Editorial Introduction: Toward Care, Healing, and Justice

Abstract

Editorial Introduction:Toward Care, Healing, and Justice Patti Duncan As we near the end of 2022, I'm delighted to introduce this latest issue of Feminist Formations. A special highlight of this issue is a Dossier featuring writings about Hil Malatino's influential text, Trans Care, curated by Jack Jen Gieseking and David A. Rubin. This exciting body of work features essays by Jules Gill-Peterson, Andrea J. Pitts, Jack Jen Gieseking, Rox Samer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, David A. Rubin, Davy Knittle, and Elliott Fukui and Christoph Hanssmann. In their introduction to the Dossier, Gieseking and Rubin describe Trans Care as a central text in the emerging field of trans studies, describing the way the book engages trans care webs, and the writers of the dossier essays respond to the text expressing their own forms of trans care. About the pieces in the dossier, Gieseking and Rubin write: "Each reading offers manifold insights for trans scholarship, trans teaching, trans collegiality, and even everyday trans lives. We structure the dossier to begin from our own geography: the academy. Then we wander across positions and disciplinary boundaries, fuzzy and otherwise, which Malatino perspicuously deems a form of 'sprawl' in his reply . . . [until we] finally arrive where so many us inevitably wind up for our survival: community-engaged activism." This movement and relation between the academy and community-engaged activism animates the dossier in important ways that help bring the ideas of trans care to life, and illuminate the many generative possibilities of theorizing and practicing trans care. Preceding the Dossier are five articles highlighting feminist themes including contemporary attacks on feminist and anti-racist research in higher education, decolonial practices in art and literature, responses to collective grief and trauma, and the gendered effects of the US-NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. We begin with Liz Montegary's "Anti-Gender, Anti-University: 'Gender Ideology' and the Future of US Higher Education," in which Montegary critically examines the figure of Robert Oscar Lopez, a conservative "pro-family" former professor at a California public university. Through an analysis of the ways far right discourses such as those disseminated by Lopez increasingly attack feminist, queer, and anti-racist knowledge production in higher education, Montegary is attentive to both the "form and function" of conservative hostility toward the US academy. "To fully apprehend contemporary rightwing hostility toward the [End Page vii] academy," she writes, "we need to situate attacks on gender/sexuality and race/ ethnic studies with respect to the broader offensive on university-based research, particularly around migration, climate science, vaccinations, stem cells, and evolutionary theory." Needless to say, Montegary's article offers a timely response to current attacks on justice-based knowledge production, reminding us that such assaults—occurring in more and more places around the world—are both systemic and interconnected. Then, in "Earth Bodies as Re-Existence: Ana Mendieta's Siluetas Beyond the Limits of Ecofeminism," Jessica E. Jones considers Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta's relationship to ecofeminism through an analysis of her self-portraits in her 1973–1980 series, Siluetas. In the series Mendieta explored nonwestern cosmologies, centering Indigenous and African figures in her work. Jones draws on decolonial and postcolonial theories as well as critical race feminisms to give what she refers to as ontological weight to Mendieta's divergence from and interventions into white, mainstream feminisms. Relying on Adolfo Albán Achinte's notion of "re-existence," a concept underscoring the ways art can function as "a re-humanizing practice for the colonized," Jones reads Mendieta as "enacting an aesthetics of re-existence, working to decolonize her own being through art by 're-member[ing]' the negated—female, Black, Indigenous, and earthly—dimensions of her existence in the Americas through her Siluetas." In "Communicating Felt Knowledge to Decolonize #MeToo: A Native Feminist Approach to the Sherman Alexie Allegations," Cortney Smith intervenes into dominant narratives of the #MeToo movement by delving into the sexual harassment allegations leveled against Sherman Alexie through a close textual reading of two essays by Indigenous feminist authors. Through an analysis of Deborah A. Miranda's "Inmate #A-93223: In the San Quentin of My Mind" and Tracy Rector's "Best of 2018: Female Native Authors...