Preface

Abstract

Preface Kathryn Moeller and Meg Sweeney “state violence is chronic,” writes Cynthia Wu in discussing institutionalized anti-Blackness and police killings.1 This issue of Feminist Studies brings together a range of essays that explore possibilities for challenging chronic forms of state-sponsored, institutionalized, sexual, intimate, and symbolic violence in a variety of transnational contexts. The first cluster of pieces in this issue responds to the current moment in US regulation of women’s reproduction, focusing on its chronic racialized, classed, and gendered aspects. Heather Latimer draws attention to how the US “slave episteme” — the system of thought that constructed enslaved women and their fetuses as competing commodities — enabled the rise of antiabortion attitudes in the nineteenth century and deeply informed the antiabortion rhetoric of early white feminists. Kenneth Carroll’s poem meditates on a twelve-year-old boy’s dawning awareness of such violence, and particularly a young woman’s unsuccessful and near-fatal abortion attempt. The second cluster of essays in this volume examines gender and sexual formation, foregrounding theoretical possibilities for reconceptualizing dominant gender and sexual subjectivities. Khanum Shaikh and Akanksha Misra both explore contexts in which children learn to comply with and to challenge gender and sexual scripts —Shaikh focuses on how intergenerational domestic spaces in Pakistan serve as sites of gender/sexual pedagogy and resistance, while Misra draws on her work as a middle-school teacher in Turkey and a child-sexual-abuse-prevention trainer in India to underscore the central role that schooling plays. Patricia de Santana Pinho elucidates how global commodity culture also shapes processes of gender and sexual [End Page 335] formation, focusing on beauty products, services, and procedures marketed as “Brazilian” in the United States. The remaining two authors in this cluster of essays —Sally Robinson and Cassius Adair— analyze processes of gender formation that foster toxic masculinity and discipline those who, in Adair’s words, “take strange and unexpected and non-linear paths in pursuit of [them]selves.” Robinson reviews five recent books that explore how specific communities of men and boys understand their masculinity, while Adair considers the affordances and limitations of conceptualizing trans subjectivity as either a chronic or acute condition, proposing that we abandon temporal frameworks. The third and final cluster of essays in this volume engages with questions of violence and gendered embodiment in zones of political conflict: Sonal Khullar analyzes the work of two contemporary women artists who live and work in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and Ambika Satkunanathan provides a gendered analysis of the recent Sri Lankan protests that emerged in March 2022. Zainab Saleh reviews four recent books that explore state disciplining, recuperating, and/or disposing of raced and gendered bodies. The issue opens with a piece titled “Abortion Regulation as the Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Or, a Call to Make Abortion Natural Again,” in which Heather Latimer argues that the US “slave episteme” — defined by Alys Eve Weinbaum as the system of thought that regulated the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women and constructed enslaved women and their fetuses as competing commodities — enabled the rise of antiabortion attitudes in the nineteenth-century United States and continues to racialize reproductive politics today. While abortion was largely considered a natural and ordinary part of reproductive management prior to the nineteenth century, fears about the reproductive autonomy of enslaved women contributed to a denaturalization of abortion and increasing efforts to criminalize it; as Jennifer L. Morgan argues, “to prevent a birth under the regime of hereditary racial slavery” was “to inflict damage on the regime.” Turning to the antiabortion rhetoric of early white feminists, Latimer argues that in the afterlife of slavery, the slave episteme made it possible to argue that “white women’s reproductive capacity was an economic and social resource in need of protecting.” Moreover, the slave episteme yoked women’s reproduction to the reproduction of racial categories, such that early white feminists constructed white women’s duty to reproduce as inextricably intertwined with their duty to reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. Given the central [End Page 336] role that the slave episteme continues to play in racializing and regulating abortion, Latimer suggests that we shift the terms of contemporary debate by moving...