Preface

Abstract

preface This issue of Feminist Studies presents an array of articles exploring political, economic, legal, and discursive forces in very different soci eties and times. The range of forces examined include neoliberalism in contemporary Brazil and in post-Soviet Cuba, laws regulating wom en's speech in early twentieth-century Ireland, classical liberal West ern influences on Egyptian street literature, and institutional narratives about women's aggression in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. Woven throughout are people's innova tive responses to forces that appear beyond their immediate control: from the highly politicized Brazilian feminist attempts to construct coalitions across widening class divides, to Cuban discourses of nos talgia as a means to reassert dearly held moral values, to Irish wom en's use of "uncharitable" speech to assert themselves in the context of family and community conflict, to Martha Rosler's striking vision of art in the interstices of everyday life. Our featured fiction and poetry grapple with problems related to racism, destructive relationships, and deteriorating health. This issue's book review essay on posthuman ism and race challenges us to rethink agency by incorporating non human matter and animals, while also remaining vigilant against colonial conceptual frameworks. Questions of religion, nation, and the regulation of women's comportment figure prominently in Marilyn Booth's article, "Islamic Politics, Street Literature, and John Stuart Mill: Composing Gendered Ideals in 1990s Egypt." Booth identifies how the ideas of nineteenth century philosopher John Stuart Mill lurk in surprising ways within street literature and conduct manuals circulating in Cairo in the late 591 592 Preface twentieth century. She places an Arabic translation of John Stuart Mill's 1869 The Subjection of Women (found for sale in a Cairo street in the 1990s) in conversation with edicts for women's comportment in pop ular street novels Wajhunbila tnakiyaj (A face without makeup) by Muna Yunus and Ibrahim Mahmud's 'Awdatfatat (Return of a young woman). Booth suggests that in "subterranean fashion, such works are in dia logue with the ways that Western liberal thought, for better or for worse, has shaped patterns of thinking, behavior, and consumption across the globe." Cara Delay's article, '"Uncharitable Tongues': Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland," also considers state regulation of women's comportment. Delay uncovers the history of prosecution of "unruly" women who used gossip, scolding, yell ing, and other forms of "uncharitable speech" against neighbors and family in order to make an impact on their lives and on the nation. Their transgressions were swiftly met with state juridical response. As Delay argues, women's acts "blurred the prescribed lines between public and private, frustrating the efforts of religious and secular authorities to contain women within the domestic sphere." As the new Irish nation sought to present an image to the world of the ideal ized Catholic woman, the press and courts attempted to make an argu ment that "female outspokenness was often a more serious offense than male violence." In her review essay, "Animal: New Directions in the Theoriza tion of Race and Posthumanism," Zakiyyah Iman Jackson offers a fresh perspective on the contingencies of the modernist subject by taking us inside the debates in posthumanist animal studies. Since the 1990s, this field has reconceived human agency as "a network of relations between humans and nonhumans, replacing the figure of sovereignty with the process of enmeshment such that intentionality is de-ontologized." Jackson points out, however, that posthumanist schol ars have often claimed a "seamless, patrilineal link" to poststructur alist challenges to Enlightenment rationality, in this way bypassing parallel critiques by theorists of race and colonialism. She challenges the burgeoning field of animal studies to take "the politics of race as its point of departure," finding important contributions by each of the authors she reviews—Seshadri's insights on the problematic binary between speech and silence; Lundblad's insistence on the link Prejace 593 between a racialized conceptions of human animality and discourses around homosexuality; and Chen's centering of the subjectivities of queer, trans, and/or disabled people of color in posthumanist discus sions of biopolitics. Martha Rosler's artistic career consistently interrogates the uneasy realities of women...