This is a journal that engages the feminist politics of positionality, not as a fixed and stable point of reference, but as a moving, mobile and open-ended field of struggle and reflection. Feminism is always already a site of critical questioning: Which feminism, which feminist theory and politics? The what of feminism is suffused with the where and the when, the who and their how. Feminism –as feminist theory, critique, methodology, labor, struggle, position, affect, (self-)history, practice and writing– is always about the politics of knowledge: the time, place and mode of its production and distribution. Feminism fuses embodied and grounded critical theorizing with the active subversion of sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia.
The journal draws on and converses with a multiplicity of feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, queer theories, critical race theories, Marxisms, anti-nationalisms, anti-capitalist ideas and movements. It links up with diverse aspects of critical theory as a corpus/body of situated knowledge and reflective engagement. From this perspective, theory is neither a luxury, nor a cancellation of political praxis. It is a critical engagement with what has been deemed conceptually, imaginatively and politically possible and/or impossible. It is thus a source of courage and transformative political desire for those who have been placed on the abjected and precarious “wrong side” of history. For that reason, feminism cannot be reduced to a simplistic dichotomy between theory and practice, nor one between intellectual and experiential labor, but instead constitutes a site of constant deconstruction of those oppositional schemas.
In insisting on taking a position against the common doxa that feminism is outdated and anachronistic, we lay claim to a different political temporality, a different collective response to the historical present. As feminists, we are simultaneously inside and outside given time. We are situated in the present but we align ourselves with the conditions of possibility that extend beyond it. We are attuned to the demands and claims of the present, but we remain critical of power matrices that define the terms of present as extraordinary, exceptional, and “critical”.
The goal of this project is not simply to articulate a “woman’s discourse” (or a discourse by and for women), but rather to pose the questions of what might be the necessary preconditions to activate and politicize feminist voices seeking transformation into public testimonies of violence and exploitation, but also of resistance, courage, and struggle. The commitment of this collective work is not just to “give voice to women” but to put forward new collective, non-violent modes of resistance that can confront the prevailing gendered grammatology –linguistic, political, social, affective– through which public discourse is articulated.
Feminism continually returns us to the need to broaden the question of what action signifies (and what it entails), both as resistance and vulnerability. Or, better, it demonstrates to us the interaction between vulnerability and possibility, between heteropatriarchy and racist violence and intersectional modes of collective resistance. Feminist movements both in Greece and in international contexts have imagined and experimented in practice with strategies of resistance that have circumvented the very norms of conflict and war.
What to make of the choice to associate a new journal with the genealogy of a term that has traversed its own course, that has gone through many “waves” in order to combat and resist gendered violence, homophobia/transphobia, sexism, patriarchy, racial and class discriminations and inequalities? We see it as a call to brush up again against the archives of violence that have formed us yet not determined us, and which from generation to generation pass over us as if they pass by us. The journal feministiqá is a call for the formation of intersectional alliances beyond identitarian essentialisms, a call to rethink our critical engagement with movements and communities, institutions and the “public”. It is an opening to try out new collective practices of ethics, politics and aesthetics from the perspective of feminist/queer archives and counter-publics.
In the international historical conjuncture in which the journal feministiqá appears, a conjuncture permeated by the neoliberal exacerbation of social inequalities, the securitization of borders, the insistence on and extension of imperialist designs, and the intensification of racist and neo-fascist violence, we do not only seek to participate in and to respond to the new urgent need for feminist action and thought, but also to rework our foundational commitment to a feminist/queer/decolonial vision. That means, on the one hand, a critical break with proposals for the expropriations made in the name of “feminism” today, such as the discourses of NGOs, state policies and other programs that instrumentalize feminism within conservative political agendas. To the contrary, we are inspired by international and transnational actions and coalitions such as the movement Ni Una Menos in Latin America as well as the intersectional antiracist struggles of Black Lives Matter.
We commit to a critical discussion of feminism and queer theory –in theory, art, subjects, affects, bodies and cultural practices- that works despite and against the racial capitalist normativity. Our commitment is to a complex feminist/queer/anti-racist situated knowledge that challenges the terms of a dominant subject as white, bourgeois, cis, male, able-bodied and heteronormative.
The name of the journal implies a rewriting that bears the traces of earlier feminist and queer discourses and practices passed down to us, while at the same time inciting their reformulation by setting all the participant sub-texts and con-texts into constant movement and critical rethinking. Besides, this challenge enacts the untranslatable “q” of queer, located emphatically between the words and things of “feminism”. Feministiqá, translated feminist-ly in English, as an adverb refers to the kind of way we act, think and are moved (to one another). This work demands and activates different temporalities, which respond to the “here and now” but at the same time resist knee-jerk conveniences of pragmatism and timeliness.
The cover image of the first issue of the journal is a photograph from the original manuscript of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which relates the ineffable story of a ghost who has arisen, taking on flesh and bones, to intervene, uninvited, in the archive of slavery and racism of the post-Civil War U.S. Such dissident readings, intersectional and relational, are what sustain the commitment of this journal.
The editorial team
Editorial Board:
Athena Athanasiou, Eirini Avramopoulou, Maria Liapi, Elena Tzelepis
Editorial Office:
Eirini Avramopoulou, Alkisti Efthymiou, Athina Papanagiotou, Aliki Theodosiou, Elena Tzelepis
Advisory Board:
Meltem Ahiska, Boğaziçi University
Athena Athanasiou, Panteion University
Alexandra Bakalaki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck – University of London
Wendy Brown, University of California – Berkeley
Judith Butler, University of California – Berkeley
Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh
Elena Loizidou, Birkbeck – University of London
Eleni Papagaroufali, Panteion University
Dimitris Papanikolaou, University of Oxford
Aggelika Psarra, journalist-historian
Ann Laura Stoler, New School for Social Research
Fotini Tsibiridou, University of Macedonia
Dina Vaiou, National Technical University of Athens
Eleni Varikas, Université de Paris VIII
Original website design, content management and art direction:
Maria F Dolores, Holly Ingleton and Eirini Spanopoulou
Current website design:
StinPriza
Current website content management:
Alkisti Efthymiou
Logo design:
Maria F Dolores
Copy editing:
Eleni Bourou (#1-3)
Dimitris Limperopoulos (#4-)
We warmly thank Io Chaviara for her support in graphic design.
We thank the Diotima Centre, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Konstantina Kouneva for their support.
Based in: Athens
The articles published in the journal feministiqá are licensed under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-SA. In any other case, the content is accompanied by an explicit special note regarding the intellectual property regime to which it is subject.
ISSN: 2585-3937