Promiscuous feminisms for troubling times

Abstract

Looking across the six articles in this issue, this paper argues that promiscuous uses of feminist methodologies offer a unique constellation of conceptual, pragmatic, material, and ethical strategies with which to understand and engage some of the social and cultural tensions that are occurring within and outside schools. It presents a promiscuous etymology of the word “promiscuous” in which a varied set of definitions provide a backdrop against which to study the project of these six scholars. Seven areas are developed with which to cluster the main themes of the articles including: (1) post-critical, (2) feminisms becoming, (3) productive unease, (4) not bound by gender, but always grounded in gender, (5) always already historical, (6) bodies that still matter, and (7) post-representational. These clusters illustrate how the authors are always becoming, sometimes intentionally and sometimes serendipitously, scholars and women who are willing to reconsider, reposition, reclaim, and rewrite a past, present, and future method, angle perspective, or identity.