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.

This project emerged out of a shared sense of frustration with some of the places in which feminist activist movements and thinking seem stuck. The concept of "stuckness" (or as Sara Ahmed might put it, "stickiness") is not entirely negative. We do not envision the concept as an individual "problem;" rather, we want to think about how various ideas and ideologies sediment in ways that are both inhibitive and generative. These sticking points can show us places that demand our attention, and attending to them can prove fruitful in the ongoing process of self-reflection necessary for organizing and theorizing.

Not surprisingly, the sedimentation of internal marginalizations, particularly around race, is one of the major sticking points that contributors address. Joy Castro, for instance, documents the continuing exclusions that are perpetuated in academia, and therefore in "theory" more generally; the foreclosing of particular emotions, especially anger, can function to elide anti-racist feminist critiques. Paying attention to the recurrence of these sticking points allows us to reconsider these problems; in "Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects)," Sara Ahmed calls on us to reclaim the killjoy, who points out the underlying problems and exclusions that characterize feminist critiques, both in society at large and those internal to movements, such as racism. She notes that attempts at addressing exclusionary practices can fail to take into account the affective significance of critique and conflict. She writes,"The feminist subject 'in the room' hence 'brings others down' not only by talking about unhappy topics such as sexism but by exposing how happiness is sustained by erasing the signs of not getting along." Attention to the affective impact of conflict proves especially important in terms of figuring out how to encourage dissent within communities.

These sticking points represent not only the persistence of the problems, but also the inadequacy of attempts to address them. Pointing to the superficiality of attempts at inclusion, Duchess Harris, for example, analyzes how, despite initial optimism, black women's roles in electoral politics have not substantially improved in the face of the election of President Obama; she demonstrates the need for further consideration of the persistence of racism and sexism in the political sphere and raises questions regarding numerical versus substantive representation. In his rethinking of the structure of Batterer Intervention Programs, Daniel Horowitz Garcia highlights the ways in which anti-violence strategies are most effective when they mesh clearly with feminist organizations. His work here focuses on clearly connecting individual and systemic violence, recognizing that shifting analyses of problems requires the continuous re-thinking of the strategies developed to address them.

Through self-reflection, contributors also talk about shifting these sedimentations; brownfemipower acknowledges her participation in the institutionalization of radical women of color feminism in ways that were sapping her energy and contributing to separations between radical activism and home life. Through exploring her daughter's activism within her own community, and reformulating the family structure to raise her daughter, she is able to provide an example of how to "unstick" ourselves and move beyond normative boundaries in order to create new ways of being.

Another point of frustration has to do with the continuous invocation of a narrow historical trajectory that suggests, for instance, that in response to critiques of identity politics, a "new" focus on intersectionality will automatically and necessarily end the sorts of exclusionary practices that prompted these critiques.[1] This move seems to represent a pattern that goes something like this: a new model comes out to address certain problems, and then that very same model is supplanted by something even better, and so on. Not only does this process vitiate earlier work that addresses the very same questions, but within this pattern whatever "new" term is introduced is then seen as the magical answer, or as Jennifer Nash puts it, the "remedy" that can rescue our organizations and save us from the systemic problems of racism, capitalism, and so forth that are endemic to organizing in the United States (see "On Difficulty: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor" in this issue). The language of intersectionality is now commonplace in activist groups, but even those organizations committed to an intersectional politic still sometimes implode over the difficulties of working across differences within the group. Even in the face of these failures, the response is often to call for "more intersectionality," obscuring the problem(s) in the supposed solution and reinforcing cyclical stickiness.

Disrupting the progress narrative that characterizes feminist historicizing, then, can provide an impetus for opening up possibilities. In "this is what it sounds like (an ecological approach)," Alexis Pauline Gumbs addresses the tensions between past, present, and future in ways that neither suggest continual improvement nor reinscribe a romanticized reminiscence. She writes, "Something is happening here that has been happening for too long. Something new is also happening here." This move avoids the twin problems of nostalgia and faith in progress—thinking carefully about differences and similarities without idealizing either the past or the future. For instance, while the language of "waves" has often portrayed contemporary feminist movements as more attuned to race and the complexities of difference, the evolutionary claim itself can reproduce the very exclusions it aims to address by ignoring their persistent presence, while simultaneously downplaying the participation of women of color and the willingness to embrace radical social change that characterized those movements.

We have been thinking about the metaphor of polyphony as one way (but not the ONLY way) to address our many frustrations with feminist activist movements and thinking. Polyphony is a musical term that describes the way multiple melodies can co-exist without dominance. In terms of cultural criticism, polyphony stems from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who uses it to explain how people's ideas represent multiple truths, rather than partial truths that can work together to create a coherent whole.[2] In other words, rather than seeing multiple perspectives as representing various slices in a pie chart that cohere into a complete circle, he shifts the metaphor to recognizing that we need to visualize overlapping and multidimensional pictures of reality.

We first came across the concept of polyphony in a feminist context in the work of Ella Shohat, who uses it in the introduction to the anthology Talking Visions.[3] (Interestingly, Mandy read this book when it was assigned in Julie's class, an element of continuity that was not discovered until the final stages of this project.) Shohat argues, "This volume forges a polyphonic space where many critical voices engage in a dialogue in which no one voice hopefully muffles the other. Talking Visions does not force an artificial consensus; rather, it aims at a dissonant polyphony. Multicultural feminism is not an easy Muzak-like harmony but rather a polyrhythmic staging of a full-throated counterpoint where tensions are left unresolved. It does not offer a unified feminist subjectivity, or a single ideological position, or a canonical repertoire of subversive acts."[4] The ensuing dissonance can, we hope, push up against recurring patterns, precipitating shifts.

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]