Coeditors’ Introduction

Issue 10.1 presents four articles, each of which explores generative ways to reread, rediscover, or recast some of the contemporary classics and cocooned concepts in theory.

First, “In the Firstness of Sexual Difference,” MD Murtagh, via Luce Irigaray, uncovers in Charles Sanders Peirce’s trichotomic categories a conception of incorporeal feminism and American pragmatism, which the author proffers is distinctively feminist. While Murtagh discovers a feminist reading of Peirce, Jana McAuliffe uncovers the feminist potential in comedy. Supposedly humorless feminists, it seems, might deploy “ frivolousness … as a mode of everyday ethical commitment that can disrupt the negative impact of neoliberal biopower,” as she argues in “She’s Making Profit Now.” In another reading against the grain, James Sares in “The Schizoanalysis of Sex” recovers in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project a relatively new theory of sexual difference, a potential opening for an alternative ontology. The last essay in this assemblage of scholarship, Ann J. Cahill on “Vocal Politics,” seeks to give voice to an absence, or more precisely a silence, in feminist theory. While a familiar topic in itself, Cahill approaches the question of voice from a more explicitly musicological viewpoint in order to accentuate the embodied and intersubjective dimension of vocality in feminism.

In a similar vein, the three texts that came together trans-oceanically for the TranScripts showcase an archival recuperation and hermeneutic reactivation of some—four here—of the much respected yet still under-recognized Anglo-European feminist avant-garde filmmakers, writers, and poets of the recent past, and they are as follows: (1) Edith Jeřábková and Francis McKee on Ester Krumbachová, “The Princess Fainted on the Spot: On Ester Krumbachová's Dark Tales” (translated into English); (2) Sarah Keller on Agnès Varda and Barbara Hammer on “Women’s Answer: Agnès Varda and Barbara Hammer,” a version of which was presented at the 2019 Seoul International Women’s Film Festival (SIWFF) in Korea as a special lecture; and (3) E. Tracy Grinnell (and Lyn Hejinian), “Making Duration of Phenomena: ‘On’ Sight and Hearing by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino.”

Special thanks are due to our editorial assistant, Sumru Atuk, and our Twittermeister, Andres Besserer Rayas. We also thank Edith Jeřábková for the cover image, a photograph from the Ester Krumbachová archive.