Editors’ Note

Abstract

Editors’ Note Darius Bost, Wanda S. Pillow, and Kimberly M. Jew This issue—consisting of general essays and a special section on “Pandemic Time”—addresses in various ways the politics of knowledge production. From former President Trump’s promotion of “alternative facts” that continue to pose a threat to US democracy to the post-pandemic “misinformation” that has impacted health outcomes, the politics of knowledge production and distortion has become a pressing political matter. Feminist scholars have made significant contributions to the politics of knowledge production in times of crisis, and this issue continues this important work. Angela Towne’s essay, “A Feminist Sexology Perspective on the Multifunctional Clitoris: Dispelling the Sole Purpose Myth,” demonstrates how progressive efforts to celebrate the clitoris’s functional role in sexual pleasure have inadvertently foreclosed its multifunctionality. Meg Perret’s “‘Transgender Frogs Turn Your Son Gay’: Endangered Amphibians, Estrogenic Pollution, and Male Extinction” tracks the scientific rhetoric and attendant moral panic regarding the effects of the herbicide Atrazine on the gender and sex of frogs. While inflammatory rhetoric claiming that the drug “feminizes” frogs may at first appear to reify binary notions of gender and sex, Perret demonstrates how it might also affirm gender and sexual diversity. In “Gender and Race in John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women,” Aurélie Knüfer revisits this canonical philosophical text to argue that Mill uses the comparison of enslaved women and English married women not to draw connections between the causes of racism and sexism, but to dissociate them. Alison Kibler recovers three television shows in the mid-1970s that engage Black feminist issues. Kibler argues that recovering and analyzing these shows broadens our understanding of feminist television activism by privileging Black women’s perspectives. The special section, “Pandemic Time,” continues the issue’s emphasis on the politics of knowledge production by engaging the question, how has the [End Page ix] coronavirus pandemic altered our perceptions of time? The scholars and artists included in this special section draw from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black diasporic, Latinx, and other epistemologies to challenge universalist conceptions of time. While they acknowledge that the coronavirus pandemic occasioned a monumental shift in how time is experienced, they foreground alternative ways of knowing that might enrich our understanding of what it means to live in pandemic time. In so doing, they expose the forms of marginalization and violence that have occurred through normative logics of time. “Pandemic Time” begins with a critical introduction by Darius Bost, who invited the contributors to participate in this special section. The introduction is followed by the roundtable, “When We’re Coming From: What Would an HIV Doula Do? On Pandemic Time(s).” The What Would an HIV Doula Do? Collective is a group of activists, scholars, and artists who are committed to responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. Approaching HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 from a range of perspectives, the eight members of the collective included here place the categories “pandemic” and “time” in productive tension and provide novel ways to approach the question of how the pandemic has altered our senses of time. We learn from this collective how pandemics move in and out of time; that time is bent, flickering, syndemic. Because global health crises overlap with capitalism’s crises, time-is-money. Though we may be in pandemic time for the long haul, they illustrate how marginalized communities possess historical knowledge of crises through which we might survive and thrive in pandemic time—what one collective member calls palimpsesting. The roundtable is followed by the Somali-Canadian artist Abdi Osman’s series of drawings, Modern Primitive. Osman’s series of color drawings extend the public health practice of social distancing to consider the broader social divisions that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Osman’s character studies prompt us to reflect on what it means to live together when existing social hierarchies and the discourse that maintain them have forced us apart. The following essays ask, how we come to know what it means to live in pandemic time, and how we convey that knowledge. Will Mosley’s “On the Lateness of Pandemic Time” deploys the Black queer vernacular term “late” as...