Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface this vibrantly eclectic issue of Feminist Studies can perhaps best be framed as a series of interventions into current literatures on masculinities and feminisms. Angela Willey and Banu Subramaniam explore the implications of the racialized “white nerd masculinity” that is at the heart of the popular television series The Big Bang Theory, while Jessica Johnson draws our attention to the significance of the virulently muscular brand of Christian masculinity preached by Mark Driscoll in his multi-state Mars Hill Church, which drew thousands of followers during the early 2000s. Both articles reveal the toxicity of these contemporary masculine formations, from their mundane and pervasive exposition in popular culture to more strident articulations in megachurches. Gergely Kunt offers a rare first-person glimpse into the complexities of a World War II sexual economy, examining via the diary of a Hungarian refugee the relationship between militarized masculinity and sexual assault and the exploitation of women in wartime. Other essays in this volume intervene in current debates about the form, histories, and implications of Western feminisms. Jennifer McLerran’s art essay on Mohawk artist Carla Hemlock expands on the “Native feminist ethics” invoked by Yaqui legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie, suggesting that for Native feminists, improving women’s lives cannot be separated from decolonization. Magdalena Grabowska demands Western feminists rethink their commonplace dismissal of women who lived under  Preface state socialism as non-agentive, while Jo Reger calls our attention to the frequently problematized “wave” metaphor as she locates the roots of disidentification with previous generations of feminists. And Eileen Boris’s review essay highlights the racialized, gendered, classed, and transnational intertwining of fashion and feminism. The poet featured in this issue is Rachel Marie-Crane Williams. The issue closes with two reflections on the January 21st Women’s March on Washington: Mrinalini Chakraborty, one of its national organizers, describes in an interview the inception and logistical challenges of the march, while Tracey Jean Boisseau describes uplifting interactions with strangers that many march-goers experienced that day. In “Inside the Social World of Asocials: White Nerd Masculinity, Science, and the Politics of Reverent Disdain,” Angela Willey and Banu Subramaniam analyze what they call the “reverent disdain” for science that continues to pervade feminist scholarship as well as public/popular culture. This reverent disdain leads to resistance to incorporating methodologies from the natural sciences into feminist studies, even while authority is ceded to knowledges produced within those disciplines. Willey and Subramaniam demonstrate the pervasiveness of this reverent disdain through a close reading of the immensely popular television show The Big Bang Theory. While the show portrays science as pure play and curiosity, with an innocent distance from the social, Willey and Subramaniam argue that, through its depiction of nerds, the show constructs brilliance in racialized and gendered ways that police and naturalize the boundaries of knowledge production in science, rendering it inaccessible to practice and to critique. In particular, the show creates an innocent white masculinity that effaces the hierarchies of race and gender that actually exist within science as well as in society at large. Willey and Subramaniam’s goal is to encourage feminist scholarship to reject the binaries of nature and culture and move toward more “naturecultural ” engagements in which critiques of science and engagement with scientific practice coexist as intellectual and political projects. If Willey and Subramaniam highlight how nerd masculinity is made to appear outside of the social even as it reinforces social hierarchies, in “Under Conviction: ‘Real Men’ Reborn on Spiritual and Cinematic Battlefields,” Jessica Johnson excavates a muscular, evangelical Christian project to transform the sociopolitical by intertwining virulent masculinity, Hollywood movies, and the global war on terror. Preface  Johnson troubles the distinction between the evangelical and the (secular ) popular in her ethnography of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, which at its height spread to five states and had approximately 13,000 attendees. The church had a charismatic and social-media savvy preacher named Mark Driscoll who urged men to stop being “pussies” and instructed married women to become sexually alluring beings for their husbands, even as he lay the blame for men’s problems on single women who were too sexually...