Editorial Introduction

Summer is here, and for many of us connected to universities, this is a time of transition—completing one academic year and preparing to begin another, celebrating the completion of a degree or the start of a new position, endings and beginnings. Following up on an important special issue of Feminist Formations on the topic, "Critical Feminist Exits" (Volume 31, Issue 1), many of us may still be reflecting what it means to resist the effects of neoliberalism and state violence when they occur within the academy, and how we make sense of institutional betrayals that have become part of the new normal, not only in higher education but across a multitude of spaces and places. In fact, it's easy in these political times to connect institutional betrayals within the academy to those betrayals by other state institutions, for example, perpetrating violence through the fracturing of families at the US-Mexico border, as well as recent abortion bans passed in several states. In this issue, we continue certain lines of analysis considered in recent issues by following up on themes including immigration, reproductive justice, racialized sexual harassment and sexual violence, care work, and political representation. The authors and artists in this issue collectively consider such topics through works based on ethnographic research, personal narrative, poetry, archival research, textual analysis, and visual narrative analysis, among other methods, helping us to draw the important connections needed at this time of urgency and precarity.

Let me start by inviting you to consider the striking image that graces our cover—the aptly titled "It's Complicated," by Shu-Ju Wang, from Wang's 2012 series of paintings entitled Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie, which encompasses both a personal exploration of the artist's story of immigration as well as a broader look at what it means to be an American. Composed of diptych, gouache, glitter, and acrylic on paper mounted on a panel, "It's Complicated," in Wang's words, "further embeds the narratives and consequences of large-scale cultivations of our staples," especially rice and wheat—two of the more common grains consumed in East Asia and North America, drawing connections among food production, health, climate change, and the environment. In the painting, two birds, a horned lark and a cattle egret, are positioned in opposition to one another in the foreground, across a vivid and colorful shifting geography, with a background that includes images of maps of the world, an insulin molecule that resembles a turning planet, and an intemperate sky. Patterns in the landscape suggest stars and ocean, indicating reflections on water, desert, and rupture. The earth is split, imagined from a new perspective, but the images in the center could also be food. By considering these themes in relation to immigration, Wang's image offers a profound reflection on mobility, migration, and relationality in today's changing world.

We begin this issue of Feminist Formations with Alison Phipps' "'Every Woman Knows a Weinstein': Political Whiteness in #MeToo and Public Feminisms Around Sexual Violence." Phipps use #MeToo as a case study to examine how sexual violence occurs—and is experienced and politicized—in the nexus of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism, and at the intersections of race, class, and gender. However, white women have long dominated public feminisms, especially around sexual violence, and #MeToo, Phipps suggests, has also been co-opted and "could largely be interpreted as a conversation between white people: the privileged white women 'speaking out' and the privileged white men with platforms to defend themselves." Phipps draws on the work of Daniel Martinez HoSang and others to suggest that the concept of political whiteness functions to universalize claims about gendered victimhood that are largely based on the experiences of white women, leading in turn to a focus on individual injuries rather than structural power. As she writes, "The practice of 'taking back' subjectivity and control through 'taking down' powerful perpetrators (ironically) shapes a position of dependence on the state and its institutions, as they are summoned to redress injuries through criminalization and discipline." Phipps' incisive analysis allows us to begin to understand the movement's failures to address forms of...