(PDF) Introduction: Protest

Introduction: Protest Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, Deepti Misri WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 46, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2018, pp. 14-27 (Article) Published by The Feminist Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2018.0029 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706793 Access provided by University Of Colorado @ Boulder (13 Dec 2018 21:23 GMT) Introduction: Protest Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? —Lee Maracle, Ravensong One way of telling the story of feminism is to tell it as a story of protest: protest against, protest for, protest within. Indeed, in the West, the current moment is often hailed as “the age of protest,” one in which the recent women’s marches and the #MeToo movement, originating in the United States but soon spreading globally, were seen as a culmination of efforts to fulfill feminism’s liberatory potential. Such declarations, however, depend on a very particular notion of what counts as protest, and indeed feminist protest, which often reifies the Global North as an originary site or dis- regards the feminist relevance of movements that do not explicitly fore- ground gender or women as their primary agenda. For this special issue, we asked contributors to consider how popular “age of protest” narratives risk obscuring other key moments and sites of long-standing protest, par- ticularly when led by racialized or otherwise minoritized populations. There is no denying that protest has been revitalized by mass partic- ipation on a larger scope than has been seen in the almost two decades since massive protests spawned global networks that came to be known as the alter-globalization movement (Davis 2016; Desai 2013). Such protests have been diverse in issues and tactics: from the revolutions of the Arab Spring to the ceaseless anti-occupation protests in Kashmir and Palestine, the Black Lives Matter movement, Idle No More, the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States and Canada, and student-led movements such as Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa—to WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 46: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2018) © 2018 by Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri. All rights reserved. 14 Introduction: Protest 15 name only a select few. Although feminists have been active in every one of the abovementioned protests, only mass protests that explicitly fore- ground gendered vulnerabilities—such as the anti-rape protests in India and the #NiUnaMas and anti-feminicide movements in Latin America, or even the women’s marches in the United States—tend to be characterized as “feminist protest.” However, the anti-racist, anti-colonial, and environ- mental movements mentioned above have all thrown up key questions for feminism, just as feminism has raised questions for these movements. Additionally, prevalent “age of protest” narratives almost exclusively revolve around the protest march on the streets as a key visual element, often overshadowing other temporalities, sites, and modes of protest. However, the protest march is usually only the most visible moment in an ongoing history of struggle fought on the ground through a much larger repertoire of tactics often comprising much less visible acts of individual and organized resistance. Beyond the streets, the digital domain has been a lively site of protest and organizing, particularly in zones where the pres- ence of protesting bodies on the streets may be met with deadly violence. We must also be aware of those resisters whose bodies cannot be at the protest march for multiple reasons, not limited to precarious labor, citi- zenship status, the prison-industrial complex, and disability (Block et al. 2016; Hedva 2016). We therefore invited our contributors to think broad- ly and critically about the relationship between feminism and protest as one that emerges on and beyond the time and space of “the streets,” and within and outside the sphere of protests that center questions of gender and sexuality. As we assembled this issue, we were also acutely aware that many rich histories of protest by working-class and poor women, immigrant women, women of color, trans women, and nonbinary subjects, as well as anti- colonial, Indigenous, and transnational feminists, still remain obscured. While these histories of protest are deserving of scholarly attention, our aim in this special issue was not to simply expand available analyses of pro- tests from a representative range of movements and sites but rather to step back and first ask: What counts as protest, and indeed as feminist protest? How might expanding the definition of protest beyond notions of agency that center masculine and ableist “action” in the public sphere expand hori- zons for creating social change? How can we think broadly and critically about the relationship between feminism and protest as one that emerges from multiple and overlapping practices, locations, and communities? 