Feminist Commemoration

Abstract

Feminist Commemoration Jennifer C. Nash (bio) It is the time of anniversaries. WSQ celebrates its fiftieth anniversary at the same time that Signs and Feminist Studies—two other landmark journals in the field of gender and sexuality studies—prepare their anniversary issues. Academic feminism has moved to a period of commemoration, retrospection, and celebration. Feminist commemoration is often fraught, filled with celebrations of and anxieties about all that the institutionalization of academic feminism has achieved. If the stories we tell—to channel Clare Hemmings—often center on our field’s precarity, the existence and durability of a slew of feminist journals, including WSQ, is evidence of the labor of generations of feminist scholars. Those scholars worked to ensure that the precarity that marked earlier feminist publishing projects (see Kitchen Table Press’s history, for example) was replaced by the capacity of feminist publications to endure, to live on. And yet, a celebration of all that we have accomplished always requires reckoning with the uneasy relationship academic feminism has to the professional and the institutional. These commemorations require that we reckon with how an “outsider” intellectual project has become, squarely, part of the academy, with its own genre conventions, conferences, journals, and forms of academic disciplining. To be clear, I lament none of this; instead, I name it to dispense with the romance that academic feminism is an outsider field. My own interest in feminist commemoration always swirls around how we anxiously mark the power we have accrued (including fifty years of WSQ) and the power that we have desired, including our desires for (at least) fifty more years of WSQ, even as we recognize that moments of commemoration and of looking back also include the sense that we do not know what the future will hold, what form(s) this—or any—feminist journal will take [End Page 22] in the future. It is the fact that the future remains open that I think makes commemoration rich, exciting, edgy. As we remember, celebrate, champion, and mark the desire for a future, it is important—to me, at least—to name and recognize that as a Black feminist, commemoration always requires bringing our dead with us: naming, remembering, marking, and celebrating the names and contributions of the scholars whose intellectual labor made possible the spaces that we stand and write in. We “take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names,” as José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 74) reminded us, with a sense of the radical potential of mourning and celebration. We “take our dead with us” to remind ourselves that the space that we write in was forged with labor and love, in struggle, by myriad scholars, activists, thinkers, and writers who wanted one thing: for the work to continue. Here we are: writing, thinking, theorizing, dreaming. Jennifer C. Nash Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography; Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality; and Birthing Black Mothers, all published by Duke University Press. She has published articles in journals, including Signs, Social Text, Meridians, Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, and GLQ. She can be reached at jennifer.nash@duke.edu. Works Cited Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 Jennifer C. Nash