Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface “Africa Reconfigured,” the cluster in this issue on recent scholarly and creative work on Africa, displays a variety of cultural, artistic, and linguistic approaches to decolonizing gender. Originating in disparate fields, each article in this cluster presents examples of how new meanings of gender are produced that defy dominant definitions. Xavier Livermon examines the cultural and political context of postapartheid South Africa, arguing that redefinitions of “tradition”—not just legal rights—have led Black South Africans to “queer” marriage practices. Busi Makoni pushes the boundaries of feminist linguistics to consider how young women creatively relate to the prevailing lexicon of body parts in southern African languages and, in doing so, how they challenge normative gender identities. Cheryl Toman offers an account of writer, playwright, and performer Werewere Liking’s distinctive lifelong fusing of performance art and social activism in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali and how Liking’s plays, prose, and poetry enact decolonization in unique ways. Nigerian artist Peju Alatise, whose work is featured in our art spread, presents an array of ideas, materials, and genealogies that deeply question European and US aesthetics, as the art essay by Moyo Okediji explains. Concluding “Africa Reconfigured” are critical perspectives on Euro-American gender orders found in Olumide Popoola’s except from a novel and the poems by Gabeba Baderoon. Two articles in the second half of this issue reconsider a specific moment of US women’s history: women’s liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sara M. Evans challenges the stereotyping of the women’s liberation movement as white, middle class, and antisex, arguing that this is a myth fostered by academic theory, the movement’s opponents, and the mistaken notion that women ’s liberation rejected its New Left roots. Complementing Evans’s argument, Agatha Beins addresses the issue of racism in that same historical moment of women’s liberation in the United States by revisiting images 8Preface of revolutionary women of color in US feminist periodicals of the time, arguing that we have to understand the use of these images in the context of mainstream and New Left portrayals that demeaned feminism as being not serious about politics. Also in this issue is Mark Schuller ’s analysis of gender-based violence in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake of 2010, in which he examines how international humanitarian organizations are not always fully aware of how structural violence operates in the country. In our forum “Teaching about Ferguson,” Feminist Studies offers our readers reflections on the pedagogical challenges and opportunities in taking up the issue of state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States. All the articles and essays in this issue emphasize that the specificities of transnational, historical, and political contexts—rather than abstract invocations of globalization —are essential for understanding the changing meanings of gender identities and hierarchies as well as the political goals of women ’s organizations. The first article in our cluster on “Africa Reconfigured” takes on a popular Western assumption about South Africa, which is that the constitutional changes that acknowledged and legalized same-sex partnerships replaced intolerant “traditional” practices among Black South Africans. Xavier Livermon challenges this assumption by demonstrating how Black South Africans engage tradition in creative nonheteronormative ways. He closely follows how Black South Africans redefine autochthonous cultural practices in order to create new meanings and practices for marriage. Just as the very definitions of gender have been continuously in flux, so have the definitions of marriage, and Livermon demonstrates how marriage and long-standing coupling practices have become queered and reconstituted in contemporary Black South Africa. In line with Livermon’s interest in redefinitions of sexuality and gender in a postapartheid context, Busi Makoni explores the relationship between the naming of genitalia and gender positionings. Studying both men’s and women’s uses of the lexicon for body parts in multiple Southern African languages, Makoni concludes that women engage in a process of dis-identification with, and reappropriation of, socially inscribed language for their bodies. Women use the same name labels, but assign them completely different meanings, thereby creating counternarratives of feminine identity. Preface 9 The ability to create new meanings permeates the art...