Preface

Abstract

Preface Judith Gardiner and Matt Richardson this year, 2022, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Feminist Studies. In the spirit of retrospection and celebration, our first issue of the year commemorates the fortieth birthdays of two anthologies that heralded major innovations in feminist theory: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone Press, 1981; Kitchen Table Press, 1983) and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (The Feminist Press, 1982). The writing in this issue reflects the deeply personal impact that these books have had on scholars' intellectual, political, and emotional development since the time of their publication. Several of these essays articulate and historicize concepts from these anthologies that have since become influential in gender studies, later termed "intersectionality," "women of color, and "queer theory." Other essays contribute new approaches to feminist theory developed in the last forty years. In addition to scholarly articles, this special issue includes two art features as well as a cluster of creative prose and poetry reflecting on This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. As a whole, this issue of Feminist Studies explores and expands the categories developed in those original two anthologies. The categories "women of color" and "queer" may seem disparate. However, it is precisely women of color feminisms that centered the voices of lesbian activists, writers, and scholars who insisted on acknowledging [End Page 7] the various parts of their identities, thereby paving the way for anti-essentialist understandings of gender, race, and sexuality. The category "women of color" realigned thinking about gender, ethnic heritage, and "race." It was preceded by the category of "people of color," which aimed to unite all persons who had been targeted by white supremacy through a common and liberatory political alignment. The category of "queer theory" reoriented thinking about both sexuality and gender. These categories, which are anti-essentialist, question supposed boundaries between nature and nurture, between the biological and the cultural. These categories were understood in differing, sometimes overlapping dimensions. Both "women of color" and "queer" assumed and realigned older majoritarian categories that once seemed self-evident although they were not. That is, new categories regarding race and ethnicity assumed a stable background of "white" dominance, at least in the United States, although the boundaries of whiteness, as well as of other racialized categories, continue to be contested. New categories defining gender identity and sexual orientation, which were also apparently self-evident though still under scrutiny, were shown to be unstable and continually contested so that categories like "woman" and "women" no longer seemed self-evident. The essays in this issue illuminate how the concepts "women of color" and "queer" opened up new approaches to theory at the same time that they introduced new exclusions and new opportunities for action and coalition. Samantha Pinto and Jennifer C. Nash envision the potential of This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave as a corrective to the limited scripts that have emerged in feminist theorizing. In their article, "Then and Now: Women of Color Originalism and the Anthological Impulse in Women's and Gender Studies," they show how these two pioneering anthologies continue to circulate alongside "women of color," a term that these texts helped produce as "legible and coherent," yet one that still remains undertheorized. Treating the anthologies as performances of "bridging," Pinto and Nash describe their visions of struggle for an autonomous institutional space for Black women's studies. They claim that "intersectionality has become the institutional cure for women's studies and the intellectual property of Black feminism." They argue that these anthologies self-consciously call attention "to how the field has created, crafted, and performed difference in the women's studies classroom" in order to situate the category "women of color" within this interdiscipline. [End Page 8] In a complementary essay that describes "Revisiting This Bridge Called My Back" decades after its original appearance, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa describes the impact the book had upon her as an undergraduate, leading her to insist that we must not settle...