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Mandy Van Deven and
Julie Kubala,
"Introduction"
(page 4 of 4)
Our goal for this issue, then, is to produce an understanding of the
ways a multiplicity of voices can co-exist, albeit messily, and point
toward new methods of rethinking and envisioning the complexities of
feminisms and movements for social change. We want to articulate the
ways the concreteness of people's lives and the abstractions of theory
can work together. Joining together words and images, text and visual
art, can aid in continuing the calls for reconnections of those things
that have been forcibly separated and theorizing strange juxtapositions
of "unlike" elements: of the personal and the political, thought and
affect, reason and emotion, body and soul, activism and academia.
Several pieces, for example, highlight the significance of bodily
practices to connect "the personal" and "the political." In her
exploration of the significance of singing,
Nomy Lamm connects
working through the blocks one often experiences about singing with the
awareness one can have of the energy and space one can take up in a
room; this desire for intervention in what is often cited as one of the
most difficult parts of alliance-building provides a clear example of
how rejoining the body and mind can aid in social justice work.
Similarly, Marta Sanchez's analysis of dancing as a tool of
community support for survivors of violence points to the importance of
physical movement as a way to alleviate the suffering of trauma, and
Lesleigh Owen explains how reconceptualizing a bar as a place for
fat women to embody sexiness can become a space of reclamation and
empowerment. These explorations into the implications of bodily
practice open up possibilities for envisioning the materiality of
strategies for social change.
Many of the contributors to this issue address what we might call
"the vision question"—how we envision possibilities for alternative
ways of living while remaining open to conflict, dissent, and rapidly
changing social contexts. In other words, how can we take seriously
wariness about the ways programmatic ideas of social change can and do
generate repressive agendas without allowing those fears to stop us from
imagining possibilities and alternative ways of being?
Jessica Hoffmann describes a
skill-sharing retreat where the lessons of visionary
organizing become clear to her (and us), noting that the retreat left
her "feeling inspired and more sure than ever that we do have the
skills, wisdom, and resources we need to create systems—communities,
ways of living—that are just and sustainable, if only we weren't under
the pervasive pressure of a system that keeps most of us too tired and
busy and twisted up—too stolen from, too colonized, to do it."
In order to record these existing practices, then, we draw on lived
experiences of thinking and organizing to investigate methods that
thinkers/activists/artists use to challenge established frameworks for
organizing and intellectual work. Adrienne Maree Brown describes
how The Ruckus Society moved from a white, male-led, hierarchical
organization to a non-hierarchical activist space occupied primarily by
women of color and members of the organization. Organizers of
S.O.N.G. (Southerners on New Ground) discuss the importance of
privileging a local vision of alternative possibilities and offering a
place to address the everyday trauma of violence in ways that "build our
collective liberation from our longing, desire, dreaming, creation as
ways that allow healing and alternative responses to persecution,
violence, and to the targeting and isolation of our communities." And,
as Shea Howell notes in "Does a Movement Need a Name," a
multigenerational video conversation directed by Adele Nieves,
"Everyplace people were doing things that look like what we want a
future to be." This notion that the ideals we are thinking about are
already happening is crucial to our idea that we need to highlight these
practices to counter the pessimism seen in so much academic and activist
thinking.
By collecting these pieces, we want to contribute to the (muffled)
polyphonic conversation that already exists about the necessity of
rethinking and reconsidering our individual, organizational, and
intellectual models to document already-existing possibilities and
continue the project of opening up spaces, visions, and ideas that
create social change. In order to do this, we draw attention to various
sticking points, to pay attention to their recurrence in ways that notes
their significance while not allowing them to prevent us from doing our
work. In other words, we envision this special issue as a kind of
"taking stock" of where we are in feminist thinking, organizing, and
creative practice; we hope to bridge divides—such as those between
activism and academia, blogs and academic journals, non-profit
organizations and artistic communities—while simultaneously
maintaining the autonomy and significance of individual voices, dissent,
and conflict. We dream of social movements that can address the trauma
of everyday, systemic violence without silencing disagreements in the
name of addressing that very same violence, movements that encourage and
value the multiplicities of intellectual and creative approaches to
social problems without prioritizing any particular way of speaking,
understanding, and visualizing the world.
Endnotes
1. To extend this example further, a genealogical
approach may allow us to destabilize intersectionality as remedy and
demonstrate the above-mentioned pattern. While the concept of identity
politics began as complex and multiple within feminist movements (see
The Combahee River Collective Statement,
for instance), it both became
and became seen as contributing to the attempts to unify the
subject-position "woman," therefore marginalizing such issues as race,
class, and sexuality. In response to this narrowing, feminists began
emphasizing a language of "difference" and "multiculturalism." Soon,
that discourse also came under criticism by theorists such as Chandra
Mohanty and Christina Crosby for reducing hierarchical imbalances to
interest group pluralism (read: we are all different, so therefore we
are all the same). Mohanty points to ways in which the language of
multiculturalism is used to "manage" and tame systemic inequalities and
suggestions for intervention (see Chandra Mohanty, "On Race and Voice:
Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s," Cultural Critique
14: 179-208). Crosby goes so far as to question the process through
which the language of "difference" becomes seen as providing a
"solution" for problems (i.e. racism, etc.) in theory (see Christina
Crosby, "Dealing with Differences," in Feminists Theorize the
Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott, New York: Routledge,
1992). Partially in response to these critiques, theorists began using
the language of intersectionality, an idea that has several origins,
from the Combahee River Collective's notion of interlocking oppressions
to Kimberlé Crenshaw's important shift to the term "intersectional,"
which describes the need to recognize the plurality and multiplicity of
power relations that structure our lives and our worlds (see Kimberlé
Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law
Review [1991] 43: 1241-299). Once again, then, thinkers as varied as
Jasbir Puar to Jennifer Nash have questioned the term. Puar critiques
the notion of intersectionality for stabilizing the very identity
components it intends to complicate—it assumes that we know what
race/class/gender/sexuality mean, even as we attempt to formulate more
complex understandings and nuanced descriptions of the workings of power
(see Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). In her essay
in this journal, Nash reminds us that these terms are, in fact,
metaphors, and that it is the sedimentation of the metaphorical language
into fixed and rigid concepts we must be wary
of. [Return to text]
2. See Mikail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's
Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984). [Return to text]
3. Ella Shoat, ed. Talking Visions:
Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (New York: The MIT
Press, 1998). [Return to text]
4. Ibid, pages 2-3. [Return to text]
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