Editorial Introduction

In this latest issue of Feminist Formations, we are excited to feature a dossier on Lynne Huffer's Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, cocurated by Meridith Kruse and David A. Rubin. Huffer's scholarly work, as Kruse and Rubin explain, imagines queer feminism as a significant space from which to engage current ethical, social, political questions and challenges. Following Huffer, Kruse and Rubin "define queer feminism as an expansive project that seeks to hold the critique of biopolitical normalization and structural violence together with a vision of ethical remaking." This timely dossier includes writings by Shannon Winnubst, Angela Willey, Kent Brintnall, Stephen Seely, Kyoo Lee, David A. Rubin, Meridith Kruse, and Debjani Battacharyya, as well as a response from Huffer herself. In their introduction to the dossier, Kruse and Rubin situate the writings within three overarching themes: intersectionality; retraversing philosophy and psychoanalysis; and queer feminist ethics. In doing so, they invite readers to think through and excavate the "connections/rifts" between Are the Lips a Grave?, the writings included in the dossier, and a broader set of "intellectual and ethicopolitical projects."

The image on our cover is titled the times of kintsugi, from Living Deep Time Calendar Year 000001, smudge studio 002016. In smudge studio's description of this project, they write, "Living Deep Time Calendar Year 000001 is a medium for noticing and appreciating wildly diverse speeds, scales, rhythms and durations of time swirling around you, within you, and as you. It can be used for inspiration, to create relief, wonder, and livable time in the Anthropocene." Huffer suggested this particular image as a cover for our issue, given her commitment to rift restoration as a practice and process that offers insight, value, and movement to the historical present. As Kruse explains, "In her response to the dossier, Lynne pushes us to really think about what 'restoring rifts' as practice might entail—as the conventional way we often think of restoration is to cover over cracks/ruptures rather than highlight them as something meaningful for ethical thought. The practice of Kintsugi is insightful here as the long-standing Japanese art of restoring the rifts of broken ceramics in a way that highlights the beauty/presence of the cracks rather than covering over them." Hence, we imagine the dossier, and this entire issue of Feminist Formations, as engaging in "living deep time"—restoring rifts and also recognizing the impact and meaning of the rifts.

Before we get to the dossier, however, we include five articles attending to questions and themes related to various sorts of rifts through broad engagement of transnational feminisms, gender, and sexuality. We begin with Amy Brainer's "Materializing 'Family Pressure' Among Taiwanese Queer Women," in which Brainer argues that queer women in Taiwan encounter significant family pressures, shaping their experiences of kinship, labor, and sexuality. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork in Taiwan and eighty family history interviews, Brainer's research offers important insights into the strategies and resources developed by Taiwanese queer women to engage in romantic and sexual relations with other women. As she writes, "Placing queer women at the center of analysis sharpens our knowledge of the literal and figurative bricks and mortar of the patrilineal household as it is reproduced from one generation to the next—the labor, resources, and daily negotiations that sustain it, and those that press against its foundation." Exploring the embodied and material dimensions of family life, Brainer suggests that the gendered division of labor within families, along with family resource distribution and housing insecurity, emerge as key challenges for queer women in Taiwan.

Next, Yurika Tamura, in "Lacerated Girls' Uniforms and What the Cuts May Engender," explores the slashing of uniforms experienced by Zainichi Korean students in Japan. Zainichi Koreans, descendants of Korean people who migrated to Japan as a result of the Japanese colonization of Korea, represent an abject ethnic group in Japan, lacking citizenship and basic rights. Tamura analyzes the cutting of Zainichi schoolgirls' uniforms as gendered, anti-Korean attacks, and as both material and symbolic ruptures, exposing ethnic and national boundaries. She pairs her discussion of news accounts of...