity and erasure of South Asian culture in the LGBTQ community. Further, it reveals that Toronto’s LGBTQ community perpetuates a culture of White privilege that discredits the intersectional identity of queer South Asian women, and consequently invisibilizes, alienates, and revokes agency from these women who do not fit the majority’s conceptualizations about what a queer woman looks like.     

LGBTQ + community organizations under neoliberalism in Ontario,Canada: Contradictions and disconnects

Abstract

This study examines the impact of neoliberal policy—which introduces competition for funding and pressure to professionalize and bureaucratize—on the working conditions and precarity of a purposive sample of southern Ontario (Canada) organizations dealing with LGBTQ?+?health. Findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 community-based organization stakeholders and government bureaucrats confirmed that neoliberal policy pressures these organizations to professionalize and bureaucratize, while restricting political advocacy. Queer Liberation Theory’s three central tenets of anti-assimilationism, solidarity across movements, and the political economy of queer health are used to understand the situation and possible futures for third-sector organizations within the LGBTQ?+?movement.     

Narrow bridges: Jewish lesbian feminism,identity politics,and the “hard ground” of alliance

Abstract

The emergence of Jewish feminism in the late twentieth century produced a contradictory site for engagement with the Israeli state and its claims to both Jewish identity and the territory of historic Palestine. While some mobilizations of Jewish feminist identity politics promoted nationalism, others engaged the self-reflexive mode to question the coherence of group identity, to work against its codification in the state-national form, and to engender empathy and solidarity with targets of both U.S. and Israeli racial states. This essay maps two forms of Jewish feminist praxis: one liberal, normatively white, invested in both heteronormativity and Zionism; the other radical, emerging in close collaboration with women of color feminism, attuned to comparative racial relations, lesbian-led, and saturated with discourse and debate on U.S. and Israeli racism, and Zionism’s connection to Jewish identity.     

Buying a Voice: Gendered Contribution Careers among Affluent Political Donors to Federal Elections, 1980–2008

Early work in feminist theory hypothesized that differences in women and men's social and institutional roles might be reflected in the ways they participate in the political sphere. However, past empirical research has found scant evidence of a gender gap in the participatory strategies or motivations of women and men who become active in politics. But significantly less is known about the gender gap among a more select and increasingly significant player in American politics—political donors. In this article, we utilize a novel big data set—called the Longitudinal Elite Contributor Database (LECD)—that contains the population of all itemized donations made in federal elections between 1980 and 2008. Using this novel big data set supplemented with Social Security Administration (SSA) data on the gender of first names, we provide original estimates of the long‐term evolution of gender representation in the donor pool, vis‐à‐vis when, how often, and to whom affluent men and women have made political contributions over nearly 30 years. We find that large and persistent gendered inequalities of political voice continue to characterize this significant form of political influence. We theorize the potential implications of these findings for the representation of women's interests in the political sphere.     

Beyond Repair: Interpretation,Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play-Technique

This article puts clinical child psychoanalysis into conversation with recent debates about critical method in order to question the turn toward so-called “reparative reading” in feminist and queer theory. While Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original call for a new kind of reparative method culled its key terms (“reparative” and “paranoid”) from child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the scholars who have adopted reparativity in critical theory pay little attention to Klein’s work. In this article, I take up Klein’s theory of the depressive position and reparativity as she elaborated them in her clinical work with children, particularly her wartime analysis of “Richard” in 1941. Klein interpreted Richard’s play—his clinical “war games”—through her idiomatic vocabulary of “attack” and “repair.” By situating this case and Klein’s larger theory of psychic reparations in the political climate of wartime Europe, I argue that Klein’s writings point to the ethico-political dangers inherent in reparative endeavors, which name the object and narrate its injury and repair according only to the perimeters of one’s own self. From this reading, I propose that there might be a benefit to foregoing the injury/repair framework implicit in reparative agendas—both critical and clinical alike. By returning reparativity to Klein, I therefore aim not to offer a corrective to Sedgwick or to the scholars following her, but rather to interrogate the ethical stakes of all reparative endeavors, be they political, intellectual, or clinical. At the most basic level, then, this article argues that the space of the clinic is an important (and often undervalued) object for the consideration of critical method.     

Making feminism count: integrating feminist research principles in large-scale quantitative research on violence against women and girls

ABSTRACT

Applying a feminist approach to research on ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) is critical because gender inequality is an underlying driver of VAWG, and feminist research aims to empower women and girls, as well as challenge prevailing inequalities through the research process itself. However, feminist research approaches have not historically been applied in the international development sector, although statistical evidence on what works to end VAWG is in high demand from governments and donors. In this article, we explore how researchers could practically reconcile an explicitly feminist undertaking, like ending VAWG, when accepted research practices within this field employ methods that are historically not informed by feminist praxis. We argue that quantitative research and feminist research approaches are not mutually exclusive, rather, they can (and do) overlap. Drawing on five decades of combined experience conducting quantitative studies on VAWG in low- and middle-income countries around the world, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for incorporating feminist research principles throughout the research process – from design, community engagement, data collection, analysis, dissemination, and policy influence. We draw on practical examples from research conducted in countries as diverse as Timor-Leste, Kiribati, and Sri Lanka, among others, illustrating that it is not only possible to apply feminist research principles to large-scale, quantitative survey research on VAWG, but that this should become a priority for good development practice.     

Claiming Queer Territory in the Study of Subcultures and Popular Music

For both the heterosexual and queer subject, subcultural participation and stylistic modes of cultural production and consumption, including popular music, are critical mechanisms aiding in the construction and expression of identity. Yet, in spite of abundant empirical examples of queer music cultures, subcultural studies scholars have paid minimal attention to queer sexualities and their concomitant stylistic modalities. In this article, I claim the importance of queer subterranean music cultures by synthesising significant literatures from various fields of inquiry including cultural sociology, popular musicology and queer studies. To begin, I will briefly clarify to whom and about what queer (theory) speaks. I then go on to offer an overview of subcultural and popular music research paying particular attention to the subaltern queer subject and surveying queer criticism within each field. Accordingly, I discuss various sites of popular music production and subcultural style such as punk and hip‐hop, to show how non‐heterosexual subjects carve space for resistant queer sexualities and merge queer sensibilities with pre‐existing cultural forms. This article consolidates interdisciplinary approaches that will benefit scholars invested in the study of queer subcultures and popular music.