In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)

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... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:396 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lisa Rofel A View of Women’s Studies from Afar and Near As a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Studies, I have had the pleasure of reading the submissions to this special issue on the state of women’s, gender, feminist, and sexuality (WGFS) studies programs. All the accepted articles highlight why WGFS studies programs have been, (...) and continue to be, a vital part of intellectual training in US academies. I read the submissions from a particular perspective: that of having been trained in a discipline I happen to love, cultural anthropology, and at the same time always having been a feminist scholar within my discipline. When I was deciding which PhD program to enter, feminist anthropology was beginning to garner much attention. Along with feminist historians, feminist anthropologists were not only trying to include women in the picture, but were asking instead how attention to gender transforms the big questions about politics, social relations, and cultural meanings. This feminist approach would forever change how anthropologists analyze culture and power. Since I was both a feminist and an anti-imperialist activist, anthropology felt like the right discipline to choose. That might seem like a strange juxtaposition—anti-imperialism and anthropology—for those not familiar with the history of the discipline. When I entered graduate school, some anthropologists had already begun the self-critique of the discipline and its collusions with colonialism. As I moved through my graduate program, I was part of the creative efforts to figure out what kind of anthropology we could Lisa Rofel 397 foster that would be anti-colonial as well as post-colonial. It was a heady and exciting time to experience how we could develop a critique of culture and power. Reading over the submissions for this special issue, I was reminded of feeling troubled by those students in interdisciplinary programs (and not just from WGFS studies programs) who approach faculty in conventional disciplines only for training in methods. Frankly, I am very tired of being treated this way. In my discipline, methods are tied to the kinds of theoretical questions someone wants to ask. Texts that explain, for example, how to do an oral life history demonstrate how the method is tied to analytical/political questions. One of the best texts in this vein is Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History.1 We never train our students merely in how to engage in participant-observation or how to conduct an interview, but rather how to think analytically about what the student wants to ask in the first place. For example, one of the graduate students I work with, Kali Rubaii, just finished her PhD dissertation, “Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province,” for which she also did analogous research in the Palestinian territories. In such conditions, one has to think very carefully about how one works with—rather than does research on—the people whose horrendous living conditions (thanks to US imperialism) under what Rubaii calls “less-than-lethal counterinsurgency” matter a great deal for the rest of us to understand.2 Rather than interview them or do something called participant-observation, Rubaii did what she calls “transhumant ethnography,” which meant she decided that ethically she had to live through everything that her interlocutors were living through, including constantly moving from one unsafe or only temporarily safe place to another. Rubaii’s work, as an example, reminds us that methods are inextricably linked with the power dynamics infusing the worlds we study. In addition to the matter of methods, I am concerned about a problematic assumption that what distinguishes and even defines WGFS 1. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 2013). 2. Kali Rubaii, Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018). 398 Lisa Rofel studies programs is attention to power. This assumption reflects the need for students in interdisciplinary programs to learn more about the genealogy of the theoretical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 251 7 preface 8 In recent years, people all over the world have become ever more aware of being drawn into intimate—and unequal—relations with one another, whether through environmental crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, global economic commodity chains, violent conflicts, forced displacements, or political protests and social movements. This special issue features China’s so-called rising presence as one of (...) the key nodes in these global intimacies. The essays by Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang, Sealing Cheng, and Wei Wei contribute new approaches to migrant intimacies across borders through their ethnographically rich analyses. Chen and Wang explore cross-border marriages and sex work between Taiwanese men and Mainland Chinese and southeast Asian women; Cheng investigates refugee marriages and the difficulties men from various African nations face in seeking asylum in Hong Kong; and Wei analyzes Mainland Chinese queer reproduction that uses transnational Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) to enable queer parents to have a genetic link with their children and to be more accepted in Chinese society. In his essay, Petrus Liu pushes us to move beyond the idea that a theory of gender construction traveled to China from the West and was wholly adopted there, instead demonstrating the complexities of gender theories in China in the age of the Beijing Consensus. Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland explore a broad range of artworks that critically reflect on China’s efforts to create a China-centered global Global Intimacies: China and/in the Global South 252Preface trading network. Paul Amar offers a “deimperial queer analysis” of the all-time top-earning Chinese film, Wolf Warrior 2, illuminating how it both buttresses China’s extractive and militarized investments in African nations and manifests anti-imperialist and utopian impulses. Poems by Zhai Yongming and Xu Lizhi feature the gendered and sexualized precarity and violence of recent social transformations in China resulting from China’s intimate linkages with the global capitalist economy. Finally, Cai Yiping’s News and Views offers a nuanced engagement with the Chinese government’s formal proclamations on women’s rights.1 In the first essay, “Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy : Evidence from Taiwan’s Cross-Border Marriages,” Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang demonstrate the fallacy of treating cross-border marriages and cross-border sex work as separate as well as grouping women dichotomously under one or the other set of practices. These two seemingly disparate categories are, in effect, produced by state immigration regulations and dominant intersectional discourses of gender, sexuality, and class. Rather than distinguishing between marriage migrants and economic migrants, or between real marriages and fake marriages, Chen and Wang demonstrate the overlapping means by which women from the Global South try to better their lives in what they call the global intimate economy—where the Global North appropriates the reproductive and intimate labor of women from the Global South. The authors develop the concept of “flexible intimacy” to highlight how migrant women treat marriage as an investment through which to improve their lives. They argue that many marriage migrants have economic motivations for cross-border marriage and that migrant sex workers, conversely, are often involved in intimate relationships. Chen and Wang focus their study on Taiwan, which they argue is economically part of the North but politically part of the South due to Mainland China’s “One China” policy, which has marginalized Taiwan in the international political arena. To assert its sovereignty, the Taiwanese government 1. These essays grew out of a Ford Foundation-funded series of workshops on China and/in the Global South: The Central Role of Gender and Sexuality, which took place in Beijing and also at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thanks to the Ford Foundation grants, and especially Susie Jolly, Lisa Rofel and the authors have built a transnational network of scholars and activists addressing China’s transformed presence in the Global South. Preface 253 strictly controls border crossings by migrant women from China and Southeast Asia yet simultaneously allows Taiwanese husbands to appropriate migrant women’s intimate and reproductive labor. Both Taiwanese men and migrant women expect... (shrink)