Responding to Palestinian organizers’ calls to use our voice, continue to engage in conversations, and to speak out, this statement articulates what we see as the abolitionist and anti-colonial way forward—the only way we can commit to a free Palestine. Imagining and building alternatives is the future, the horizon of possibility, that Lateral, as part of the intellectual and activist project of cultural studies, is imperfectly but consistently striving toward. Here, we highlight work in this issue, including the Towards Third Worlding forum, articles, book reviews, and the second installment of the Positions podcast. We continue to welcome authors to join in this work of pushing the field of cultural studies further, towards its promise of critical inquiry matched by political engagement.
Articles by Alyson K. Spurgas
Alyson K. Spurgas is Associate Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Alyson researches, writes, and teaches about sociologies of trauma, politics of desire, and technologies of care from an interdisciplinary and intersectional feminist perspective. They are the author of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State University Press, 2020) and Decolonize Self-Care (OR Books, 2023).
Editors’ Introduction: Lateral Changes
This issue marks the addition of a new co-editor and several special projects, including Lateral‘s first podcast, Positions. This issue presents two important sections of work, both building on conversations in the field and across publications: “The Black Shoals Dossier,” curated by Beenash Jafri, and the second part of “Crip Pandemic Life,” edited by Alyson Patsavas and Theodora Danylevich. In addition to these impressive sections, the issue features three research articles and ten book reviews.
Editors’ Introduction
In this introduction, the editors continue their reflections on scholarly editing in the pandemic, welcome two new co-editors, and announce a grant-funded initiative that builds on Lateral Forums. This issue features three regular articles, book reviews, and the first installment of a special section, “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry,” which builds on the “Cripistemologies of Crisis” special section, edited by Theodora Danylevich and Aly Patsavas, last year.
Solidarity in Falling Apart: Toward a Crip, Collectivist, and Justice-Seeking Theory of Feminine Fracture
In this essay, I reconceptualize feminized trauma by utilizing a queer crip feminist disability justice framework. This reconceptualizing allows for an intervention in both historical psychoanalytic and contemporary biomedical framings of the experience of gendered and sexual violence, pursuant or sequelic trauma, and associated symptoms. Both historical and contemporary psycho-logics too often imagine gendered and sexual violence as abnormal or exceptional events (e.g., “stranger rape”) which can be treated and cured individually, thus delimiting them within a white, wealthy or middle-class, cis- and hetero-feminine register. As a corrective, within the framework of everyday emergencies, insidious traumas, and cripistemologies of crisis, I position feminine fracturing and falling apart as chronic, and consider abolitionist strategies for survival, care, and solidarity beyond traditional medical frameworks for recovery. This further provides a way to understand dissociation or rather dissociative-adjacent symptomology as real, legitimate, and painful, yet also as sociopolitical products experienced differently across diverse populations—and as mundane, banal, and even expected for some. Here, feminine fracturing is symptom, method, and potential avenue for change or liberation. What does “recovery” look like when feminized trauma is endemic to the point of being so normalized and unexceptional as to be a thoroughly unremarkable part of our everyday cultural backdrop? How is this exacerbated when we examine the experiences of trans women, poor women, and immigrant and BIPOC women and femmes? I posit that there is promise in embracing a fracturing, in falling apart—as antidote to the normative and neoliberal logic of keeping it together.