Editorial Introduction

It is exciting to introduce our winter 2021 issue, featuring a special dossier on #MeToo and Transnational Gender Justice, curated by Chaitanya Lakkimsetti and Vanita Reddy. This dossier engages an important set of questions regarding the transnational dimension of #MeToo, as authors reflect both on how it poses a critique of the notion of "global sisterhood" as well as how it reproduces normalizing discourses of gender and sexuality. This exciting collection includes an introduction by Lakkimsetti and Reddy, eight essays, and an afterword by Ashwini Tambe. As part of the dossier, our Poesía for this issue features two powerful poems by Choi Young-Mi, "Monster" and "To The Pigs." As Lakkimsetti and Reddy discuss in their introduction to the dossier, "Monster" has been credited with igniting the #MeToo movement in South Korea. They write, "Choi's poem calls attention to the power of cultural representation not only in igniting social movements, but also its power in reimagining feminist strategies for addressing sexual violence." And it is this process—the reimagining of feminist strategies for addressing sexual violence—that comes to life throughout the dossier.

Alongside the dossier, we include eight timely articles, beginning with "Abolishing the Broom Closets in Omelas: Feminist Disability Analysis of Crisis and Precarity" by Jess Whatcott and Liat Ben-Moshe. Whatcott and Ben-Moshe take as their point of departure Ursula K. Le Guin's well-known story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," to argue that attending to disability and the carceral institutionalization of disabled people is critical to our understanding of precarity under gendered racial settler capitalism. Within capitalist systems that devalue gendered, racialized, and Indigenous populations, Whatcott and Ben-Moshe write that "disability is key to understanding the capitalist crisis because disablement and the construction of the ability/disability binary has been a key mechanism for constructing disposability in the crisis of capitalism."

In her article, "Political Times: The Multiple Temporalities of Activism in Feminist Print Culture," Agatha Beins examines the 1970s feminist publication Distaff as an artifact to help us understand how different textual forms shape political transformation and possibilities in feminist activism. Through a study of temporal shifts, Beins demonstrates how imagining different futures is intertwined with temporality, writing: "Because most social movement activism takes linear-time politics as its basis, considering another form of time in which politics operate potentially broadens our revolutionary repertoires." Alana Bock also engages temporality in "Out of Place and Out of Time: Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss, and Queer Filipinx Haunting," in order to trouble the temporal paradigm that places some queer Filipinx figures (in this case, Andrew Cunanan) in a distant "primitive" past and others (here, Darren Criss) in a "multicultural" present without recognizing the ways that we continue to be haunted by the violence of US empire. Relying on a queer of color critique, Bock explores "what these queer Filipinx ghosts always already desire and speak in excess of imperial forms of knowledge production."

Kristen Kolenz, in "A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands," discusses the music of Guatemalan queer feminist hip-hop activist, Rebeca Lane, through the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, demonstrating how Lane claims her Indigenous ancestry and spirituality through engagement with Anzaldúa's theories of the borderlands and mestiza consciousness. Through an analysis of Lane's songs, Kolenz suggests that she revises Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness "to generate a liberatory and creative vision for Central Americans who build coalition through their shared histories, contemporary struggles, and tireless, decolonizing resistance." And in "'Anyone can be Pussy Riot': Exploring the Possibilities of Transnational Digital Feminism," Jessica Gokhberg considers the work of Russian feminist punk rock performance art group Pussy Riot to explore what is at stake in mobilizing transnational, anti-authoritarian, queer feminist art and activism, especially when using social media as a movement platform. They argue that Pussy Riot creates a "digestible feminism" and critique of state violence, often by mobilizing whiteness and familiar tropes of liberalism, while also enacting possibilities for coalition. Through analysis of a live performance and two online videos, Gokhberg aims "to bring the group's legitimate and...