ABSTRACT
In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, universities and colleges across the United States began to unroll plans to shift residential teaching to remote or virtual learning environments. As feminist scholars primarily located in the US academy, we are invested in mapping longer genealogies of crises in the settler-colonial US academy, delineating how racist, imperial, and hierarchical structures that are replicated and reinstated by the academy formulate continuous and ongoing discursive and material violence towards racialized, classed, and gendered minorities. By centering what we refer to as feminist modalities of care tthat center collective, communal, and transnational feminist interventions, this article challenges the imperatives of academic success and survival beyond the logics of emergency and crisis. We explore the interlinked transnational discourses of emergency and crisis, mapping their travels and circulations in local and global academic networks in ways that reproduce systemic inequalities and the politics of value that inform power hierarchies within the academy. Energized by a refusal to normalize crises, this essay is invested in showing how feminist interventions, here explored under three modalities, including research and teaching collaborations and coalitions that take place inside and beyond the academy and against its competitive logics, can challenge the imperatives of academic survival premised on notions of individualistic care, productivity, and worth.
ABSTRACT
In Thailand, the advocacy group Feminist Liberation that emerged alongside the pro-democracy protests in mid-2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic translated Un violador en tu camino, a song composed and performed publicly by Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis and since hailed as a feminist anthem, into Thai as Sita Lui Fai and adapted the original choreography to construct their public discourse around gender-based violence. To answer the overarching question of how transnational feminism was enabled by translation, this paper investigates how the Chilean feminist discourse has changed upon introduction into the target context using Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Thai translation and its choreography. The results show that while both versions similarly highlight the structural cause of gender-based violence, the Chilean lyrics place greater focus on feminist theoretical pedagogy in contrast to the Thai translation's function as an affective vehicle for anger as exemplified by the adoption of a more colloquial term for "patriarchy”, the choice of specific pronouns to challenge Thai seniority culture, and the emotionally charged modifications to the original choreography. With multiple references to the monarchy, the song has been re-signified to reflect the reality of gender oppression specific to Thailand. Translation has thus served as a tool through which transnational feminism has been fostered. Feminist Liberation's collaboration with other advocacy groups additionally indicated their intersectional framework where LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive healthcare, students' rights are inextricably linked to the goal of gender equality. © 2023, Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The special issue "Feminist Publishing Against the Pandemic” features essays from thirteen contributors whose work would have been presented at "FiMA2: Feminist Revolutions,” the second conference of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association (FiMA), originally scheduled for Spring 2020, rescheduled, and eventually canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. By soliciting snapshot essays of no more than 2000 words, the editors of the issue are able to showcase a wide range of feminist modernist scholarship in danger of being lost due to the constraints of the pandemic and a profession in crisis. Authors included in the special issue engage with modern women writers, artists, and culture-makers who navigated their own constraints such as fighting for suffrage, managing domestic and professional commitments, responding to two world wars, and continuing feminist work in the post-war years. This collection of essays highlights vibrancy and complexity in the field of feminist modernist scholarship. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
This essay examines the digital feminist strategies of the Russian political performance group Pussy Riot. At the same time that I argue that the risks the group takes in creating a digital transnational feminism on YouTube are interesting for how they open up translocal critiques of authoritarianism, I ask a broader question regarding the criteria by which international feminist scholarship evaluates its objects of analysis. I avoid relying on holistic judgements of success or failure, and instead focus on Pussy Riot's legitimate and tangible feminist engagement with police brutality and border regimes between the United States and Russia.