In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors’ Introduction
  • Judith Plaskow and Traci West

In preparation for the thirtieth anniversary of JFSR, the editors issued a call in the fall 2013 issue (and other outlets) for submissions on global feminisms that “address issues of globalization, religion, and feminist inquiry and practice across borders or which highlight feminist work in religion in particular cultural contexts beyond the U.S.” As we begin our fourth decade, we are pleased to be able to publish a special section on global feminisms, two interviews with German or German-born scholars, and a roundtable on Asian/Asian North American theologies that looks critically at concepts such as globality and transnationality. The Journal’s transition three years ago to an online submission system has made it easier for scholars from around the world to submit their work, and the material in this issue is the fruit of our strong commitment to including more articles from outside the United States and more sustained reflection on issues of globalization from scholars in differing social and political contexts.

As we look forward to what we hope will be our next thirty years of feminist publishing, we find ourselves reaffirming certain established JFSR practices and rethinking others. We are gratified by the continuing strong interest in our annual Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award contest, which garners many entries each year. This issue contains articles by our 2014 winners: Aitemad Muhanna (“Women’s Moral Agency and the Politics of Religion in Gaza Strip”) and Christina Cedillo (“Habitual Gender: Rhetorical Androgyny in Franciscan Texts”). While these essays would normally have appeared in the fall 2014 issue, we held them for the spring in order to include Muhanna’s article in the special section on global feminisms. In terms of new initiatives, we have decided to shorten and refocus the editors’ introduction. The fact that we include abstracts of articles—a practice we began eight years ago—makes it rather redundant to have an introduction that summarizes each issue and strains to find connections among the various contributions that may or may not exist. We will therefore use this space to share JFSR news and highlight some common themes in an issue and, on occasion, comment on their relationship to larger social and political events.

One of the striking connections in this issue, for example, is the way that, in the special section on global feminisms, Muhanna and Svetlana A. Peshkova both use the lens of a single woman’s activism to raise broader questions about the nature of women’s agency and the interrelation between individual commitments [End Page 1] and desires and larger social context. Although Ira D. Mangililo’s piece in the same section comes out of a different scholarly field, it also uses the voice of one woman—the biblical Rahab—to shed light on the situation of women in Indonesia. We also see significant overlaps between issues raised by the roundtable and the interview with Renate Rose. Anne Joh and Nami Kim’s discussion in their lead-in piece on the pervasiveness of violence in everyday life and the legacy of US militarism in Asia Pacific resonates with Rose’s critique of militarism and her lifelong peace activism. The critical examination by several roundtable contributors of various ways that Asian Americans can become complicit with structures of domination relates to Rose’s consideration of her German identity and the obligations it generates and imposes.

At this moment of marking our thirty years with an emphasis on global feminisms, we are very aware of the multiple forms of violence occurring in our world in which issues of gender, religion, and state intersect and demand our ongoing analytical and activist concern. In the United States in 2014, the refusal of grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City to indict police officers who killed unarmed black men sparked protests that erupted all over the country and that included groups calling for equal attention to unarmed black and brown women killed under similar circumstances.1 In many places in the world, the past year has been a time of intense gender-related violence and resistance to that violence. Among other events, we think of the...

pdf

Share