Introduction: Protest

Abstract

Introduction:Protest Elena L. Cohen (bio), Melissa M. Forbis (bio), and Deepti Misri (bio) Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? —Lee Maracle, Ravensong One way of telling the story of feminism is to tell it as a story of protest: protest against, protest for, protest within. Indeed, in the West, the current moment is often hailed as "the age of protest," one in which the recent women's marches and the #MeToo movement, originating in the United States but soon spreading globally, were seen as a culmination of efforts to fulfill feminism's liberatory potential. Such declarations, however, depend on a very particular notion of what counts as protest, and indeed feminist protest, which often reifies the Global North as an originary site or disregards the feminist relevance of movements that do not explicitly foreground gender or women as their primary agenda. For this special issue, we asked contributors to consider how popular "age of protest" narratives risk obscuring other key moments and sites of long-standing protest, particularly when led by racialized or otherwise minoritized populations. There is no denying that protest has been revitalized by mass participation on a larger scope than has been seen in the almost two decades since massive protests spawned global networks that came to be known as the alter-globalization movement (Davis 2016; Desai 2013). Such protests have been diverse in issues and tactics: from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the ceaseless anti-occupation protests in Kashmir and Palestine, the Black Lives Matter movement, Idle No More, the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States and Canada, and student-led movements such as Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa—to [End Page 14] name only a select few. Although feminists have been active in every one of the abovementioned protests, only mass protests that explicitly foreground gendered vulnerabilities—such as the anti-rape protests in India and the #NiUnaMas and anti-feminicide movements in Latin America, or even the women's marches in the United States—tend to be characterized as "feminist protest." However, the anti-racist, anti-colonial, and environmental movements mentioned above have all thrown up key questions for feminism, just as feminism has raised questions for these movements. Additionally, prevalent "age of protest" narratives almost exclusively revolve around the protest march on the streets as a key visual element, often overshadowing other temporalities, sites, and modes of protest. However, the protest march is usually only the most visible moment in an ongoing history of struggle fought on the ground through a much larger repertoire of tactics often comprising much less visible acts of individual and organized resistance. Beyond the streets, the digital domain has been a lively site of protest and organizing, particularly in zones where the presence of protesting bodies on the streets may be met with deadly violence. We must also be aware of those resisters whose bodies cannot be at the protest march for multiple reasons, not limited to precarious labor, citizenship status, the prison-industrial complex, and disability (Block et al. 2016; Hedva 2016). We therefore invited our contributors to think broadly and critically about the relationship between feminism and protest as one that emerges on and beyond the time and space of "the streets," and within and outside the sphere of protests that center questions of gender and sexuality. As we assembled this issue, we were also acutely aware that many rich histories of protest by working-class and poor women, immigrant women, women of color, trans women, and nonbinary subjects, as well as anticolonial, Indigenous, and transnational feminists, still remain obscured. While these histories of protest are deserving of scholarly attention, our aim in this special issue was not to simply expand available analyses of protests from a representative range of movements and sites but rather to step back and first ask: What counts as protest, and indeed as feminist protest? How might expanding the definition of protest beyond notions of agency that center masculine and ableist "action" in the public sphere expand horizons for creating social change? How can we think broadly and critically about the relationship between feminism and protest...