Introduction

At the time of this writing, several states in the US have further restricted access to abortion through fetal heartbeat laws—Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Georgia, and Ohio—and Alabama has passed a law, signed by Governor Kay Ivey on May 16, 2019, banning abortions at every stage of pregnancy and criminalizing the procedure for doctors (except in the case of medical emergency). The state of Indiana has recently placed a near total ban on second trimester abortions. The new sets of laws restricting access to reproductive choice in the US is alarming. We at Frontiers endorse the National Women’s Studies Statement in Support of Reproductive Justice. “We strongly condemn the current attacks on reproductive choice and add our voice to the chorus of opposition. Autonomy over our bodies, including our reproductive choices, is fundamental. NWSA members have upheld this principle in our scholarship and practice for over four decades. We reiterate it today in these urgent times.”

We acknowledge these pressing matters but also dedicate this issue to pursuing new conversations in feminist studies that surround the fat body, partake in discussions of the aftermath of overwhelming trauma, and help us comprehend how power shapes our responses to white supremacy and reproduction. The scholarship and artwork in this issue asks us to rethink how we understand these issues, their methods and histories, and their application in the field of feminist studies.

Tala Khanmalek’s essay “Making Generations: Gender, Reproduction, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” begins our issue by tracing the complicated legal system of nineteenth-century Brazil and looking at the 1871 Free Womb Law in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora. Khanmalek suggests that “making generations”—to continue life under precarious conditions, is an attempt to counteract rather than perpetuate control over reproduction, redressing past injuries while unsettling assumptions in the history of the hemispheric Americas. Even as the law abolished hereditary slavery and allowed enslaved women to claim maternal custody, Khanmalek asks her readers to trouble its “womb-based logic” effectively holding freeborn children in bondage by way of their mother’s status. In this provocative tracing of the 1871 law, Khanmalek reinterprets ‘making generations’ as a way of counteracting the legal forces that perpetuate “Old man Corregidora,” the grandmother’s slave master and father to both grandmother and mother in the novel. As Khanmalek focuses on the intergenerational trauma of the grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter, “making generations” must be seen as a corrective to the deletion of the history of Brazilian slavery, where the problem of erasure in the novel makes so urgent the need for the reader to bear witness to the intergenerational trauma experienced by the women in the story.

Our second article is from Lina Chhun, the recipient of the 2017 NWSA Graduate Student Essay Award. Her article “Walking with the Ghost: Affective Archives in the Afterlife of the Cambodian Holocaust” begins with a meditation on the silence of her mother, whose testimony evokes the specter of the Cambodian genocide. Chhun, as the scholar-daughter, undertakes the project of listening to the fragments and storied afterlives of violence in the testimonies of both her mother and father, where she attends to the silence and unspoken narratives of trauma. Thinking with Toni Morrison’s re-memory, Chhun reads the psychosomatic hauntings of her parents as corporeal memory, where flashbacks and the pieces of stories are gathered, sometimes pieced together, in ways that challenge Western trauma research. For Chhun, Morrison reminds us that silence cannot be seen as “cultural non-compliance,” as medical authorities have argued, but instead prompts us to remember that silence does not always equal absence, especially for subjects relegated as the racialized and gendered Other. Chhun shifts from an understanding of trauma narratives as psychosomatic pathology to one that is an archive of memory and emotion, where the history of genocide and its aftermath can be documented, and perhaps in this radical recognition of the body in pain, some healing can begin.

Mary Maxfield’s “Harmed or Harmful: The Discourse of Trigger Warnings, Trauma, and Shelter” traces trigger warnings to trauma...