Editors’ Note

In 2019 we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of influential U.S. movements—such as the gay liberation movement following the Stonewall uprising (1969) and the launch of the New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization (1969)—that demonstrated the power of alliances to successfully shift and challenge seemingly entrenched heteronormative, racialized, and gendered social structures. Yet, as many anniversary event organizers and movement veterans have reminded us at recent celebrations, it is also critical to recognize the differential power relations, exclusions, and uneasy relationships among the various participants within these movements. The insights of Miss Major and Victoria Cruz as well as recent films and articles celebrating the legacies of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera attest to the frequently unacknowledged role of trans women of color in the Stonewall uprising and the struggles that trans women of color faced and continue to experience within the queer and feminist movements that they helped initiate. Likewise, Sylvia Rivera’s participation in the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of the Young Lords and the founding of the Women’s Caucus of the Young Lords by Iris Morales, Denise Oliver-Velez, and fellow organizers following the launch of the Young Lords Organization in 1969 illustrate that the Puerto Rican and Third World liberation movements that brought activists together also included an ongoing struggle to address sexuality and gender hierarchies within the movements.

Guest editors Ujju Aggarwal and Linta Varghese and contributors to WSQ: Together offer a timely dialogue that helps us better understand and critically assess the limits and possibilities of past and current calls to come together for liberation and justice. Aggarwal and Varghese’s careful curation of case studies of gendered violence, migration, reproduction, solidarities, and welfare rights, as well as activist reflections on Critical Resistance and INCITE!’s “Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex” (originally released in 2001), offer analytical frameworks and methodologies to push us to “expand our political horizons by foregrounding the relationality of struggle” (Aggarwal and Varghese 2019, 13).

“Together” is a fitting theme and capstone to end our term as general editors of the journal. We began our editorship in January 2017 in the context of the beginning of the Trump administration. Our challenge immediately became how to curate content, including both scholarly and creative contributions, that would speak to the multiple crises we are currently facing from various perspectives. During this liminal time, we edited the issues Precarious Work, Beauty, Protest, and Asian Diasporas. The issues Beauty and Protest revisited some of the most debated issues in women’s and gender studies surrounding beauty politics and resistance while also asking important questions about our contemporary realities. Precarious Work offered thoughtful inquiry into today’s insecure and exploitative global labor conditions. That issue also included more visual art than any other previous issue. Asian Diasporas offered meditations on the impact of global gendered migration and a number of entry points into understanding today’s current immigration crisis. Throughout all of these WSQ issues, we, the guest editors, as well as the poetry editor, fiction and prose editor, peer reviewers, contributors, board members, and Feminist Press staff, have contemplated what it means to work with, against, and in tension with one another in these liminal and turbulent times. Women’s and gender studies has long debated what sisterhood and feminist solidarity means and how it is practiced. Who is included in calls for “sisterhood” and feminist solidarity? How are solidarities formed and reworked, and how do they sometimes end? WSQ: Together intervenes in these debates, asking what it means to work through solidarity, dissent, and nontraditional forms of organizing across institutions and locales.

The issue’s theme is also particularly apt at the level of production of the journal. Since 1972 WSQ has not only published scholarship, activist thought, and creative expression probing the limits and possibilities of calls to come together to address gender inequality, but the journal has also served as a venue for putting into practice the work of feminist collaboration. It has been our pleasure as general coeditors to work with WSQ Editorial Board...