Feminism/memory/activism

This special issue enriches the emerging dialogue on feminism, memory, and activism by showcasing activists, movements, and cultural productions that have received little attention, and by developing analytic frameworks that amplify their innovative acts of resistance and repair. It explores the politics and aesthetics of women’s activism, including aesthetic activism, in making visible and responding to the harms flowing from legacies of dispossession, war, state violence, intimate violence, and ecological devastation. In working with contributors, an urgent question emerged for us as feminist scholars: how to bear witness to struggles for justice across divergent sites unequally impacted by precarity and violence, without implicitly affirming some experiences as normative and without flattening the contours of specific histories? Sensitive to this issue, each contributor develops concepts and frameworks that are attentive to the specificity of local struggles and their mobilizations of memory and, where appropriate, explores existing or potential transnational connections. In our usage, the “transnational”, with its vision extending across east and west and into historical legacies of dispossession, signals a way of seeing that cuts through rigid categories defined by the nation-state. Introducing this issue, positioned at the interface of intersectional and transnational feminist scholarship, memory studies, and decolonial studies, we identify three key contributions. First, it extends memory studies beyond its European and North American core by bringing a southerly perspective, and by focusing on interventions from the south, the Middle East, and East Asia. Second, the essays feature women as memory activists, artists, and cultural producers, and analyse small-scale and ephemeral movements and lesser-known films, performances, and artworks, thereby extending the archive. Third, the issue offers a practice-based approach to women’s activism that shows the value of attending to site-specific contexts while acknowledging complex entanglements across scales of the local, national, transnational, and beyond the human.