{"title":"The Revolt's Illegitimate Body?","authors":"Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10747802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10747802","url":null,"abstract":"The 2019 revolt in Chile touched and exposed the mythical violence involved in the establishment and preservation of political-legal orders (Benjamin). The demand for the New Constitution and the (ineffective?) process of its elaboration could have been key moments of that exposition, but never its final destination, nor the legal body in which the revolt could have been hosted and translated. It was not the demands of the revolt that put the established legal-political order in check, but the constitution without Constitution of a collective and vital political power (potencia) that, once and again, resisted being subjected by force—by the force of instituted law—to the legal-political pact within whose framework it was supposedly irrevocably destined to move, be recognized, and raise its demands.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87919341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Everybody's Maybes: Reproducing Feminism's Bad Objects","authors":"J. Nash, Samantha Pinto","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10643945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10643945","url":null,"abstract":"In this introduction, we reconsider how we can tell the stories of Black feminist thought and institutional feminist study through uncertainty and incommensurability rather than clear reproducibility of good and bad objects. We then consider the speculative place of reproductive history, metaphor, and technology vis-à-vis intersectionality as a foundational object of worry for and in feminist thought. Taking seriously the sustained focus on white women and white feminism as the quintessential bad objects and actors in the present of US feminism, we engage how the reproductive in Black feminism has been both an occluding and elucidating genre to refract Black women as subjects of a “white” field of feminism and the academy at large. We pay particular attention to the social reproduction of race in analyses of gestation, birth, and motherhood and the opportunities these sites represent for disorienting intersectional analysis rather than shoring up its contours. By challenging feminism's critical attachments to self-evidently ethical objects, this introduction, and this issue, offer a way forward in feminist study that imagines uncertainty as a core method and value of feminist inquiry.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"113 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80729332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lest We Forget Black Patriarchy; or, Why I'm Over Calling Out White Women","authors":"Candice J. Merritt","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10643987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10643987","url":null,"abstract":"This article contends that present-day focus of Black feminist anger at white women obscures the old and ongoing Black feminist struggle to name and diagnose Black patriarchy. In effort to redirect attention to the sexual/gendered intramural struggles within Black social life, this article reads selected texts by the Combahee River Collective, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks from the 1970s–1980s. Doing so illustrates the long tradition of Black feminist writing filled with rage –not at white women—but at Black men and with the expressed objective to eradicate patriarchy. Remembering these Black feminist analytic and activist efforts to challenge black women's sexual oppression reframes Black feminism as a singular project that calls out white women's racism to a broader liberatory one requiring confrontation with male power writ large and, in particular, Black male violence against Black women.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73818316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Flailing at Feminized Labor: SOFFAs, 1990s Trans Care Networks, Stone Butch Blues, and the Devaluation of Social Reproduction","authors":"Aren Z. Aizura","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10644043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10644043","url":null,"abstract":"Around 1998, the term “significant other” or “significant others, friends, family, and allies” started to circulate in English-language trans communities to describe cis people's labor in supporting trans people through transition. One newsletter, Your SOFFA Voice, published letters, essays, and poetry by and for SOFFAs. Your SOFFA Voice could be understood as what Cait McKinney calls information activism, attempts at creating political collectivity through DIY communication and publication methods. While the poems, stories, and manifestos of Your SOFFA Voice were undoubtedly expressions of genuine experience, they also read as expressions of “bad” liberal feminism, preoccupied with the domestic and intimate and obscuring political questions other than personal identity. Historicizing the intimate, domestic themes of this 1990s archive in relation to earlier trans/butch/femme representations of 1960s bar culture and working-class solidarities—particularly in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues—helps contextualize them in relation to multiple historical events: the expansion of feminized administrative and clerical labor markets on one hand; and on the other hand, the withdrawal of the welfare state and the absorption of the radical political imagination into homonormative lesbian and gay rights organizing, and the institutionalization of 1960s-70s feminist, queer, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous campus protest into liberal diversity and inclusion initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s. This analysis helps us ask questions about trans care now: how and why intimate partnerships are made to bear such utopian desires for community building and care while also constituting a crucible for much of the mess, tension, and dysfunction of trans care, and whether understanding trans people as autonomous and self-determining is a viable alternative.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84703719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Free Sex","authors":"H. Berg","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10644001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10644001","url":null,"abstract":"Grounded in sex worker theory, this essay explores paid sex as a confrontation with free sex. Sex worker theorists name an ambivalent relationship to radical feminist thought, finding theoretical affinities in radical feminism's critiques of unpaid heterosexuality while also disidentifying with its whorephobia, whiteness, gender essentialism, and narratives of false conscious. In an invitation for a radical feminism that commits to radical politics, they frame unpaid heterosexuality as a site of exploitation and romance as a bad deal. They articulate a critique of free sex with cis men, but one that is rigorously attentive both to questions of subjectivity and to the inadequacy of gender as a coherent analytic.