Introduction
Julie and Mandy met in a classroom in Atlanta, GA. Both new to the
campus of Georgia State University—Julie as a teacher of women's studies
and Mandy as a student—we found ourselves straddling a line many believe
to be laden with dichotomies: the line between activism and academia.
Although our relationship began as teacher-student, Mandy and Julie
became peers as the events of September 11th muted dissenting voices.
Outraged by the corporate media's depiction of the American public as
homogenous and bloodthirsty, the students in Julie's class dubbed
themselves the 4910 Collective (after the course number in the college
catalog, WSt 4910, Activism: History and Theory) to organize a protest
of the mainstream media's censorship of Americans who did not support
the so-called war on terror; instead, we demanded a considered
diplomatic response to the attacks. The theory we were reading in the
classroom became concretized in our actions in the streets (literally
and figuratively), and the divide between academia and activism blurred.
Over the past ten years, Julie has continued to teach, and Mandy became
a grassroots organizer and independent writer—both frequently hopping
over that preemptory line of divide as well as maintaining their
friendship.
When Mandy initiated the conversation about this special issue,
highlighting the word "polyphony," Julie's first thoughts focused on how
frequently we need to remind ourselves to open up, to expand our
understandings of feminist thought and activism, and how intense the
pressure is to solidify convictions and strategies. We see polyphony,
with its focus on non-hierarchical multiplicity, as a way to address
frequent conflicts within movements, including narrow definitions of
both feminism and activism, exclusionary practices, and internal
dissent. In other words, we hope that the idea of allowing
contributors' voices to come together while maintaining autonomy can
help resist the pressure to present a coherent, unified feminist
ideology. We don't want to repeat the framework of recognizing problems
and then claiming that we have a singular innovative solution, or that
we will simply "break the silence" in order to liberate ourselves.
Instead of finding a magical new formula that will make all previous
work coherently lead to the glorious future, we want to attend to a
process that involves recognizing the ways patterns form in order to
intervene in them when they become stuck.
In particular, we want to draw attention to ways models for social
change begin as exciting and inspirational, but over time can stagnate
and become repressive. When the models themselves become so entrenched
that it seems almost impossible to question the perspectives through
which we organize, new ways of thinking and strategizing are necessary
to jolt us out of ineffective cycles. To that end, we have organized
this issue in what we hope is an innovative fashion: we begin with a
section on feminist visions, focusing on imagining and creating
possibilities. The second section investigates the idea of "sticking
points"—places where we are reminded of the challenges and
difficulties of enacting our ideals. The third section combines the
previous two: here we highlight the concrete methods
activists/academics/organizations use to work through sticking points in
new and exciting ways. These three sections are accompanied by a
multimedia art gallery, which provides yet more visual, aural, and
performative ways of theorizing and articulating these ideas and
issues.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4
Next page
|
