Introduction to special issue.

Abstract

Feminism today is both recognizable and un-recognizable: its fast-changing pace of renewal, and the geographical and generational scope of its diffusion are transforming feminist practices, discourses and priorities as we knew them. However, much of it also remains familiar to scholars of feminism: not only the claims contemporary feminists are making but also the emotions that fuel feminism and the emotions that feminism ignite are recognizable to us. The anger, the joy, the fierceness, the wonder and the hope, but also the defiance, bitterness and anger among feminists are all emotions that have shaped and continue to shape feminist attachments (Ahmed, 2014). This special issue proposes to focus on emotions as a productive site to observe, analyse and interrogate feminism, its potentialities and its transformations. By which emotions is feminist activism sustained, inhibited or transformed? The various contributions to this special issue all investigate and reflect on the nature and the role of emotions in feminist activism. What are feminist emotions? How do they contribute to coalition building, intersectional practices or feminists’ political imagination? Conversely, how do they prevent coalition or intersectional work, reproduce and secure asymmetrical power relations among feminists? Emotions have been a central site of investigation and conceptualization for feminist theory. Feminist philosophy and epistemology have reclaimed emotions as proper grounds for producing knowledge (Code, 1993; Jaggar, 1989). Feminist theorists have engaged thoroughly with emotions, contributing centrally to the affective turn in social science (Ahmed, 2010, 2014; Davis, 2015; Ngai, 2005; Pedwell and Whitehead, 2012), and emphasizing the role of emotion in the practice of theorization. Emotions such as rage (Ahmed, 2014) and passion (Braidotti, 1991) have been identified as stimulating and sustaining feminist theorization. Feminist theorizations of emotions are also productive sites of inquiry into how emotions shape feminist engagement and imagination (Hesford, 2009). As such, feminist scholars have investigated emotions as a way to renew the conceptualization of the subject of feminism as embodied, located and relational (Liljeström, 2016). They have also questioned how emotions may elicit feminist solidarity (Hemmings, 2012; Luna, 2010) and question the dangers emotions are fraught