Editors’ Note

Abstract

Editors’ Note Cindi Katz and Nancy K. Miller “One becomes a witness to one’s own experience by finding a testimonial form; in other words, a language and a listener.” In her analysis of Judith Herman’s groundbreaking study Trauma and Recovery, the feminist classic we honor in this issue of WSQ, autobiography theorist Leigh Gilmore underlines the survivor’s vital need to identify and address an interlocutor capable of receiving her story. This need becomes particularly acute when the traumatic events belong to the domain of women’s lives, to violations like rape (to this day not everywhere recognized as a crime to be prosecuted by law), as well as the brutal scenes of domestic violence. History changes when women break the silence and bear public witness to the trauma so often marked by gender. This impulse is at the heart of Kara Walker’s stunning reappropriation of racialized and gender stereotypes. In her film Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (which was on display at the Whitney Museum, New York City, October 11, 2007–February 3, 2008) the artist, playing the role of puppeteer, brings the black woman’s erased words into the world. Through Walker’s creative practice, testimony acts as an agent for social change. In their Introduction to Witness, our guest editors Kathy Abrams and Irene Kacandes have highlighted the importance of bearing witness as a key challenge to interdisciplinary feminist scholarship in the twenty-first century. Throughout the pages of the journal in which they, a law professor and a literary critic, combine their impassioned knowledge and expertise, the intense focus on matters of “women’s witnessing” and “the configuring of gendered narratives of witness” guides the complex organization of the issue. At the same time, the editors ask a key question to which there is no simple response: “If we, as feminists, aim to create a space for women’s witnessing,” to put forward “a broader political project . . . what kinds of witness do we want to enable, and how might we propose to do it?” The complexity of their answer as editors lies in part in the unexpected juxtapositions produced by the diversity of the contributions chosen for the issue. In bringing together, for example, Mamie [End Page 10] Till’s decision to show the world the horror of the harm to her son from the violence of 1950s racism, with Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik’s chilling exposure of U.S. governmental complicity in contemporary practices of torture where victims often are denied the right to bear witness, and essays on the recent creation of women’s graphic narratives as a subversive political form, Abrams and Kacandes have demonstrated the always intersecting domains of the everyday and the extreme, the domestic and the national, the global and the intimate, the historic and the contemporary in matters of trauma and witnessing. The editors have gathered an extraordinary collection of materials that demonstrate not only the power of witnessing, but the ways it calls forth and insists upon women’s subjectivity and selfhood. With Witness the two of us leave our tenure as coeditors of WSQ. We leave this position with a certain degree of sadness, but also with the knowledge that the work we’ve done since the fall of 2004 when we began to grapple with the reconfiguration of Women’s Studies Quarterly has become secure enough to pass on. We are delighted to announce here that the successful transformation of the journal has been recognized by a prize from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). WSQ has received the 2007 Phoenix Award for Editorial Achievement, which is announced at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). This has been a collaborative effort between the two of us and the staff at The Feminist Press, notably the Executive Director, Gloria Jacobs, the Managing Editor, Anjoli Roy, and The Feminist Press designer, Lisa Force. The transformation of the journal also testifies to its long feminist history, and the early vision of its founding editor Florence Howe. During our tenure as general coeditors, we have been extraordinarily fortunate in having Kamy Wicoff as our fiction/nonfiction...