Editorial

Welcome to Volume 37.2 (2) of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice!
This issue consists of one thematic cluster and an open cluster. The first cluster, edited and introduced by Melissa Autumn White (LGBT and Queer Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Jennifer Musial (Women’s and Gender Studies, New Jersey City University), focuses on Belaboured Introductions: Inspired Reflections on the Introductory Course in Gender and Women’s Studies. The five articles featured in the cluster include: Dana M. Olwan, AnaLouise Keating, Catherine M. Orr, and Beverly Guy Sheftall’s “Make/shift Pedagogies: Suggestions, Provocations, and Challenges for Teaching Introductory Gender and Women’s Studies Courses”; Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, Karl Bryant, and Heather Hewett’s “Unlearning Introductions: Problematizing Pedagogies of Inclusion, Diversity, and Experience in the Gender and Women’s Studies Introductory Course”; Carrie Hart’s “Viewing as Text: Theorizing Visual Literacies in Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies”; Stina Soderling’s “Anarchist Pedagogy in the Gender and Women’s Studies Classroom”; and Jocelyn Thorpe and Sonja Boon’s compilation of short essays by eleven authors entitled “The Intro Course: A Pedagogical Toolkit.” The thematic cluster also includes two review essays: Ilya Parkins’ “Agenda, Horizons, and the Canadian Introductory Reader: A Review Essay” and Carly Thomsen’s “Becoming Radically Undone: Discourses of Identity and Diversity in the Introductory Gender and Women’s Studies Classroom.”
The second cluster includes a series of open topic articles that cover a broad spectrum of themes and issues. The first two articles focus on questions related to the field of Gender and Women’s Studies. In “No Guarantee: Feminism’s Academic Affect and Political Fantasy,” Robyn Wiegman returns to the question of Gender and Women’s Studies’ academic institutionalization and engages in a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of both the “new and ongoing challenges to the intellectual and

political life of the field.” Mark Kessler’s “In Search of Law in Women’s and Gender Studies: Toward Critical Womanist Legal Studies” also considers the issue of Women’s and Gender Studies’ institutionalization and suggests that “transdisciplinary critical womanist legal studies may help to address concerns that the successful institutionalization of WGS has narrowed the field’s focus, blunted its critical edge, and separated academic work from grassroots communities and political action.”
The following two articles focus on the body and embodiment. In “Placenta-Eating and the Epistemology of Ignorance,” Cressida Heyes examines “human placentophagy” or the practice of eating one’s placenta. She asserts that, rather than viewing this practice through “the epistemology of ignorance”— “distain for female bodies, visceral disgust”—placentaeating “deserves a more nuanced treatment as a practice that meets the under-served needs of women who fear postpartum depression and as a practice taking place in a context of the biomagnification of environmental pollutants.” Heather Tapley, in “Edgy Un/Intelligibilities: Feminist/Monster Theory Meets Ginger Snaps,” analyzes the werewolf film Ginger Snaps (2000) through various feminist lenses and offers a reading of the film’s werewolf as “the unbound body of the liminal Other, the subject/ self formerly denied” and as “both threatening and politically productive in its liminality.”
The following three articles explore issues related to Indigenous nationhoods, Canadian state policies and their effects, and the politics of Indigenous revitalization, resurgence, and decolonization. In “Post-National Foundation of Judith Butler’s and Rossi Braidotti’s Relational Subjectivity,” Adam Burke Carmichael draws on Indigenous conceptions of nationhood to critically analyze “the post-national foundation” of Butler’s and Braidotti’s “theories of affective subjectivity.” The author maintains that “if both Butler’s and Braidotti’s diagnoses of a post-national world require revision in light of the complexities of Indigenous nationhoods, then so do their affectively constituted subjects.” Karen Lawford, in