16 Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri In order to first fundamentally redefine what is seen as protest and build a new historical narrative, we began with Audre Lorde’s reminder that some of us “were not meant to survive” (1978, 32), to insist on the practice of survival as protest in a necropolitical age (Mbembe 2003). Sur- vival is not simply existence, or the act of “getting by,” but instead is the refusal of extermination, of disposability, of erasure. Drawing on Anishi- naabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance, Richards and Paine- mal note in their article in this issue, “An active sense of presence, then, is resistance in itself.” Survival—survivance—is a refusal of victimhood, an act of creative and collective protest. Survival as refusal is a radical act of embodied protest, refusing death, and in turn, opening up a broader politics that refuses to accept the legit- imacy of the state—to grant rights, services, to “represent” (A. Simpson 2014). This politics is a further challenge to frames of protest that demand inclusion, which is a type of acceptance of the dominance that created the exclusions/erasures in the first place (Gilmore 2007). The politics of re- fusal is not a politics of disengagement; rather, it looks beyond the state frame to measure success, reinterpreting histories and producing new sub- jectivities and social relationships that in turn create new political imagi- naries and ways of being (L. B. Simpson 2017). The Zapatista movement for Indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico, has been a source of inspi- ration for many others since their uprising in 1994. Other recent move- ments—of the precariat, local and transnational practices of mutual aid and horizontality, movements for decolonization and Indigenous sover- eignty and autonomy—exemplify this vision and reorient their struggles as ones of community self-defense, clearly exemplified by the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) activists’ rejection of the label “protesters” in favor of the term “water protectors.” As we open up what counts as protest, we must also then question who is seen as a protester, and who holds legitimacy—in the social as well as legal sense—as a protester. Although digital and “hashtag” protest has been critiqued as “not real activism,” the recent global spread of protest against sexual violence through the #MeToo hashtag has shown us once again that hashtag activism can actually be a powerful tool, particularly in cases where those who are affected and marginalized do not have a voice in the public sphere and/or face repercussions for speaking out. While much of the initial media attention was focused on actors and executives, it has been more recently used in the U.S. and other places to focus on violence in the workplace, at the border, etc. This movement also exposed Introduction: Protest 17 long-standing tensions in feminist movements around race and class, as the prior coinage of the hashtag in 2006 by the Black feminist activist Tarana Burke had to be pointedly restored, when the actress Alyssa Milano was credited with popularizing it in 2017. Similar to critiques of social media as a forum of protest, the question of who is seen as a “legitimate” protester also came up with particular poi- gnancy around the 2017 women’s marches in the United States, where viral internet photographs of police officers in pussy hats smiling with white women marchers contrasted sharply with the images (and indeed the reality) of riot police confronting Black Lives Matter protesters and #NoDAPL water protectors—a reminder that racialized subjects are the ones least likely to be perceived as legitimate protesters, by the state or the general public. One trend that marks the state response to recent protests spanning the globe is mainstream demand that protests must be “peaceful” and “lawful,” even as what they protest are circumstances that are often unlawful (e.g., Israeli settlements in Gaza, which are illegal according to international law), including sometimes legalized violence by powerful militarized states against their communities. Protesters who favor actions outside of a limited repertoire of “nonviolent,” state-sanctioned modes— such as permitted marches and petitions—run the risk of becoming crim- inalized, perceived as threats, or labeled “terrorists.” Such demands for decorous forms of protest cast the only legitimate protester as one who in fact refuses refusal, who disrupts nothing in the status quo. At the same time, utilizing peaceful modes of protest is no guarantee against such char- acterizations, as seen in the case of the young feminists arrested in China for handing out anti–sexual violence stickers, or the political assassination of Marielle Franco, a Black, queer councilwoman from the favela of Maré, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We can see in all these cases how the fiction of the “legitimate protester” implicitly seeks to anchor protest firmly to a politics of recognition via a reform-oriented approach that favors inclusion into violent institutions. Once we have begun to question what a protest is and who a protester is, this special issues urges a reexamination of what makes a protest “fem- inist.” As discussed above, although women and/or feminists have been core organizers in recent mass protests, very few are considered “femi- nist.” Yet a protest need not explicitly be about “women’s issues” in order to be feminist. Resisting colonialism, racism, classism, state and nonstate violence, and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, environmentalism, im- migrant communities, and working-class people are central concerns of 18 Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri feminism, as they are all deeply tied to gender oppression and hierarchy. A major motivation for us in editing this issue has been to recognize that feminist protest encompasses so much more than the familiar issues of reproductive rights and violence against women—as deeply important as those issues are. The insistence that a movement explicitly foreground gender both overlooks how many systems of oppression rely on heterosex- ism