Abstract
With Gratitude
At this pivotal time for Affilia, we first give thanks to the journal’s outgoing editors in chief, Dr. Noël Busch-Armendariz and Dr. Deb Ortega, for their peerless leadership during a period of growth and rising impact for the journal. Among their many accomplishments was the establishment of the consulting board of editors, an expansion of the existing editorial board structure that allowed the journal to effectively manage the volume of submissions which doubled during their tenure. Perhaps more importantly, the addition of new consulting board members widened the breadth of content-specific knowledge within the board structure while ensuring that feminist principles in social work guided the review of manuscript. With the able support of associate editor Dr. Susan Chandler and editorial assistants Lindsay Morris, Karin Wachter, and Laurie Cook Heffron, they established a well-ordered system that resulted in both a more timely and rigorous peer-review process. Their success in upholding the journal’s commitment to feminist leadership was demonstrated in their steadfast provision of collaborative mentorship to junior and mid-career feminist scholars as well as the creation of the Distinguished Feminist Scholarship and Praxis in Social Work Award to focus well-deserved attention to excellence in feminist scholarship. Last and not least, the powerful, topical editorials they generated issue after issue challenged us to expand the limits of feminist praxis. We will sincerely miss their collective wisdom and unfailing comradeship.
Unwavering Commitment
“It is with great hope and enthusiasm that we begin our term as the new Editorial team for Affilia: Women and Social Work, social work’s flagship feminist journal.” With these words, we began the original draft of our first communication as Affilia’s editorial team, a few months prior to the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In the fraught days that followed, we found ourselves questioning whether we could, in all honesty, still espouse such sentiments. We determined, ultimately, that we could and would do so, though their shape and tenor seemed irretrievably different; hope had begun to crystalize into resolve, and enthusiasm was being transmuted into something resembling fervor. We remain unwavering in our support of Affilia’s commitment to “[g]iving voice to the myriad ways in which feminist practice and praxis manifest in social work” (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/affilia/journal200881#description). Our resolution in the aftermath of the U.S. election, much as it was the day before it, is not only to continue to honor the journal’s commitment to creating space for a wide range of feminist social work scholarship that embraces activism and advances practice but to propel this commitment forward. As three “nasty” women of color navigating our way in social work, academia, and the gendered and racist societies of which both are part, we wish, ardently, to incite recognition of the exigency for realizing these commitments.
In times of tumult and fear such as these, it is easy to imagine that the work of a scholarly journal, whatever its political aims may be, is an insignificant cog in the academic machinery; that times such as these demand action and activism instead. We argue fervently that resistance must and does take many forms; activism must be understood to be not only multivocal but also multimodal. Research and scholarship that challenge the center while claiming and reclaiming the margins are as necessary as grassroots organizing and street-level protests. Scholarship—the development of new ideas and different ways of understanding the world as well as the critical analysis of the naturalized—is indeed action. The generation of alternative forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that contest entrenched dominant narratives have always been understood in feminism as deeply consequential political action.
Contesting Certainties
“All Members Are Women”
Affilia was created in 1986 to claim a particular kind of public space missing in social work literature. While women scholars did not, in general, have trouble publishing in social work, they did experience a specific difficulty in publishing feminist analysis “about women” (Bernard, Dinerman, & Sancier, 1999, p. 274). A planning group of 12 women “identified with feminist issues, whose work had been published, and who represented a variety of racial, ethnic, professional, geographic, and sexual orientations” took on the challenge of carving out that space, in which women scholars could publish articles written “as women, about women, for women” (Meyer, 1996, p. 141). Defining the borders of the particular space claimed by the journal—specifying what counted as, for, and about “women”—has never, however, been a simple or a settled matter. In 1996, Editor in Chief Carol H. Meyer noted that the editorial board had “struggled for 10 years to define feminism” and had “succeeded only in agreeing to start with the idea of ‘feminisms’” (p. 141) with an intent for diversity and inclusiveness in its board membership as well as the scope of its publications. Ultimately, Meyer averred, the only common thread the board members shared was their commitment to feminist issues, and the fact “that all the members are women” (p. 143).
Under their leadership, as Drs. Ortega and Busch-Armendariz (2016) have eloquently explained in their last editorial, the Affilia editorial board has begun the important task of critically examining this gendered category for and upon which the journal was built. We have begun to grapple “with the realization that the woman focus of Affilia was riddled with cisgenderism as a practice although not necessarily as a policy” (p. 403). Clearly, as a journal, we must move beyond essentialist, exclusionary identity politics of which binary gender categories are a part. The emerging politics of pronoun disclosures, a driving edge of new contestations of belonging and recognition, challenge us to interrupt our participation in procedures, patterns, and practices that persist in reifying exclusionary, binary constructions of gender. The appalling rates of violence across the globe perpetrated on trans and gender nonconforming bodies, especially those of trans women of color, tell us that it is a matter of critical importance. How to put these realizations into practice, as a journal and a profession, how to acknowledge the continuing political need to underscore the category of “woman” as subject without resedimenting and reinforcing gender binary in our practices, remains far less clear.
