Editors' Introduction

In the introduction to the 32nd volume of the Women in German Yearbook, we wrote of the racism, sexual violence, and patriarchal injustice marking 2016, beginning with the incidents in Cologne and other European cities on the eve of the New Year, and ending in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. We also wrote of the groundswell of street-level activism, the transnational solidarity forged by social media, and the coming together of student groups across the US. The tension between the fear and mourning for social progress undone and the hope swelling from voices calling for justice continues to mark the year 2017. On 21 January 2017, thousands of people marched in the "Women's March on Washington DC," with thousands more joining in across the US, Canada, and around the world in "Sister Marches," to protest what the inauguration of Donald Trump as President means for women's rights, gay and trans rights, and racial justice. As the marches played out in the streets, online images of the protests rolled across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds and live video streams from media organs such as the BBC or CNN as well as from individuals on the ground using apps such as Periscope. The deluge of images, dominated by the primarily pink "pussy hats," took on the feeling of a unified and spontaneous groundswell of opposition, communicating, at least visually, international solidarity.

Of course such solidarity, suggestive of a singular and unified feminist movement, has been importantly put to question. In her blog post for Missy Magazine published just prior to the inauguration, entitled playfully "(G)RRRACHE—Wofür eigentlich?" ([G]RRREVENGE—What's the point?), literary and cultural studies scholar Peggy Piesche points to the manner in which the collective outrage, pain, and shock at the outcome of the US election in Communities of Color was transformed "pointedly and swiftly into new and proven resistance strategies […] derived from our historical experience of surviving racist everyday terror," while in white leftist circles "myth production and normalization" dominated.¹ This normalization is two-fold: the normalization of white women, despite (mythologized) claims to intersectionality, who "chose in the majority to participate in their white claim to dominance and for their own social power,"² and the continued and ongoing normalization of the interconnection between sexual violence and racism for Women of Color, a normalization also driven by white women and a singular conception of (white) feminism.

Living a Feminist Life by feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed, which appropriately appeared in this year of tension and activism, opens with a discussion of the word feminism:

[Feminism] brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. […] It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up.

(i)

Across academic and activist work, feminists formulate the words that give breath to the action of refusal. Being willing to pick each other up through feminism also necessitates asking the hard questions of ourselves as feminists, and especially as feminist scholars in the academy; indeed, Ahmed writes that we "enact feminism in how we relate to the academy" (15). In a talk at the University of Alberta on 10 March 2017, sociologist Sirma Bilge criticized the manner in which intersectionality, again and importantly a flash word in popular feminist discourse and within feminist academic circles, has been whitened and drained of race—also in women's, gender, and sexuality studies programs and departments in the academy—, citing neoliberalism's "love affair" with difference. She argues for a disruption of the hegemonic mechanisms of the university, including those adopted and perpetuated by academic feminists, through a transformation of the way we reinvest in the routine practices of our professional lives, including mentorship, administration, teaching, research, and writing. Because universities are sites of hegemonic whiteness, all of these...