Critical Feminist Scholarship as a Roadmap Toward a Just Future *

Welcome to a special issue of Affilia driven by the question: What do critical feminisms mean for social work theorizing, research, practice, and education today? What began as a collaboration between the Affilia Editorial Board and the Council of Social Work Education's Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education, also known as the Women's Council, evolved into a call for a reimagination of critical feminist social work considering the dramatic global changes in recent years and those on the horizon. Our call for papers resulted in an abundant collection of abstracts across geography, identities, and issue areas, resulting in the 17 exemplary and provocative manuscripts authored by 33 feminist scholars contained in this special issue.

In the opening article “How We Do the Work Is the Work: Building an Intersectional Queer Praxis for Critical Feminist Scholarship,” Gita Mehrotra asks readers to consider what it might mean if we, as critical feminist social work scholars, understood the process of our scholarship as more important than its outcomes, which she argues, would best facilitate the realization of our vision for a more just world. To help us in reframing our focus in this way, she asks three questions, which we paraphrase here (1) What if we viewed our critical feminist scholarship as a means to develop a queer praxis that reflects our theoretical and political commitments, as well as our lives more broadly? (2) How can we challenge ourselves to curiously incorporate different ways of being, knowing, and doing into our scholarship? (3) How can we use our scholarship to dismantle oppressive academic norms and expectations? (Mehrotra, 2022). These questions, originally raised in a keynote address at the LGBTQ Research Symposium held by the Center for LGBTQ + Research and Advocacy at the University of Kansas, School of Social Welfare in 2021, also serve as a kind of “keynote” to our special issue.

What is the relevance of queer scholarship as a central frame in critical feminism? Beyond sexuality and gender, the term “queer” has long meant “troubling” what is considered normal.

… I believe that when we are doing the work in ways that challenge, circumvent, trouble, destabilize, and resist neoliberal and normative assumptions of research, productivity, and knowledge we are doing queer scholarship. And, when we do this with an end goal of intersectional liberation—we are doing critical feminist work. (Mehrotra, 2022, p. 2)

In this way, Mehrotra argues that critical feminist scholarship requires us to engage in queer praxis, which means attending to how we do our work in ways that undermine oppressive academic standards that block the liberatory potential of our work. The articles in this special issue present examples of critical feminist scholarship as intersectional queer praxis, and, thus, collectively offer guidance for the essential work ahead.

In This Issue

In addition to being the opening article for this special issue, Gita Mehrotra's keynote address, “How We Do the Work Is the Work: Building an Intersectional Queer Praxis for Critical Feminist Scholarship,” offers a framework for grouping the articles and thus highlights the special issue's key themes and contributions. Integrating slow scholarship with queer lived experiences and critical theoretical lenses, this keynote invites us to “consider what it could look like to build our critical feminist scholarship in the spirit of queer praxis” and delineates four interrelated dimensions of intersectional queer praxis that challenge dominant approaches to academic knowledge production: (1) Reimagining time, (2) centering relationships, community care, and collaboration, (3) embracing complexity and disrupting binaries, and (4) attention to embodiment and emotion. Below, we present a brief overview of the rich and varied articles in this special issue using these four themes as an organizing frame.

Reimagining Time

Embracing the tenet that how we do the work is the work, draws on ideas from slow scholarship (Wahab et al., 2022) including the powerful and provocative invitation to reimagine time. This invitation pushes back on neoliberal “churn” (Goodkind et al., 2023) of productivity, a pace set by “white, hetero-patriarchal, and neoliberal universities” (p. 4). Several articles in our special issue add to this discussion not only through critical research and observation but also by reimagining the spaces they critique in new, multidimensional ways. In “Too Muslim to be a Feminist and Too Feminist to be a Muslim? Locating Lived Experiences of Feminism and Muslimness in Social Work Academe,” Amilah Baksh and Maryam Khan reimagine academic writing at the pace of conversation, using an autoethnographic approach to share narratives of their lived experiences in social work academe in Canada. Not only do they address the unique pressures of Muslim feminists in academia, but also they provide a powerful call to recognize the diversity within categories that are paradoxically included for the sake of diversity.

Miriam Valdovinos, Quenette Walton, and Olubunmi Basirat Oyewuwo also use a collaborative, autoethnographic approach in their piece, “Normal Wasn’t Good: A Collaborative Autoethnography of the Intersectional Experiences of Academic Women of Color Mothering During the Dual Pandemics,” which reflects on mothering among women of color during the dual pandemics of 2020/2021. These authors dialogue about the work, pain, and joy of being academic women of color, arriving at grounded recommendations for universities to help them “reimagine” processes such as tenure to be sustainable in terms of pay and time.

