Protest

Protest

Volume 47, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2019
Jillian M. Báez and Natalie Havlin

Excerpted from the Editors’ Note

“Together” is a fitting theme and capstone to end our term as general editors of the journal. We began our editorship in January 2017 in the context of the beginning of the Trump administration. Our challenge immediately became how to curate content, including both scholarly and creative contributions, that would speak to the multiple crises we are currently facing from various perspectives. During this liminal time, we edited the issues Precarious Work, Beauty, Protest, and Asian Diasporas. The issues Beauty and Protest revisited some of the most debated issues in women’s and gender studies surrounding beauty politics and resistance while also asking important questions about our contemporary realities. Precarious Work offered thoughtful inquiry into today’s insecure and exploitative global labor conditions. That issue also included more visual art than any other previous issue. Asian Diasporas offered meditations on the impact of global gendered migration and a number of entry points into understanding today’s current immigration crisis. Throughout all of these WSQ issues, we, the guest editors, as well as the poetry editor, fiction and prose editor, peer reviewers, contributors, board members, and Feminist Press staff, have contemplated what it means to work with, against, and in tension with one another in these liminal and turbulent times. Women’s and gender studies has long debated what sisterhood and feminist solidarity means and how it is practiced. Who is included in calls for “sisterhood” and feminist solidarity? How are solidarities formed and reworked, and how do they sometimes end? WSQ: Together intervenes in these debates, asking what it means to work through solidarity, dissent, and nontraditional forms of organizing across institutions and locales.