in their functioning, and excludes women, trans, and gender-noncon- forming people who struggle within their communities. Finally, the scene of protest calls for a deep critical reflection on ges- tures of allyship and solidarity through which communities of protest are formed and extended across borders and difficult inter- and intragroup di- vides of race, caste, class, disability, gender, and/or sexuality. There exist ample cautions in feminist scholarship as well as activist archives about the potential pitfalls of well-meant but ill-conceived gestures of solidarity, particularly those gestures articulated through idioms of rescue by fem- inists located in the West on behalf of women elsewhere (Ahmed 1993; Bouteldja 2010). Another area of reflection that emerged from Native and Indigenous movements, and has spread more broadly, calls for a shift in the language of solidarity from one of allyship to accomplices (Indigenous Action Media 2014). Vertical gestures of solidarity from outside commu- nities of protest are also frequently grounded in expressions of empathy that, as Saidiya V. Hartman (1997) has noted, may risk displacing the very subjects on whose behalf empathy is extended. And within communities of struggle, horizontal lines of solidarity may be suddenly cut by vertical lines of difference, a reminder of the indispensability of intersectional ap- proaches to solidarity work within and without communities, as Lovell as well as Berg and Carbin show us in this issue. Despite these pitfalls, we submit, reflective and thoughtful forms of transnational as well as local solidarity are crucial for protest movements to succeed. Further, this fun- damental redefinition of protest directs us to recognize that the individual and collective moments of failure that will inevitably mark the scene of solidarity can also be generative of new creative spaces and strategies. Survival/Refusal Gathered under the theme of “Survival/Refusal,” the first four articles orient us to thinking about the question of what counts as protest. Here, the practice of repetition of everyday life can work as a protest that unset- Introduction: Protest 19 tles the workings of power, whether state or interpersonal. We open the section with Patricia Richards and América Millaray Painemal Morales’s article “The Life Histories of Mapuche Women Elders as Protest,” pre- senting the life histories as narratives of protest and the narrative as pro- test. Huibin A. Chew’s “Bringing the Revolution Home: Filipino Urban Poor Women, ‘Neoliberal Imperial Feminisms,’ and a Social Movements Approach to Domestic Abuse” directs us to view Metro Manila women’s federation GABRIELA’s concept of “survivor-organizer” as an action and positionality deployed in community resistance as they link their work to other scales by also pursuing a broader Left movement against class and national oppression. In “Home and Homing as Resistance: Surviv- al of LGBTQ Latinx Migrants,” Sandibel Borges presents the concept of survival as protest as LGBTQ Latinx migrants recreate a space of “home” transnationally, but one that she characterizes by the more radical practice of homing “a resistance that pushes against patriarchal, cis-hetero-patriar- chal, capitalist, and ableist systems that build and maintain borders, deem- ing racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies disposable.” We close this section with Hafsa Kanjwal’s essay “Between Resistance and Resilience: ‘Protest’ Photography in Kashmir,” focusing on the work of Masrat Zahra and Durdana Bhat, two Kashmiri women photojournalists. In this piece, their compelling photographs serve as a protest, as “counter-memories” to a dominant narrative that would erase the Kashmiri people’s struggle for self-determination from view. Methodologically, these articles foreground the importance of oral his- tories and photography as sites of social memory that serve to expand our notions of protest in order to open new possibilities for the present. While the histories presented in Richards and Painemal’s article give us insight into the ongoing Mapuche struggle for self-determination and against colonialism, they also challenge accepted movement stories of struggle and show that the women’s narratives are key to how these struggles are theorized. Chew’s analysis centers the voices of “survivor-organizers” through oral history and extensive fieldwork in Metro Manila with urban poor women organized in GABRIELA. Likewise, Borges’s oral histories with LGBTQ Latinx people centers survival as a strategy, a creative act that LGBTQ Latinx people deploy against the multiple forms of violence present in their lives as migrants. In Kanjwal’s essay, her discussion of Kashmiri women photojournalists demonstrates that their photographs precisely in the nontypical protest scenes of the routines of everyday life, 20 Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri and centrally Muslim faith practices, underscore a refusal to erase Kash- miri struggles for self-determination. This enactment of survival, under extreme state violence and constant threat, is itself a political act of protest. The contributors also push us to discard notions of social movements as homogenous space, focusing on the relationship between individual and collective demands. When the normative condition of home can be a threat, Borges’s elaboration of homing creates new possibilities that dis- rupt borders and boundaries on multiple scales. The narratives presented in Richards and Painemal’s article detail elders’ survival and refusal as a creative decolonizing praxis to counter the interlocking forms of “colonial violence, state