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83871417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feminism and the Impasse of Whiteness; or, Who's Afraid of Rachel Doležal?","authors":"Robyn Wiegman","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10643973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10643973","url":null,"abstract":"Who can forget Rachel Doležal—the Africana Studies instructor and head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP who was outed in 2015 as “born white to white parents” after years of presenting herself as a light-skinned Black woman. By taking up the controversies that have followed Doležal, this paper considers the multifaceted ways that she constitutes a quintessential bad feminist object, even as her “alibi” (which is more a defense) draws on academic feminism's own anti-essentialist investment in social constructionist theories of race and racial identity. In doing so, I am not interested in condoning or rescuing Doležal from critical condemnation but in exploring the problem of thinking about Rachel Doležal for feminist analysis.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89331354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sisterhood Is X: On Feminist Solidarity Then and Now","authors":"Durba Mitra","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10643959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10643959","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1970s and 1980s, sisterhood became a critical concept in the making of internationalist feminisms built on an infrastructure of women's movements, international organizations, and postcolonial states. Perhaps most famously, radical feminist Robin Morgan declared over three anthologies and three decades that sisterhood is, in the present tense, powerful (1970), global (1984), and forever (2003). It was envisioned differently by women of color and Third World feminists who saw sisterhood as a critical praxis of survival in the face of authoritarianism. Today, the moral invocation of sisterhood as powerful and forever is far less viable. So, is sisterhood all bad for twenty-first-century feminisms? In this essay, I return to bell hooks's formulations of sisterhood as a pedagogy of political solidarity to ask, what kind of solidarity is possible under the rubric of sisterhood and how might we imagine a global feminist politics of solidarity today?","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"161 6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83746986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feminism Is for Beginners: Learning from Straight Men Doing Queer Feminism","authors":"R. Fawaz","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10644057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10644057","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues for the importance of cisgender straight male perspectives to contemporary feminist theory and practice. I identify four lessons to be learned from what I call male affirmative feminist theory written by people of all genders, defined as any feminist thought that considers cis men critical interlocutors to feminism and legitimate subjects of gender and sexual freedom projects. These lessons include the value of androgynous thinking; the necessity of anti-essentialist approaches to male gender; the importance of understanding nonviolent and anti-sexist male perspectives on gender dynamics; and the potential queer investment that cis straight men might have in feminist politics, namely the freedom from heteronormative policing. I offer an intellectual genealogy of cis male contributions to feminist thought, followed by a close reading of Mike Mills's Academy Award–winning film Beginners (2010). The movie presents a visual account of straight male masculinity as it is positively impacted and influenced by feminist and queer perspectives, without necessarily becoming them. The film makes a powerful male feminist argument for the value of “beginning,” asking what feminist and left social justice projects might gain by splitting their gaze between a focus on failed relations across gendered difference—grounded in the seemingly endless betrayal of women and queers by straight cis men—and a productive openness to the inauguration of unexpected relationships between all gendered subjects.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81146136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To Have and to Hoard: Xandra Ibarra's Object Lessons","authors":"Leticia Alvarado","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10644015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10644015","url":null,"abstract":"Thinking with the work of Oakland-based artist Xandra Ibarra, this essay engages the object lessons accessed through analysis of the artist's oeuvre. Dwelling specifically with the objects Ibarra gathers and thinking askance to new materialist approaches when theorizing the social life of objects, Alvarado explores the racial vespers that suffuse objects, their presentation and exchange, as well as our interpretation of relations of exchange. Alongside Ibarra's theorization of “things” as published in her art lexicon guide, this essay additionally considers the elevation of proper feminist and ethnic/racialized objects and subjects in art markets and social justice spaces, their circulation as “things,” and Ibarra's exhaustion in the face of this process. Ultimately this essay takes up Ibarra's own engagement with the proper objects of Latinx art and women of color feminisms and her awareness of herself as a bad object for funding, presentation, and favored kinds of political work.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89292362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Doing Laundry with the TERF","authors":"Emily A. Owens","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10644029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10644029","url":null,"abstract":"TERF, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, is a contemporary configuration that has gained traction in this feminist political moment to encapsulate an imagined set of generational tensions among feminists and queers with respect to gender's essential and/or expansive possibilities. It is also loaded with negative affect. This essay traces the ways that TERF travels in feminist dialogue—often alongside “lesbian”—and argues that loud disavowals of TERFs accumulate into discursive routines that present as anti-anti-trans, but (and) primarily function to preserve a sense of the threatened status of lesbians.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79831866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}