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“Locating Invisible Policies: Health Canada’s Evacuation Policy as a Case Study,” focuses on the material impacts of Canada’s evacuation policy, that exists in “the grey zone between federal and provincial jurisdiction,” on pregnant First Nations women living on reserves and analyzes its negative effects on First Nations women’s access to maternity health services and on their families and communities. In “All My Relations: Reclaiming the Stories of our Indigenous Grandmothers,” Jodi Beniuk documents the conversations she engaged in with her Métis grandmother and the “process of compiling her teachings into a handmade book.” For the author, this deeply personal project was not only about honouring her grandmother and her teachings, but it was also about “the process of Indigenous revitalization, resurgence, and decolonization.”
The next two articles focus on aspects of transgender embodiment and politics. In “‘I Am Not My Bodies’: Transgender Embodiment in Nina Arsenault’s The Silicone Diaries,” Zaren Healey White analyzes the work of Canadian transgender performance artist Nina Arsenault and, in particular, “how her pursuit of an exaggerated ideal of beauty simultaneously subverts essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman.” Emma McKenna, in “Delayed Critique: On Being Feminist, Time and Time Again,” reads the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival “as a cultural archive of gender essentialism” and the politics of trans exclusion in feminism. The author’s main purpose is to promote a systematic reevaluation and reimagining of feminist politics and to advocate for “the prioritizing of transfeminism within all feminisms.”
The next four articles engage with various questions related to feminist pedagogy, performativity, and digital production. In “Feminist Accused of Difference from the Self,” Mary J. Harrison analyzes Cynthia G. Franklin’s (2009) reading of Jane Gallop’s Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997) and her own identifications with Gallop and her text. In the latter case, the author not only emphasizes the ways in which her “reading repeats both daughterly violence on Gallop and motherly violence on the graduate students who populate the text,” but also considers such themes as “conflict, aggression, loss, permission, and forgiveness.” Julie E. Dowsett, in “When Students are Consumers: Reflections on Teaching a First-Year Gender Course (That is Not a Gender Studies Course),” examines her

experiences as a contract faculty member teaching a first-year Gender and Law course at York University. Drawing on the course evaluations she received over a five-year period, the author not only explores the “gendered, racial, and other power dynamics involved in the university/corporation and student/consumer nexuses,” but also shares the strategies she employed to disrupt “the ‘cruising, shopping, disengaged’ mindset of students” studying at a large corporatized university. In “Affecting Art and Theory: The Politics of Shame and Creative Academic Performance,” Jessica Joy Cameron documents her experience of integrating performance art into an academic conference presentation and analyzes her resultant feelings of both shame and pride. The author argues that there is a need “to foster diversity in the academic form and resist the institutionalization of feminist scholarship through the nurturing of academic relationships with embodiment and affect.” Alana Cattapan and Quinn Dupont, in “Moving Forward, Looking Back: Taking Canadian Feminist Histories Online,” examine the feminist possibilities of the “networked model” of scholarly production, a model that has emerged from the digital humanities and promotes three “techno-social transformations”: “encouraging more collaborative authorship, challenging conventional peer review practices, and broadening readership beyond academia.”
The final two articles in the open cluster include Christina Rousseau’s “The Dividing Power of the Wage: Housework as Social Subversion,” which revisits the Wages for Housework perspectives and movements in Italy and Canada and makes a case for the recovery of Marxist-feminist analyses of social reproduction as a needed response “to new forms of oppression in a re-organized economy.” Ina C. Seethaler, in “Feminist Practices in Julie Shigekuni’s Invisible Gardens: A Japanese American Woman in the Twenty-First Century,” offers a Japanese American feminist reading of Shigekuni’s novel and explores such themes as “patriarchal familial relationships, the significance of mental spaces of refuge—like a garden and other ‘beyond spaces’—and the explicit celebration of the (sexual) body as a site of women’s empowerment.”
The cover photo, courtesy of the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, is titled, Red Flowers III by Anna Torma. Enjoy the issue! Annalee Lepp Editor

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