Celebrating feminist responses to populist politics

Abstract

When I began teaching feminist and sexuality studies in Germany many years ago, I needed to learn about the variety of feminist movements that in no way resembled the second-wave in US America, in which I had been acculturated. Part of this learning consisted in recognising that the wave metaphor, used so typically to characterise the history of feminist movements in the UK and the US, fits the history of other feminist movements only poorly. This is true for Germany, before and after reunification in 1989, for the Northern European countries, and for those geopolitical contexts about whose feminisms I knew far less. This includes South European and post-Yugoslavian articulations of feminisms, such as those in Croatia and elsewhere. My personal education of engaging with feminisms different from ones in my country of origin may mirror the reader’s experience of this issue. The voices assembled in this issue speak primarily from the perspective of South Europe. These voices articulate themselves at a particular moment of time – when minoritized communities are feeling the conjoined forces of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a surge of anti-feminist and anti-queer and anti-trans initiatives within Europe and beyond, and while the Mediterranean remains a grave for migrant persons. “Feminist responses to populist politics” invites Anglophone readers to enter into forms of feminist resistance taking place in Mediterranean countries, as activists react to the pandemic and a variety of nationalist and ethno-nationalist initiatives that have chosen feminists and queer and trans persons as their preferred enemies. The essays gathered here reflect on feminist-activist work in Catalunya, in Spain, in Italy, and in Croatia, and the dissemination of feminist topoi beyond these geopolitical areas. The authors are activists, and the guest editors and the contributors dispel with some common misrepresentations of feminists today. One concerns feminism’s supposed exclusions of intersectional and anti-racist viewpoints, and of trans women and non-binary persons. Each of the essays that appears in this issue speaks for inclusive intersectional feminisms. One champions a form of “resilient feminism”, meant here not in the sense of a neo-liberal Lean-In brand of feminism that insists that individual women just need to try harder. Rather, resilient feminism is understood as an adaptive response to new iterations of neo-liberal power in disruption. In their composition, with one more mature and two younger feminist scholars, the guest editors unite in countering a second negative narrative that feminists are divided generationally. EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 2021, VOL. 25, NO. 2, 111–112 https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2021.1953065