violence, everyday symbolic violence, and interpersonal vi- olence” in Mapuche women’s lives. GABRIELA’s work in Manila, as Chew shows, dialogues with U.S. feminist of color political traditions, as both refuse to capitulate to carceral logics, and in the Philippines with what she calls “neoliberal imperialist” feminism, which is exposed as upholding the structures of power it claims to challenge. In Kanjwal’s essay, we see the in- terplay of the individual and collective as these women photographers are themselves engaged in protest with their work. They are also the subjects of their photographs and are additionally subject to harassment as women from the very communities of struggle of which they are a part. Each of these articles points to the tensions within movements and communities, and the complex negotiations needed to refuse the frame the state offers of an either/or social justice in favor of something more transformative. Discordances Articles in this section draw out the tensions that emerge in the cases in the previous section—tensions that inevitably exist within movements and gestures of protest. Protest movements can be at once sites of both tremendous harmony and tremendous discordance: the feeling of being in tune with a larger collective may be suddenly—or gradually—undercut by harsh and discordant tones. Lovell’s “‘Everyone Gets a Blister’: Sexism, Gender Empowerment, and Race in the People’s Park Movement” focuses on two examples from the 1960s to the 1980s. In People’s Park in Berkeley, California, white women and women of color experienced empowerment and exclusion within spaces of insurgent park creation in distinct ways. The visual culture of the park figured the laboring/able-bodied male as the Introduction: Protest 21 iconic protester while women’s working bodies were sexualized and pre- sented as objects of the male gaze. Additionally, Lovell details a proclivity to “play Indian” by white park creators through native dress and campfire performances while park creators of color “could literally re-cover gentri- fied spaces with symbols of anticolonial resistance.” Here, Lovell suggests how discourses of multiculturalism were intertwined with discourses of settler colonialism in this euphoric moment. In “Troubling Solidarity: Anti-racist Feminist Protest in a Digitalized Time” by Linda Berg and Maria Carbin, race takes on a more central role in determining who is seen as having agency in protest. Berg and Carbin discuss a hashtag protest called in 2013 by Muslim feminist activists in Sweden, encouraging “all sisters” to veil themselves to show solidarity with Muslim women who suffer harassment. Berg and Carbin show the discourses around these well-intentioned protests as nevertheless index- ing an entrenched mentality where the subject of solidarity was white by default, and where “non-white women are less likely to be seen as doing solidarity,” being positioned exclusively as victims of discrimination, “as though they could not act in solidarity with women who wear a veil.” The visual emergence of white women as the iconic bearers of solidarity in protest parallels the emergence of white men as the iconic protesters in the People’s Park movement, and Berg and Carbin remind us of the easy cooptation of political goals as well as labor within feminist and anti-rac- ist protest cultures. Berg and Carbin’s “Troubling Solidarity” and Lovell’s “Everyone Gets a Blister” suggest the need for a continual acknowledg- ment and interrogation of the inevitably divergent positionalities of those who come together in protest, reminding us that well-intentioned gestures of solidarity in protest are never enough in themselves. Technologies The final four contributors build on the expansive view of protest and its tensions of the previous sections, and turn their lenses to the tools of pro- test. Each article focuses on the bodies in and of protest—physical and digital. The tools of protest discussed here are diverse: song as an under- theorized technique; looking at complicating visibility as a tool of protest; affect, here in the dual form of sadness/carefree within digital subcultures; and error, or “glitch,” as resistance in virtual dimensions. Julia Cox’s “Never 22 Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri a Wasted Hum: The Freedom Singing of Fannie Lou Hamer,” reconcep- tualizes Hamer’s 1964 Democratic National Convention speech as sonic protest. In “Visual Practices, Affect and the Body: The Story of a Night Vigil in Kerala, India,” Navaneetha Mokkil focuses on a nighttime protest in India to analyze the technologies of looking. Heather Mooney’s “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls: Affect, Race, (Dis)Possession and Protest” turns to virtual spaces, examining the digital rise of the “Carefree Black Girl” and the “(White) Sad Girl.” The section ends with Andie Shab- bar’s “Queer-Alt-Delete: Glitch Art as Protest Against the Surveillance Cis-tem,” which investigates how “glitch art” can use error to unleash po- tentials for social change. By orienting us to think more about these technologies, these articles open spaces for thinking through new possibilities for embodied resis- tance as protest. Cox, for example, identifies how Hamer consciously used sonic techniques of “freedom singing” simultaneously in the struggle to end segregation laws, and to address the gendered hierarchy of Black polit- ical leadership by centering Black women’s lives inside the utopic vision of the Civil Rights movement. Mokkil’s analysis of visual and print responses to a night vigil in Kerala challenges the conventional feminist (and West- ern) view of visibility