Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Feminist Ethnographies on Crime and Deviance: Contemporary Trends and Contributions to Criminology

This chapter reviews the origins of, and contemporary trends in, feminist ethnographies of crime and deviance to highlight how these works have shaped the broader field of criminology. First, this chapter underlines how the Chicago School, post-World War II, facilitated the growth of ethnographies on crime and deviance. Second, it traces the influence of second-wave feminisms and Black feminisms on criminology that challenged White masculinist modes of knowledge production. Next, contemporary works that examine carceral institutions, their collateral consequences, and stigmatized groups are considered for their potential to advance understandings of crime, deviance, and victimization. The chapter concludes by offering directions for future research and a discussion on the policy implications and radical potential of feminist ethnographies of crime and deviance.

Henrietta Crawford: Radical Black Evangelist in Post-Civil War New Jersey

Representing Black feminisms of the so-called, “First Wave era of American feminism,” forgotten icon Henrietta Crawford impacted Black political representation in southern New Jersey during the post-Civil War decades. As a noted evangelist, universal suffragist, Black community organizer, Civil Rights activist, homemaker, and intergenerational caregiver for minor dependents, Crawford crafted an intersectional legacy worthy of commemorative re-remembrance. Collectively, scattered bits and pieces of information recorded over the past eighty years in newspapers and in recent scholarly accounts offer an incoherent combination of disparate hints at Henrietta’s historical significance. Buttressed, however, by historical insight, contemporary newspaper accounts, Civil War pension file records, real estate deed transactions, federal and state census records, vital statistics data, the evidentiary record sheds light on Crawford’s important role in the operation of historically significant Mt. Pisgah [U.A.M.E.] Church in Vineland and her associated development and implementation of important social justice initiatives. In 1948, a fifty-year commemorative notation about James and Henrietta Crawford’s 1898 departure from Vineland was published in the Daily Journal newspaper. Twenty-five years later “New Jersey Mother of the Year Award” recipient Rebecca Lassiter noted the Crawfords' important role in her life as foster parents. In year seventy-three since the Daily Journal’s acknowledgement, this essay conveys Henrietta Crawford’s legacy to students, scholars, and the general readership for current and future generations. As the present confluence of national political and economic crises resolves within an encapsulating global pandemic that is exacerbating socio-economic inequalities, Crawford’s life and record offers a critical example of faith-based social-justice activism and the seamless role of African American women in American history.

Defining the Flow—Using an Intersectional Scientific Methodology to Construct a VanguardSTEM Hyperspace

#VanguardSTEM is an online community and platform that centers women, girls, and non-binary people of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. We publish original and curated content, using cultural production to include a multiplicity of identities as worthy of recognition and thus redefine STEM identity and belonging. #VanguardSTEM is rooted firmly in Queer, Black feminisms which delineate the experiences and critiques of Black women matter and that these insights can foster a restorative and regenerative construction of the cultures in which we exist. In describing how #VanguardSTEM descended from counterspaces, we draw on speculative fiction to define a #VanguardSTEM hyperspace as a fluid “place-time” that is born digital and enabled by social media, but materializes in the physical world for specific purposes. As Black women in STEM, we consider how our situated knowledges and scientific expertise inform our process. We propose an intersectional scientific methodology to address the influence of embodied observation, embedded context and collective impact on scientific inquiry. Through #VanguardSTEM, we assert, without apology, the right of Black, Indigenous, women of color to self-advocate by fully representing ourselves, our STEM identities and interests, without assimilation.

‘Here and There, Then and Now’: Envisioning a Palimpsest Methodology

Black feminisms challenge Western conceptions of linearity as an optic for understanding the experiences of Black folx in the United States social imaginary. As such, this article centers the understanding that for Black and minoritized folx, historical legacies carry the lingering effects of what may seem over and done with. These tensions converge on what M. Jacqui Alexander (2005) called the palimpsest, or “a parchment that has been inscribed two or three times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased” (Alexander, 2005, p. 190). A framing of time and realities as palimpsestic, or imperfect erasure, suggests that the past is visible and acting upon the present. The potential of a palimpsest methodology rests on the ethical entanglements of the body, memory, and space-time and afterlives with respect to existing tendencies and reliable possibilities. Methodologically, we propose that the palimpsest necessarily reads data and researcher positionalities as woven together, written over, and grappling with one another. In turn, this article intends to pursue embodied research by envisioning the notion of the palimpsest as a methodological tool. To accomplish this, we begin with a brief review of the literature and disciplinary grounds that root the notion of the palimpsest. From there, we discuss the guiding principles for this approach before offering methodological considerations. Against the violence of complicity, temporality, and objectivity, for researchers, a palimpsest approach argues for an assumed responsibility to the work they engage in, the lives they work with, and sites that ground their work.

Reimaginando pelo afeto o feminismo negro na era da interseccionalidade

Resenha de:<br />NASH, Jennifer C. <em>Black Feminisms Reimagined: After Intersectionality</em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 170 p.