Preface

Abstract

preface This issue of Feminist Studies is particularly exciting for anyone with an interest in the ways that gender and the body are deployed within neoliberalism to bolster the state and market. The precarity of the body, the commodification of gender, race, and class, and the reengineering of masculinity are thematic engagements that inform many of the pieces in this issue. Charlie Y. Zhang presents hypermasculinity as an attendant feature of China’s transition to a state market economy, and Elizabeth Schewe explores the vulnerability and dispensability of trans masculinity within neoliberal filmic frames. Catherine Rottenberg reflects on how popular feminism in our time has shifted from advancing freedoms to a highly individuated ideal of achieving personal balance. Michelle Meagher analyzes the work of three artists who playfully question representations of aging female bodies, while Elspeth H. Brown probes the affective labor that was key to the world of “brownskin” models in high fashion in the 1920s. The poets Mariana Sierra and Heather Hollinger ruminate on the themes of commodification and terrorizing of bodies. Our issue commemorates the legacy of Audre Lorde this spring, on the eightieth anniversary of her birth, with contributions by Lyndon K. Gill, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Dagmar Schultz, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who, in their respective arenas as cultural workers, filmmakers, activists, and academics, illuminate the richness of Lorde’s words—which indeed both heal and serve as a clarion call to action in neoliberal times. In the lead-up to the recently concluded winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia’s anti-gay legislation drew widespread criticism internationally 8 Preface from both governments and civil society. The celebration of the Olympics as a gladiatorial spectacle among nations, Russia’s disavowal of queerness, and Putin’s own well-documented embodied performance of nationalist hypermasculinity are a highly relevant context in which to read Charlie Y. Zhang’s essay on the contemporary meanings of Olympic hurdler Liu Xiang’s performance of masculinity. Zhang’s “Deconstructing the National and Transnational Hypermasculine Hegemony in Neoliberal China” carefully tracks the Chinese media’s treatment of Liu as brash, entertaining, and virile, in contrast to gender performances that foreground more stereotypically traditional Chinese traits—“humility” and a “reserved personality.” Zhang provides an overview of how the category of gender (within all forms of state narration) has historically— from Maoism to neoliberalism—been imbricated in renderings of Chinese state identity, drawing attention to gender as a shifting formation with a differential value within the marketplace of identity. The piece points to the conjuncture between China’s transition to a market economy and a reconstitution of masculinity that draws on terms that are more readily understood as Western representations of hegemonic masculinity . Zhang shows that, when taken up by the logic of the market, sport and sporting bodies do not stay within the confines of formal market activity but move, rather, into disciplining modes of governmentality where bodies learn their rightful shape and place in relation to the generation of profit and state identity. The malleability of the body is also a broad theme in Elizabeth Schewe’s “Highway and Home: Mapping Feminist-Transgender Coalition in Boys Don’t Cry.” Even though the film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) has been frequently taught, cited, and analyzed, Schewe offers a fresh angle with which to engage it: she examines the filmmaker Kimberley Pierce’s decision to tell Brandon’s story through the interpretive lens of a home/migration narrative. Noting the masculinized and racialized character of road tripnarratives,SchewepointstothewaysinwhichBrandon’spersonhood and broader queer possibilities are constrained and enabled by Pierce’s narrative choices. Schewe opens up these limitations through a carefully applied intersectional analysis that blurs the dichotomy of home and highway, and points to the inherent danger that resides in both these locations for transgender subjects. This intersectional engagement further points to the erasures of blackness within a narrative form that has been racialized as white, and it highlights the contradictory formations Preface 9 of white masculinity and the tensions that exist within hegemonic masculinity and homoerotic desire. Schewe’s intersectional analysis highlights a number of the film’s successes: the film’s ability to render Brandon with a complex personhood; its sustained resistance to...