as agency, which indexes a subject who owns her body and deploys it in a rational public sphere as an act of defiance. Instead of a neat linkage between visibility and agency, Mokkil’s engagement with media technologies demonstrates the unpredictable and nonrational con- sequences to seeing and being seen: in supporting the struggle by landless people for cultivable land, the middle-class and privileged women partici- pating were unexpectedly seen not as respectable protesters but as immor- al, obscene, and pornographic. Bodies in public can be framed in many unpredictable ways, even when the people protesting intend their bodies to be sites of resistance. Therefore, claiming visibility as a political strategy can be risky and complicated. As such, feminist theorizing of protest must take into account how, through technologies of looking, women’s bodies are affective sites. Embodied performance as both resistance and compliance is further explored in Mooney’s study of the Sad Girl and the Carefree Black Girl and Shabbar’s theorizing of sexual surveillance and data collection. Rein- troducing the Latina/x origins of the Sad Girl and adaptations that align the Sad Girl with white consumerism, Mooney demonstrates how the Latina/x Sad Girl can be a “symbol of solidarity and intersectional protest Introduction: Protest 23 to colonization, machismo, white feminism, and the devaluation of the young and feminine” while some white feminist deployments limit the potential of the Sad Girl as resistance to normative expectations of the am- bitious and empowered “can-do” girl. The Carefree Black Girl and “Black Girl Magic” represent a different site of affective and racial performance/ protest that invert the stereotype of Black girls as “at risk,” thereby dislocat- ing white supremacist constructions of Black girl/womanhood and emo- tion. Following Mooney’s focus on the digital, Shabbar investigates how “queer bodies, trans people, and could-be-Muslim-terrorists . . . interact within various biometric surveillance assemblages.” Her own experiences as a white and Pakistani mixed queer woman inform her ongoing glitch art project. By defining “glitch” as a mode of protest that “manifests when a rigid relation between two elements fails,” Shabbar shows how this act of glitching can use error to escape the “cis-tem” of binary control by queerly corrupting unstable surveillance technologies. Placing Shabbar’s explora- tion in conversation with the sonic, visual, and digital practices examined by Cox, Mokkil, and Mooney widen our view to include the way that tools of protest can become technologies of embodied power, bringing light to new possibilities for resistance not commonly considered protest. “We Must Love Each Other and Support Each Other”: Revisiting Assata Shakur In the “Classics Revisited” section we turn to Assata Shakur’s “To My Peo- ple,” published in 1973 by the Third World Women’s Alliance newspaper Triple Jeopardy. We open the section with artist Melanie Cervantes’s 2013 print that underscores Assata’s continued presence in today’s movements. Her essay/manifesto/call to action is woven with many of the threads we’ve drawn together in this issue, and is a sharp reminder that our work is unfinished and new patterns and meanings will be added to our collective histories of protest. A reflection written for this issue by Angela Y. Davis, Shakur’s contemporary in struggle, highlights the reality that Assata’s very existence is a threat to power: as a Black woman who not only challenged the limits on her life and freedom offered by the white supremacist U.S. state, but who also won, refusing to submit to a form of justice that would have surely killed her. Davis reminds us that despite the historical continu- ities of racist violence, Assata’s essay points to our individual and collective power to come together and create new worlds. 24 Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, herself a scholar who has faced legal cen- sure for her advocacy for Palestinian rights, wrote her response while traveling through occupied Palestine. While cautioning us not to erase the specificity of the Black liberation struggle from “To My People,” she shows us how deeply Assata’s words travel across these distinct contexts, resonating strongly with the anti-colonial Palestinian struggle. BYP 100 (Black Youth Project 100) National Director Charlene A. Carruthers of- fers a hopeful response to Shakur’s essay, linking histories and possibilities for imagining and fighting for worlds otherwise for Black liberation strug- gles today. Technology has opened up circuits of communication and new ways to share and learn from the past. In these circuits, words circulate and are adapted by movements, and layers with new meanings accrue as they travel through and across time and space. By including Assata’s essay and these responses, we hope to participate in a protest that Abdulhadi terms a “call and response praxis,” to echo Carruthers and “declare a commitment to fighting, winning, loving and protecting each other,” invocations that call us into being in community. Digital Chronicles Our “Digital Chronicles” section features prose pieces from public in- tellectuals in Kashmir and Kenya, each suggesting the manner in which the digital domain shapes the possibilities of protest and respatializes the sphere of politics. Fozia S. Qazi’s “Curfew Diary—Kashmir, 2016,” for in- stance, offers a potent reminder of the supple and sometimes contiguous relationships between protests online and “on the streets,” particularly in zones where occupying powers cement their territorial powers by disrupt- ing mobile and broadband