Editors’ Introduction

In her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed calls attention to the politics of citation. Arguing that citational practices often perpetuate the institutions of white heteropatriarchy, she instead cites work that is committed to naming and dismantling those institutions, especially work by feminists of color, and adopts a strict policy of citing no white men. “I think as feminists we can hope to create a crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering, that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths,” Ahmed writes (148). By invoking scholarship that has contributed significantly to feminist and antiracist thought but has often been abandoned prematurely in favor of novel intellectual objects, Ahmed departs from “the official paths laid out by disciplines” to pursue alternative genealogies (15).

Together with awareness about the politics of citation, renewed attention to the consequences of syntax, orthography, and register is crucial for disrupting normative discourses. While it may seem patently obvious to reiterate the point that language and discourse shape systems of meaning and thought, recent debates over and shifts in stylistic choices concerning the naming of gender and race underscore how the politics of language continues to be a key arena for negotiating social and cultural change. In 2019, Merriam-Webster named the English-language pronoun “they” as its word of the year, responding to a surge in searches in its online dictionary for the definition of the pronoun’s usage in the singular to refer to a nonbinary person (Harmon).¹ During the same period, the Gendersternchen (gender star) was increasingly adopted as a typographic style in German: the placement of an asterisk in between the conventionally gendered forms of a noun (for example, Autor*innen, or authors) allows the writer to refer to all genders and to nonbinary people, while also highlighting the constructedness of grammatical gender and gender categories more broadly.² Last year the New York Times changed its house style to capitalize the word Black when referring to people of African origin in order to better reflect their shared culture and history, a change that reflected the embrace of this orthographic choice in journalistic and popular usage (Coleman). In the US and in Germany, the terms BIPoC and BPoC have increasingly been adopted in mainstream discourse; originating as terms of self-identification, BIPoC and BPoC reference the collective experience of racism shared by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, including those previously colonized and enslaved.

These brief examples demonstrate how linguistic shifts index, and help to instill, changing sociocultural norms. They also reflect the imbrication of language, embodiment, and knowledge, exemplifying how the naming of bodies shapes the way they are perceived and understood. When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 as an analytical lens for highlighting the complex and interlocking ways in which racial and gender discrimination are experienced by Black women, she created new language that enabled the articulation of critical insights about the interactions of power and identity.³ Reflecting on the significance of the term intersectionality for her own life and work, Sharon Dodua Otoo highlights the matter of language: “I am grateful to all Black feminists who continue to teach us the importance of coining words to spotlight, critique, and challenge dominance” (“Language Matters,” our emphasis). As Otoo suggests, coining words offers one strategy for combating the rhetorical violence to which Black women are disproportionately subjected.

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have notably emphasized the limitations of language when it comes to activism and advocacy, arguing that the easy adoption and appropriation of decolonizing discourse neutralizes what is unsettling about decolonization and evades its actual goal of repatriating Indigenous life and land: “decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (3). Robbie Richardson likewise cautions that the land acknowledgments now offered by many institutions and invoked regularly by speakers at conferences and events may serve as feel-good gestures that do not benefit dispossessed people (“Some Observations”). These caveats pose crucial...