Editorial Introduction

Abstract

Editorial Introduction Patti Duncan I began drafting this introduction while sheltering in place in Oregon early in the COVID-19 pandemic, writing in small moments of time between zoom meetings, remote teaching, and helping my child adjust to distance learning. I returned to it following the racist police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and others, amidst mass protests across the nation and around the world, and feelings of deep, collective grief. I finally finish it during a transnational uprising against racist state violence and white supremacy, while we continue to live with deep uncertainty, precarity, and trauma. Writing this brief introduction has taken me much longer than usual because it's difficult to focus. I don't know what the future holds for my community, my family, my students, or my university. I write as someone with an auto-immune syndrome that places me in a high-risk category in a moment when campuses are announcing that they will reopen in the fall. I write as a non-Black woman of color committed to the Black Lives Matter movement. I write from my home in the Clackamas area of Oregon, on the land of the Clackamas people who traditionally lived along the Clackamas River until being forcibly removed. I don't know how we will all weather this storm, and what our collective losses will ultimately be. I write this while still grieving my mother's passing, a few months before we all became aware of COVID-19, from a rare form of cancer that was diagnosed just months before her death. Like many of you, during these months I've been learning new things about grief, getting familiar with loss, and pausing to try to gather my stories and my loved ones close. But still, there is so much work to do. The authors in this issue of Feminist Formations highlight this point, offering questions, frameworks, and theories that provide meaning during these difficult times. Through their critiques of settler colonial and carceral logics, arguments about racism, white supremacy, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, and discussions of the connections among gender, sexuality, race, and disability, these writers move us forward in important new directions. Their articles are timely and urgent. They offer theoretical frameworks and analyses that help us make sense of the world right now. In this moment when we are learning that nothing in our world will ever be the same, I share them with the hopes that they offer you some meaning, comfort, and hope. [End Page vii] We begin this issue with "Black Feminist Thought and the Gender, Women's, and Feminist Studies PhD: A Roundtable Discussion," by Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, Moya Bailey, Karen Flynn, Bettina Judd, Ayana K. Weekley, Jennifer Musial, and Melissa Autumn White. This piece is based on a roundtable discussion that took place at the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in 2017. In the discussion, participants reflect on their work as Black feminist scholars in Gender, Women's, and Feminist Studies (GWFS) programs and departments, their experiences earning the PhD in this discipline, and their hopes for the future of GWFS. Their collaboration "serves as part wake-up call, part warning, and part 'truth telling' about the realities of being a Black woman intellectual navigating GWFS PhD training and post-PhD faculty life." Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, Bailey, Flynn, Judd, and Weekley describe both interpersonal and structural forms of violence that they have encountered in the academy. They theorize how the logics of slavery continue to shape institutional spaces, contexts, and structures. And in describing and analyzing painful experiences of anti-Black racism, microaggressions, exclusionary practices, and feelings of "push out," the authors also offer their collaboration as a call to action, pointing to "the importance of making Black Feminist Thought more explicitly central to the very possibility of the field of GWFS." Building on the work of other Black feminist intellectuals, they ask, "How do/can Black women survive the GWFS PhD?" In "Amplifying Our Voices: Feminist Scholars Writing for the Public," Carrie N. Baker, Aviva Dove-Viebahn, Michele Tracy Berger, Carmen Rios, and Karon Jolna describe their work writing for Ms. Magazine, and argue...