EDITORS’ NOTE: A CALL TO FERALIZE THOUGHT-MAKING
Danielle Cooper, Ela Przybylo and Sara Rodrigues
PDF of this piece // PDF of Issue 1
“Thinking and moving ferally constitutes a risk, both to the borders of disciplinarity and to the author who is metonymically feralized along with the text.” – Mel Y. Chen
“The only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one” – Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
Eschewing institutional affiliation and receiving no regular funding, Feral Feminisms is a dangerous undertaking for a journal project. We see our wild state as necessary, however, for fostering the “risky” kind of work we aim to publish: untamed, queered and radicalized feminist thought that deliberately traverses disciplines, genres, methods, politics, times, and contexts. We also see it as integral to and reflective of the idiosyncratic configuration of Feral Feminisms, which presents full-length academic essays alongside poetry, art, and cultural commentaries. Feral Feminisms is a site for collective thought-making, creative exploration, and feminist thought and practice. It is a hands-on approach to feminism today, as it is articulated across various cultural sites. As such, Feral Feminisms explores ways to engage scholastically but not exclusively academically in these neoliberal and precarious institutional times.
Embracing Feral Feminisms’ underlying aim to subvert academic processes, our inaugural issue, guest edited by Leyna Lowe and Veronika Novoselova, examines how resistance functions as a political act. This issue examines how the meaning and tenor of political resistance morphs across time, geographic and cultural contexts, and creative media. In this particular time and place, we see our undomesticated journal as an accessible tactic for wrestling with the academy while still fostering the intellectual work of thinking, making, breathing, and dancing, that sustains us and so many others.
Acknowledgments
The inaugural issue of Feral Feminisms was made possible thanks to the commitment, thoroughness, and creative capaciousness of Leyna Lowe and Veronika Novoselova. We would also like to thank the many peer reviewers for their careful reading and collegial engagement with the pieces submitted. This issue was also made possible by the dedication of our copy editors–Esther Edell, Ariel Leutheusser, and Rachel Lyon. We thank the Communications Committee for maintaining the visual presence and coherence of the journal. In particular, we thank Veronika Novoselova for coordinating the promotion of the journal on and beyond our social media, Landon Whittaker for the dynamic graphic design of the print version of the issue, and Jenna Danchuk for serving as our creative liaison. We would like to thank the York University Graduate Students’ Association (YUGSA) for their financial support. Thank you also to David Buchanan from Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature for providing us with invaluable and generous advice on how to get a journal going. Finally, the issue would not have been possible without the collaboration of the contributors who provided us with thoughtful dialogues on the politics of resistance.
Works Cited
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text 79.22 (2004): 101-114.
Get involved!
We are recruiting, on an ongoing basis, peer reviewers and experienced copy editors. We also accept proposals for guest editing special issues on any topic of relevance to Feral Feminisms’ aims and scope.
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