The ‘Europe’ of the European Journal of Women’s Studies: Editorial

Abstract

There is an imaginary of Europe embedded in the European Journal of Women’s Studies that implicitly or explicitly orientates the contours of its scope and terms of engagement. What this means is that there is more to the ‘Europe’ of the EJWS than simply that it is produced from Europe. Rather the ‘Europe’ in the title is an active framing principle for the journal and its authors whether this is consciously known and/or explicitly engaged. In some ways this ‘Europe as active principle’ approach has been there since the journal’s inception, though in a narrower way. Then the ‘Europe’ was a place from which to enter into and/or inflect feminist debates and theoretical developments that were emerging in the USA, as well as an attempt to make a statement against considering the USA as the only or major site of feminist studies and knowledge production. It was in a sense aimed at staging a kind of transatlantic conversation (as Kathy Davis and Mary Evans have called it) in which despite being multi-sited in the sense of coming from an array of national locations in the European landmass and state locations in the USA, the transatlantic still tended to mean USA (and maybe Canada) on one side, and north west to west central Europe on the other side. Now the aim is to cast the scope of ‘Europe’ (and its conversations) wider and deeper. In the view of the editors there are a number of reasons why this should be so. The first is loyalty to the by now well-established feminist principle regarding the importance of declaring one’s locatedness (as multiple as this might and must be in a field called ‘European’) so as to refuse the idea and claim that one speaks from no-where. Instead, we adhere to the importance of stating exactly where one is speaking, thinking, experiencing from and, of equal importance, why and how that matters, i.e. how any specific locatedness inflects the speaking, thinking, experiencing and what it brings into and occludes from view. A second reason is that it helps us to meet our aim of contributing to the disciplining and ‘provincializing’ of Europe (to use Chakrabarty’s [2000] evocative and provocative