Elements in Feminism and Contemporary Critical Theory – serie

This autotheoretical Element, written in the tense space between feminist and trans theory, argues that movement between 'woman' and 'nonbinary' is possible, affectively and politically. In fact, a nonbinary structure of feeling has been central in the history of feminist thought, such as in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). This structure of feeling is not antifeminist but indexical of a desire for a form of embodiment and relationality beyond binary sex and gender. Finally, the Element provides a partial defense of nonbinary gender identity by tracing the development of the term in online spaces of the early 2000s. While it might be tempting to read its development as symptomatic of the forms of selfhood reproduced in (neo)liberal, racialized platform capitalism, this reading is too simplistic because it misses how the term emerged within communities of care.

This Will Not Be Generative attends to the semiotics of ecological writings via Caribbean literary studies and black critical theory. Closely reading texts by Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Lisa Wells, it exposes how the language of tentacles and tendrils, an assumptive 'we,' and redemptive sympathy or 'care' disguises extraction from black people and blackness. This often speculative rhetoric, abetted by fantasies of white communion with indigenous groups, contrasts with the horror semiotics of the films Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019), which unmask the antagonistic relationship between white survival 'at the end of the world' and blackness as compost.

TransGenre is a reconsideration of genre theory in long-form fiction through transgender minor literature in the US and Canada. Using four genre sites (the road novel, the mourning novel, the chosen family novel, and the archival novel), this Element considers how the minoritized becomes the minoritarian through deterritorializing generic conventions in fiction to its own ends. In so doing, TransGenre proposes narrative reading practices as strategies of the minor to subvert, transgress, and reappropriate the novel's genealogy and radical future prospects. A range of fiction published in the last decade is deployed as largely self-theorizing, generating its own epistemological, thematic, and formal innovations and possibilities, revealing cisheteronormative underpinnings of generic categories and turning them in on themselves.

TransGenre is a reconsideration of genre theory in long-form fiction through transgender minor literature in the US and Canada. Using four genre sites (the road novel, the mourning novel, the chosen family novel, and the archival novel), this Element considers how the minoritized becomes the minoritarian through deterritorializing generic conventions in fiction to its own ends. In so doing, TransGenre proposes narrative reading practices as strategies of the minor to subvert, transgress, and reappropriate the novel's genealogy and radical future prospects. A range of fiction published in the last decade is deployed as largely self-theorizing, generating its own epistemological, thematic, and formal innovations and possibilities, revealing cisheteronormative underpinnings of generic categories and turning them in on themselves.

This Element theorizes the emergence of the girl as the ideal subject of Western imperialist power. Feminist anti-imperialist scholars have long argued that imperialism operates through the global North's claim to be the savior of voiceless, victimized women and girls in the global South. However, during the global war on terrorism, the military and development organizations of the global North shifted their practices and rhetoric in response to the popularization of this feminist anti-imperialist critique. Focusing on this key historical shift, Theory of the Counterinsurgent Girl argues that hegemonic Western cultural and military strategies have moved away from 'saving' women to 'empowering' girls, in keeping with the neoliberal emphasis on individual resilience and agency. This Element traces the rise to dominance of the figure of the agential girl, analyzing how she has been incorporated into decision-making, securitizing, and policing operations as both a surveillance tool and a social justice goal.

This Element theorizes the emergence of the girl as the ideal subject of Western imperialist power. Feminist anti-imperialist scholars have long argued that imperialism operates through the global North's claim to be the savior of voiceless, victimized women and girls in the global South. However, during the global war on terrorism, the military and development organizations of the global North shifted their practices and rhetoric in response to the popularization of this feminist anti-imperialist critique. Focusing on this key historical shift, Theory of the Counterinsurgent Girl argues that hegemonic Western cultural and military strategies have moved away from 'saving' women to 'empowering' girls, in keeping with the neoliberal emphasis on individual resilience and agency. This Element traces the rise to dominance of the figure of the agential girl, analyzing how she has been incorporated into decision-making, securitizing, and policing operations as both a surveillance tool and a social justice goal.

Rage is having a moment. It is everywhere, among men, women and children, but particularly among feminists like us. This Element is a concentrated meditation on women's rage in Bruised Hibiscus (2000) and Negra (2013), two novels by and about Caribbean women. We explore how expressions of rage braided with feminist solidarity figure in these novels and how this mixture produces affective and political responses to racism and gender-based violence. Our focus on the contours of Caribbean women's rage advances feminist thought on rage as a political tool of power. In selected readings of our two novels, we identify feminist solidarity as an essential and shared factor in the discursive expression of Caribbean women's rage: We argue that the female protagonists in Bruised Hibiscus and Negra articulate their rage differently but use it similarly to claim the power to resist if not to eradicate racism, gender-based violence, and sex shaming.

Rage is having a moment. It is everywhere, among men, women and children, but particularly among feminists like us. This Element is a concentrated meditation on women's rage in Bruised Hibiscus (2000) and Negra (2013), two novels by and about Caribbean women. We explore how expressions of rage braided with feminist solidarity figure in these novels and how this mixture produces affective and political responses to racism and gender-based violence. Our focus on the contours of Caribbean women's rage advances feminist thought on rage as a political tool of power. In selected readings of our two novels, we identify feminist solidarity as an essential and shared factor in the discursive expression of Caribbean women's rage: We argue that the female protagonists in Bruised Hibiscus and Negra articulate their rage differently but use it similarly to claim the power to resist if not to eradicate racism, gender-based violence, and sex shaming.

In the vital traditions of women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and aligned projects disidentified from majoritarian worlds, this Element focuses attention on how we continue to work in and with the attenuating conditions of academic life.There is, it suggests, hope to be found, nurtured, and elicited amid the difficulties of the present. This Element does not romanticize or assign nobility or moral purpose to teaching or to scholarly life more broadly. Rather, it elaborates an understanding of teaching as a name for how we go about building collectivities, sensibilities, and social formations organized by and around mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity. This Element remembers the classroom to be any space dedicated to the work of collectively thinking hard, and one in which we rehearse the forms of relation, social being, and collegiality we wish to proliferate.