Matt Richardson

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface “Africa Reconfigured,” the cluster in this issue on recent scholarly and creative work on Africa, displays a variety of cultural, artistic, and linguistic approaches to decolonizing gender. Originating in disparate fields, each article in this cluster presents examples of how new meanings of gender are produced that defy dominant definitions. Xavier Livermon examines the cultural and political context of postapartheid South Africa, arguing that redefinitions of “tradition”—not just legal rights—have led Black South Africans to “queer” marriage practices. Busi Makoni pushes the boundaries of feminist linguistics to consider how young women creatively relate to the prevailing lexicon of body parts in southern African languages and, in doing so, how they challenge normative gender identities. Cheryl Toman offers an account of writer, playwright, and performer Werewere Liking’s distinctive lifelong fusing of performance art and social activism in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali and how Liking’s plays, prose, and poetry enact decolonization in unique ways. Nigerian artist Peju Alatise, whose work is featured in our art spread, presents an array of ideas, materials, and genealogies that deeply question European and US aesthetics, as the art essay by Moyo Okediji explains. Concluding “Africa Reconfigured” are critical perspectives on Euro-American gender orders found in Olumide Popoola’s except from a novel and the poems by Gabeba Baderoon. Two articles in the second half of this issue reconsider a specific moment of US women’s history: women’s liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sara M. Evans challenges the stereotyping of the women’s liberation movement as white, middle class, and antisex, arguing that this is a myth fostered by academic theory, the movement’s opponents, and the mistaken notion that women ’s liberation rejected its New Left roots. Complementing Evans’s argument, Agatha Beins addresses the issue of racism in that same historical moment of women’s liberation in the United States by revisiting images 8Preface of revolutionary women of color in US feminist periodicals of the time, arguing that we have to understand the use of these images in the context of mainstream and New Left portrayals that demeaned feminism as being not serious about politics. Also in this issue is Mark Schuller ’s analysis of gender-based violence in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake of 2010, in which he examines how international humanitarian organizations are not always fully aware of how structural violence operates in the country. In our forum “Teaching about Ferguson,” Feminist Studies offers our readers reflections on the pedagogical challenges and opportunities in taking up the issue of state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States. All the articles and essays in this issue emphasize that the specificities of transnational, historical, and political contexts—rather than abstract invocations of globalization —are essential for understanding the changing meanings of gender identities and hierarchies as well as the political goals of women ’s organizations. The first article in our cluster on “Africa Reconfigured” takes on a popular Western assumption about South Africa, which is that the constitutional changes that acknowledged and legalized same-sex partnerships replaced intolerant “traditional” practices among Black South Africans. Xavier Livermon challenges this assumption by demonstrating how Black South Africans engage tradition in creative nonheteronormative ways. He closely follows how Black South Africans redefine autochthonous cultural practices in order to create new meanings and practices for marriage. Just as the very definitions of gender have been continuously in flux, so have the definitions of marriage, and Livermon demonstrates how marriage and long-standing coupling practices have become queered and reconstituted in contemporary Black South Africa. In line with Livermon’s interest in redefinitions of sexuality and gender in a postapartheid context, Busi Makoni explores the relationship between the naming of genitalia and gender positionings. Studying both men’s and women’s uses of the lexicon for body parts in multiple Southern African languages, Makoni concludes that women engage in a process of dis-identification with, and reappropriation of, socially inscribed language for their bodies. Women use the same name labels, but assign them completely different meanings, thereby creating counternarratives of feminine identity. Preface 9 The ability to create new meanings permeates the art...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface That an overtly white-nationalist misogynist demagogue was voted into power in the United States is cause for alarm and despair. As the election results sink in and analyses take shape, we at Feminist Studies mark this moment via poetry, a tradition of feminist expression that we have long nurtured. We include in this issue a special section on poems responding to the election. Raw by necessity, they allow for a collective processing of feelings experienced in this moment, even as we prepare for the courage and acuity needed in days ahead. The scholarly works in this issue offer reflections on the travels of the term gender: in French Canadian feminist circles; the misreadings of gender and sexuality in histories of post-WWII New York City; and the gains and gaps in activism against gender-based violence and inequality. Geneviève Pagé recounts how the term gender was taken up in French Canadian scholarship, while Alix Genter offers a visual history of what butchness meant in 1950s and 1960s New York City. Julie R. Enszer tracks the representation of women writers through literary grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts and in Norton anthologies, making the case that gender parity remains an elusive goal. Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck narrates the 1980 horror film The Shining as a commentary on violence against women and child abuse that uses the Gothic form to salutary effect. Nikki Lane reviews recent scholarship in black queer ethnography, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor introduces us to the feminist eco-art of Pamela Longobardi. Our featured poets, apart from our special section, are Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Karen An-hwei Lee. Our closing forum on trigger warnings narrates the innovative practices that Alexis Lothian and Ramzi Fawaz propose in response to a contentious pedagogical debate. 560Preface Geneviève Pagé describes the history of the journey of the term gender in feminist circles in Montreal, using this case to comment on the dilemmas that arise from Anglocentrism in feminism. Pagé argues that in many ways, the term gender was not well suited to the context she highlights: Quebec feminists already possessed an intellectual infrastructure for referencing the meanings of the term gender through alternative phrasing, such as rapport sociaux de sexe. Furthermore, the grammatical concept of genre was “a concept central to the French language, but only peripheral in the English language,” and therefore, its use in French carried a potential “naturalizing” connotation. Nonetheless, given the dominance of English in feminist theory, Pagé concludes that “the polysemic nature of gender” allowed “for a fluid and multiple account of the local and global processes at work in the construction of women and men” in this context. Alix Genter gives us a nuanced understanding of butch genders and butch-femme aesthetics. Rather than relying on a stereotypical version of the 1950s queerly legible butch in masculine clothes, Genter argues that butchness itself was visually nuanced and coded in different ways than expected. Referencing a rich archive of 1950s-era photographs, Genter demonstrates that butch-identified women “conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions.” This approach to butch aesthetics and lesbian self-representation opens up the common notion of a strict butch-femme contrast and introduces the concept of conscious mutual survival between the two lesbian identities. The appreciation of nuance continues in Nikki Lane’s review essay of reflexive ethnographic research about black queer communities. Lane’s review of recent work by Jafari S. Allen, Marlon Bailey, Mignon Moore, and Mireille Miller-Young highlights the attention these authors give to the complex politics of sexuality in everyday experiences of black communities. With an emphasis on the illuminating potential of ethnography and qualitative methodologies, Lane discusses how each text adds to our understanding of processes of “racialization, gendering, and sexualization.” Lane concludes that black queer and feminist ethnographic methods help accrue an embodied knowledge—the “flesh”—of black queer experience. Preface 561 The art featured in this issue is by Pamela Longobardi, who uses found-plastic objects to create painting, sculptures, installations, assemblages, photographs, and community-art projects. As an artist with training in biology, Longobardi focuses on the...