In “Precedents to Think About Social Work in Chile in the Current Uncertain Political Scenario: Reflections from Critical Feminisms,” María Paz Martínez Rubio, Daniela Díaz Bórquez, and Magdalena Calderón Orellana explore the challenges for feminist social work in Chile, given the political transformation process occurring since 2019 and argue that—despite the progress achieved—the main challenge for feminist social work today continues to be male privilege. Here time is considered historically, as the authors reflect on possibilities for change in social work practice and education through a critical feminist perspective, given the political uncertainty that Chile is facing, particularly after the failure of the first constitutional reform effort. Together, the articles in this section prompt us to resist the pressures of the neoliberal university to produce more articles in less time and to instead center our collaborative social change goals as the goal of our scholarship.

Centering Relationships, Community Care, and Collaboration

As Mehrotra notes, striving for power-sharing, reciprocity, and co-creation of knowledge takes time and intentional practice to achieve, but is an essential component in the collaborative relationships that are central to much critical feminist scholarship. Centering care, communities, and relationships in our political and intellectual endeavors, she argues, is an important form of resistance to neoliberal forces. Several of the articles in our special issue focus on forms of care and connection both within their substantive focus and their methodological approaches. For example, in “Epistemic Peerhood in Trans Social Work Research,” Vern Harner argues that for trans scholarship to continue to grow and produce the most culturally attuned results, social work academia must utilize community-based and collaborative research processes in which trans scholars conducting trans scholarship have epistemic peerhood on research teams.

Luis R. Alvarez-Hernandez and Judith Maria Bermudez present findings from their study about the lived experiences of trans-Latina immigrants who are activists and agents of change in their Southern U.S. communities in “Entre Madres y Comadres: Trans Latina Immigrants Empowering Women Beyond Marianismo.” Specifically, they note the ways in which trans-Latina immigrants and Latina feminists encourage us to see Latinas beyond traditional and stereotypical gender scripts broadly, and, specifically, illuminate the distinction between the traditional motherly role of marianismo and the more collaborative and empowering caregiving role of comadres.

In “No Free Homeland without Free Women: Tal’at's Indigenous Feminist Movement,” Jessica Saba reflects on how the femicide of Israa Ghrayeb mobilized Palestinian feminists to call for an end to gender-based violence and traces the emergence and influence of Tal’at, an Indigenous decolonization movement that challenges the intersecting oppressions queer and female Palestinians face by simultaneously resisting patriarchy and Zionist settler colonialism. Ultimately, Saba's piece is a call to action for feminist social workers to act in solidarity with Tal’at’, and for transnational feminist solidarity.

Brianna Sorenson and Amy Krings explore the history of the fat activist movement, which challenges weight prejudice and advocates for the equitable treatment of individuals with diverse body types, in “Fat Liberation: How Social Workers Can Incorporate Fat Activism to Promote Care and Justice.” The paper is a call to social work educators and practitioners to critically deconstruct anti-fat social norms and to integrate body-positive interventions within micro, mezzo, and macro practice, including connection and community building local or virtual fat-positive spaces.

In “‘Disability Is an Art. It's an Ingenious Way to Live.’: Integrating Disability Justice Principles and Critical Feminisms in Social Work to Promote Inclusion and Anti-Ableism in Professional Praxis,” Ami Goulden, Shanna K. Kattari, Elspeth M. Slayter, and Sarah E. Norris emphasize the centrality of interdependence and collective care within the disability justice movement. In their paper, they draw on significant events such as the impact of climate change and criminal legal systems on disabled people, to map connections between critical feminisms, disability justice principles, and social work values.

Finally, in “The House That Deconstruction Built: Can Post-Structuralism Inform A Liberatory Social Work Praxis?” Giacinta Talarico explores how feminist organizing, scholarship, and activism of the past decade—specifically around the #MeToo movement and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) wars—have impacted social work praxis. At the heart of Talarico's analysis is the recast social work question “Who is worthy of care in the age of neoliberal feminism?”

Embracing Complexity and Disrupting Binaries

Moving away from binaries and towards complexity is a key challenge of critical feminist scholarship (Singh, 2007, p. 4). In “Unsettling Feminism in Social Work: Toward an Indigenous Decolonial Feminism,” Autumn Asher BlackDeer describes U.S. Indigenous decolonial feminism situated within the larger feminist social work landscape, centering the white supremacy and heteropatriarchy of the U.S. settler nation, and calls for the profession to engage in critical strategizing for social change and embodied decolonization. Complexity is a key element in the framework proposed by BlackDeer to move us towards these goals.

