Why intergenerational feminisms, why now?

We hatched this special issue in the midst of multiple global sea changes in feminist life:  institutionally, politically, personally.  The shifts toward openly authoritarian and reactionary regimes in the US and Europe remaking the neoliberal landscape of gender and sexual rights; the long wake of the Covid-19 pandemic that exposed and entrenched domestic labor distributions amongst households globally; and the rise of feminist graduate degree programs within the corporate university structure– these are but a few of the circumstances that informed our own middle-aged, administrative-era feminist theorist investments in re-evaluating the field’s relationship to intergenerational exchange. And now here we are, in the middle of the rapid dismantling of US higher education, thinking more urgently about the future of feminism for ourselves, our students– and generations to come.

Given that both of us have been drawn to the limits of certain genealogies of feminism– or at least how they are narrated through feminist scholarship and pedagogy– across our work, this issue was also a long time coming. This Special Issue is a large and varied conversation about field formation, on the creation myths of feminist theory and how they circulate with certain attachments in specific moments to key figures. Then, these figures and these moments pass, and we (as Clare Hemmings trenchantly explores) re-narrate the field through scripts of loss, disavowal, and recovery. For this special issue, we wanted to showcase multiple generations of scholars in conversation with each other, not just about each other– including dialogues that include pillars of feminist theory Chandra Mohanty, Ann duCille, Ann Cvetkovich, Banu Subramaniam, and Cheryl Clarke alongside amazing earlier career scholars.  Laura Kang, Cinnamon Williams, Juliet Williams, Paulina Jones-Torregrosa, and Haylee Harrell revisit feminist classics and classic movements and terminology for this generation of scholars.  Kate Campbell, Rachel Corbman, Stefanie Schafer, and Jennifer Cho trouble the legacies feminism has inherited, while Cole Rizki, Sushmita Chatterjee, and Kim Lamm offer new genealogies through the field.  And in interspersed personal reflections, Alice Hill-Woods, Mali Collins, Moon Charania, and Ana Nenadovic ruminate on the generational intimacy of feminist inheritance across generations. Feminist theory is uniquely organized around a methodology of self-critique; we wanted this issue to showcase that with a tender pen that refuses the seduction of generational metaphor turned progress narrative as surely as it knows it can’t escape history.

As we grapple with legacies of care and loss in relationship to our locations in a “sandwich generation” with aging parents and young children and institutional homes to tend to, the work in this issue re-evaluates its relationship to feminist generations with an eye toward multiplicity.   This multiplicity is a genealogy of feminist theory’s radical successes and the site of feminist exhaustion as we seek to constantly redefine our field and our relationship to it. As we move between being students, scholars, and stewards of feminism– as the field ages and expands and even grows redundant, as all disciplines do, in part– how do we re-negotiate our attachments across generational lines?  In a mix of lengths, styles, reflections, fields, geographies, and methods, this issue engages the possibilities and pitfalls of feminist intergenerational thinking in this crucial moment of, we hope, survival.

  Read the special issue