Locating the complexities of feminist Europe (original) (raw)

2012, European Journal of Women's Studies

When the European Journal of Women's Studies was first set up, one its main aims was to offer a space in which specifically European takes on and approaches to issues central to feminist praxis and Women's Studies scholarship could be published and offered as part of an ever more complex but increasingly urgent global conversation. Such a global conversation needed to be built around a conception of feminist praxis as multi-centred and multi-sited in a way that rejected a centre-margin geometry of feminism with the consequent hierarchies of status and import that follow such representational orderings of emancipatory vision and struggle. At the time chief among the journal's interlocutors were feminist debates and forms of scholarship emerging from the USA, and perhaps also Canada, conceived in an implicit epistolary relation which simultaneously attempted to undermine a privileged position being accorded to feminist thought emerging from the USA, especially in regard to theory, yet which also slightly undermined the attempt to situate European feminist scholarship and practice in a global field of differing yet interconnected gender dynamics. Despite this tension the aim of the EJWS to 'locate' European feminisms remains central to the journal's project, as has been recently emphasized in its pages. Such 'location' is multi-dimensional and constituted in an endless dynamic of normative stabilization and contestation across multiple registers but three dimensions of this 'location' are worth mentioning here. One kind of location involves situating European feminisms and Women's Studies in a global frame and dynamic, including their connections to counter-global flows, alliances and visions of which the current Occupy camps and protests that circle the globe are a high profile example. Second, is to locate in time and the temporal, remembering that the temporal is multi-dimensional and involves non-linear movements as well as linear movements of chronological time. As such locating historically will involve biographical (individual and collective), secular, sacred, psychic and embodied time/ temporalities as well as political, ideological, productive, technological times/temporalities. Finally, locating also involves the simultaneous and highly complex task of conceiving European feminisms as a socio-cultural-ideological formation, i.e. locating it in terms of general patterns, preoccupations, modes of practice, orientations towards that deemed 'other' to itself, etc. and as a set of highly differentiated and heterogeneous fields of sociocultural-political-psychic-institutional-ideological formations with varying and shifting constellations of gender, class, ethno-religious, sexual, bodily, aesthetic and moral relations. This poses feminist practitioners, including Women's Studies scholars, the complex task 436224J NT19210.