connectivity, enforcing what Helga Tawil-Souri has called “digital occupation” (2012). Qazi’s “diary” first appeared as a series of Facebook posts in 2016, chronicling one of the longest periods of curfew across Kashmir, marking poignantly the role of digital technol- ogies in negotiating the time-space of curfew. Qazi’s diary also serves as a crucial feminist archive, as she registers women’s participation in the pro- tests, while refuting the feminist affectations of the occupying state via the discourse of “women’s empowerment.” Nanjala Nyabola’s “Kenyan Feminisms in the Digital Age” offers a window into Kenyan feminists’ activism on Twitter, tracing some of the Introduction: Protest 25 tangible successes of online organizing in the legal and political action that followed feminist Twitter campaigns in Kenya. Refuting the “belief that feminism on social media does no real work offline,” Nyabola suggests how feminist digital activism has effectively redrawn Kenya’s “imagined geography” centered on Nairobi to address women’s issues in places like Mandera, Wajir, and Butula, where women’s issues are rarely addressed at length in the local press. Art, Poetry, Reviews On the cover of this issue, we feature a piece entitled “NeeNee Brooklyn” by the artist Swoon that calls to attention the creative work of building feminist communities and bringing an affective politics to pressing social and environmental issues. Like Swoon’s visual art, the poetry and book review sections of this issue ask us to consider the possibilities generated by moving beyond typical modalities of imagining protest and resisting racialized and gendered state violence constituted through ableism and ongoing colonial projects. The poetic work in the issue pushes us to think more about the form of protest and how poetic expression can open ways to rethink the relations and boundaries between the future, the past, col- lective action, the law, and violence within gendered frames. The books we chose for review emerged from our desire to foreground Native and Indig- enous studies, disability justice, and recent Arab revolutions. Moving be- tween activism, the academy, and Indigenous communities, Anne Spice’s review discusses recent books that examine the different strategies for re- sisting colonialism that emerge when the imposition of heteropatriarchy and gender violence are seen as “central technologies of colonial gover- nance and Indigenous pacification.” Liat Ben-Moshe’s review pairs Andrea J. Ritchie’s Invisible No More and Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim, two books that on the surface seem to have little ground for dialogue. Looking at these works on disability and Israeli violence and anti-police violence movements together, Ben-Moshe argues, “brings to the forefront the re- lationality and potential differences between slow death (via biopolitical debilitation) and state killing (via criminalization, policing and police shootings) in the analysis of state violence.” These reviews highlight how our analysis of feminist protest expands when we instead center questions of ability, empire, nation, and colonialism. 26 Elena L. Cohen, Melissa M. Forbis, and Deepti Misri Invisible Labor There are many people behind this issue to whom we are deeply grateful. We would like to express our deep gratitude to Natalie Havlin and Jillian M. Báez, the general editors of WSQ, for their vision for the journal as an intervention into current feminist debates, and to Natalie in particular for her support throughout the final months of this project. Many thanks are also due to our consulting guest editor Saadia Toor, editorial assistant Melina Moore, and the Feminist Press staff. We would like to extend spe- cial thanks to Frances Beale for permission to reprint “To My People,” and Brianna Rodriguez and Lauren Neglia for transcribing the piece. Thanks to all of the authors and artists for giving shape and content to this issue, and to the anonymous reviewers for their time and insightful suggestions. Deepti Misri would like to thank the Critical Kashmir Studies Collec- tive—our work together informs all my thinking about what feminism is, or can be, in relation to protest. The editors thank each other, deeply, for many months of collaborative curating, theorizing, and writing. Editing this issue has showed us how varied, dynamic, and powerful feminist pro- test is today—and has always been. We dedicate this special issue, in hope and in struggle, to all those who believe that another world is possible. To new worlds and alternate futures. Elena L. Cohen is an attorney, doctoral candidate, and activist. She is the president elect of the National Lawyers Guild, having served as the President of the New York City Chapter of the Guild for two terms. Her legal practice includes criminal defense and civil rights litigation, and her academic writing focuses on theories of sexuality and protest through comparative constitutional law. She can be reached at ElenaCohenESQ @gmail.com. Melissa M. Forbis is a cultural anthropologist and activist. She is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her publications on gender, Indigenous rights, the Zapatista movement, and state violence have appeared in the U.S., Mexico, and Chile. Her decades-long community work spans issues such as sexual violence, immigrant rights, and prison abolition. She can be reached at:

. Deepti Misri is associate professor in the Women & Gender Studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, and a founding member of the Critical Kash- mir Studies Collective. She can be reached at

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