Gianinna Munoz-Arce and Mitzi Duboy-Luengo use their piece, “Decolonial Feminism and Practices of Resistance to Sustain Life: Experiences of Women Social Workers Implementing Mental Health Programmes in Chile,” to introduce readers to how the history of social work in Chile has set up boundaries between professionals and service users, remnants of colonial and patriarchal attitudes that continue to pervade the practice landscape, but also how social workers on the ground dismantle, confront, and resist them.

“We Can Only Go so Far’: Employing Intersectionality in Research with Middle-class Black Women and Black Muslim Women” offers a perspective on scholarly development by authors Olubunmi Basirat Oyewuwo and Quenette Walton, noting how the power of intersectionality as an analytic framework that confronts binaries often fails to be matched by its practical application in designing research.

In “Reflections on the Ethical Possibilities and Limitations of Abolitionist Praxis in Social Work” Bethany Jo Murray, Victoria Copeland, and Alan J. Dettlaff explore how the U.S. racial reckoning of 2020 reignited conversations regarding social work's need to realign and reconsider our standing ethical values and principles, including the profession's role within the carceral ecosystem, making a strong case for “disruptive social work.”

In “Resistance as a Foundational Commons: Intersectionality, Transfeminism, and the Future of Critical Feminisms,” Suzanne C. Draper and Reshawna Chapple look at twentieth-century U.S. feminism's exclusionary practice critiquing, among other things, their alignment with patriarchal understandings of gender and sexuality. They argue that critical feminisms must also center the contributions and complex experiences of trans, nonbinary, and queer people that help us to reimagine what it means to be a feminist in a world of free expression.

Attention to Embodiment and Emotion

Attention to embodiment and emotion in critical feminist praxis, challenges mind/body separation and highlights the dangers of disembodied practice. Mehrotra writes:

As queer people, we often have complicated relationships with our bodies and embodiment. This is even more true for those who are queer women, BIPOC, fat, trans, living with disabilities, and aging—our embodiment can feel dangerous, euphoric, dissonant, and thrilling at different times and in different spaces. (p. 9)

Every article in this special issue begins from a place of embodied reflection, as authors describe their position in relation to the dilemmas they explore. Goulden, Kattari, Slayter, and Norris, in their article about disability justice, and Sorenson and Krings’ article on fat liberation highlight embodied intersectional identity and social justice. Munoz-Arce and Duboy-Luengo posit an “embodied objectivity” that counters the dehumanizing practices that people with mental health encounter in Chile. Baksh and Khan use embodiment and standpoint theory to “seize space” for a discussion of the dilemmas of Muslim feminists.

In “‘She Must Be Experimental, Resourceful, and Have Sympathetic Understanding: Toxic White Femininities as a Persona and Performance in School Social Work,” Samantha Guz and Brianna Suslovic use critical discourse analysis to analyze school social work professional association materials from 1906 to 1936, revealing three archetypes of embodied, toxic white femininities in school social work that cast shadows reaching into contemporary practice. In “Becoming Black Womxn through Embodied Inquiry,” e alexander uplifts embodied inquiry, or living out knowledge through the body and/or in its environments through a process of becoming, as an alternative way of knowing, using embodiment as a framework to engage and amplify Black womxn's knowledge in social work. This article explores how embodied inquiry challenges epistemologies and imaginatively asks what it will mean for us to bring our whole selves to research and scholarship.

Conclusion

This special issue of Affilia offers a timely and nuanced critique of our profession and the academy. It also offers a vision and a roadmap for a more just future. And it harkens to our 2010 special issue of Affilia which similarly sought “to reinvigorate our profession's commitments to social justice and social change” through a special issue on critical feminisms in social work (Gringeri & Roche, 2010, p. 338). Much has changed since that time.

We have and are still now collectively experiencing the associated traumas of a global pandemic and climate crisis which continuously expose multiple layers of inequity across the world—inequities in access to healthcare, employment, and the most basic means necessary for survival. These recent years have also demonstrated how the dismissal of our collective well-being and investments in care for each other have left individuals and entire peoples to the increasingly lethal consequences of these catastrophes. In this new era, a turn to critical feminisms highlights the structural violence that undergirds the production of gender and the continued disregard for racialized and otherwise marginalized lives within and outside that gender regime.

Critical feminisms provide not only an analytical lens for critique but, more importantly, guides to sustainable and liberatory futures. In response, this special issue showcases generative turning points for both a varied and collective understanding of the scope of critical feminisms in social work, inviting readers to further develop, a practice of “continuing to grow and stretch into new ways of being and doing in our work” (Mehrotra, 2023, p. 3). The scholars in this special issue, representing a breadth of geographies and positionalities, provide multiple pathways forward. Now it is our responsibility as feminist leaders, theorists, researchers, practitioners, and educators to actualize the vision of a just and liberatory future.