Many former and current board members who have dedicated their lives to contesting the economic, political, social, and symbolic violence targeting women and girls, qua their gendered bodies, remind us that we do not live in a postgender world. The struggle, as the phrase goes, is real for billions across the globe who identify and are identified as women and experience gendered persecution because of that identification. In recent years, Affilia has reached for intersecting and incommensurable feminist agendas, issues, and research, strived for an international readership and the publication of subject matters written by and for scholars from outside North America and Europe. It would simplify matters for us to argue that this important goal, with which the journal continues to struggle for a multiplicity of reasons both financial and epistemological, is what complicates the problematic of delimiting the gendered borders of the journal’s space. We could argue that the significance of the term women varies across settings across the globe, with the subtle inference that we, in the center, have moved on from such a need and our political goals are hampered by the margins of the globe. But we do not need to look beyond the stunningly misogynistic actions of the president-elect (at the time of this writing), and the thoughts articulated by his ardent supporters highlighting the shameful prevalence of violence and sexual assault of women and girls, especially those of color, in the United States and Canada, to know that the forces of objectification and subjugation of women are alive and well in the West as well as the rest of the world.
Feminist scholarship, of course, covers vast and contested theoretical landscapes; claims and critiques of what constitutes feminist scholarship are always informed by subjectivities that articulate them and the respective location and point in time in which they are positioned. How then do we forge a space in which such a diversity of perspectives and positionalities can be acknowledged and respected but also examined and challenged? How do we trouble the epistemological certainty underlying the assertion that “all members are women,” contest the salience of gendered identity categories, the very premise of woman as subject, all without undoing the undeniable need to argue for the rights of women? The feminist scholar (Hesse-Biber, 2007) asks, What does acknowledging difference mean to feminist researchers? Does embracing difference mean there is no identity politics for women? What are the consequences of embracing difference for research praxis? How do feminist researchers engage with issues of difference in their research and activist pursuits without losing the power of a gendered analysis? (p. 538).
Radical Epistemological Inquiry
Arguably, the most important element of the kinds of feminist scholarship we are calling for is a radical epistemological inquiry. Many social work scholars have and continue to produce rich, robust, theoretically grounded, critical, creative, and participatory feminist research. We believe, however, that current feminist scholarship in social work, as a whole, tends to present overly simplistic claims to feminisms; much of what gets called feminist research in social work is “feminist because I say so” (Orme, 2003, p. 131) and not because it makes explicit and clear feminist claims theoretically, epistemologically, or methodologically. We agree that much (though certainly not all) feminist social work research remains atheoretical (Gringeri, Wahab, & Anderson-Nathe, 2010; Wahab, Anderson-Nathe, & Gringeri, 2012), reinforces rather than challenges binary thinking, particularly around gender (Gringeri et al., 2010), and lags significantly behind other disciplines in terms of incorporating critical perspectives and methodologies (Bryant, 2016; Gringeri et al., 2010). Thirty years ago, the founders of Affilia claimed a space for and about women that did not exist in social work scholarship. While the need for a space in social work that allows for different ways and means and voices is more urgent than ever, the alternative space we imagine today cannot be the same as that imagined in 1986. In our view, impelling that claimed space forward in today’s social work scholarship—a space sharply delimited by the neoliberal logic of the increasingly corporatized university setting—means that Affilia must provide room for those thorny theoretical, epistemological, and methodological examinations that do not fit within that illogic. Affilia, far more than any other social work journal, does already do this, but mainly by default. Our intent is to do so more proactively. We would like to see Affilia continue to grow to become that space where new, groundbreaking ideas and hitherto unimagined ways of knowing can and will be shared, debated, and stringently weighed.
Resolutions
Twenty years ago, in 1996, the Editor in Chief Emma Gross laid out her hopes for the journal and the profession at large. I hope that a 21st-century-oriented Affilia will help all of us want to reenter the fray-to recommit to those feminist and democratic ideals that are concerned with improving the quality of life for everyone. Along with just about every other group, the profession of social work has been in retreat from its democratic, liberal, and change-oriented agenda since at least 1980. Now, however, may be just the time to pull ourselves up out of the repressive muck we’re in and fight back (Gross, 1996, p. 406).
The love and hope for justice for all communicated in an “Open letter to America by 100 women of color” shortly after the election (https://www.our100.org/) inspires our resolve to sustain Affilia’s feminist commitments. We also draw inspiration from current political and grassroots organizing that are feminist in their values and aims, as they tackle intersecting oppressions of Black Lives Matter, We Give Consent, Palestinian solidarity work, and the unprecedented gathering of dozens of tribes to protect the land, waters, and people from pipeline development on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in Canon Ball, North Dakota. Bryant (2016) suggests that by expanding its engagement with intersectionality theory and analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative approaches to social work problems and issues, not only will feminist social work researchers find their places at the broader feminist research tables, but social work commitments to equity and social justice may also be deepened through robust research. Social work must critically examine its relationship to settler colonialism, to unsettle innocence, and engage with what is incommensurable (Tuck and Yang, 2012) across our differences as a necessary path for solidarity. As social work anticipates a Trump agenda—part of a worldwide resurgence of white supremacist antidemocratic neoliberal agendas that disenfranchise so many—we must refuse further cooptation by state systems that perpetuate violence and oppression. We invite you to join us in our efforts—to rethink, to reexamine, to challenge and decenter, and thus to reshape the discourses of social work in these dangerous times. We must work to ensure that the charge that Dr. Gross laid out 20 years ago, “that the profession of social work has been in retreat from its democratic, liberal, and change-oriented agenda” will not resonate 20 years hence.