Introduction. Women’s Stories of Crisis: Portals to Relationality, Vulnerability and Resistance?

Abstract

This special issue aims to provide a deeper insight into cultural responses to various contemporary crises, such as migratory movements in recent history and, at the very present moment, pandemics, climate change and such other unsettling societal processes as political and economic ruptures, armed conflicts or environmental disasters. In particular, our aim is to draw attention to the way these changes have affected women’s lives and the way female writers and artists represent these processes and their consequences in diverse cultural narratives, such as fiction, poetry, experimental and autobiographical works. We explore issues related to diaspora, feminism, environmentalism, new materialism, memory and identity from a transnational and intersectional perspective, attempting to find connections among those cultural texts by women voicing some of the most relevant crises that have configured and are still re-configuring our global and local identities.

Keywords:

• Contemporary crises
• literary representations
• transnational feminism
• intersectionality
• vulnerability

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been characterized by diverse crises stemming from environmental disasters, pandemics, migration, displacement, exile, war, violence, terrorism and radicalism, and, for the past year, a full-scale senseless war in Europe, marked by its particular atrocities against women. Vulnerability—visible and invisible—seems to be the defining aspect of our times, as an indispensable facet of crisis, manifesting itself in catastrophic events, such as wars and pandemics, and less obviously, slow but steady crises, such as climate change. Women, we may say, are at a two-fold risk in this context. As reports of Russian war crimes against civilians on the Ukrainian territory circled the world, large-scale sexual crimes against women and girls, notably gang rapes and torture, continue to be reported by journalists, psychologists and human rights activists as likely to have effects on the victims and the whole society ‘for years to come’ (UNWOMEN 2022). However, as Ukrainian women’s rights advocate Hrystyna Kit rightly emphasizes, a war only lays bare what is ever-present in society in general, stating that ‘[t]oday, it’s especially hard to imagine a world without gender-based violence’ (ibid.). In Iran, the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody for breaching the rules of wearing a hijab led to nation-wide protests in autumn 2022, resulting in further arrests, massacres and executions (De Hoog and Merresi 2022), which received wide media coverage. Meanwhile, unknown to the world, as writer Arundhati Roy reveals, Muslim school girls in Southern India were ‘physically intimidated by right-wing Hindu men’ for precisely the opposite—for wearing a hijab as a mark of their identity (Roy 2022). In Roy’s view, these opposing events are not about the hijab at all, but they are symptoms of the larger practice of coercion, of ‘[t]he age-old preoccupation of controlling and policing women’ (Roy 2022).

Violence, control and injustice make women’s vulnerability universal, illustrating Lauren Berlant’s claim that ‘crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but [is] a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what is overwhelming’ (2011: 10). In other words, it is the ordinary and the everyday that produces greatest vulnerability, which becomes only more visible in extreme circumstances such as the ones described above. It does not take a war to produce violence—according to a recent UN report (Johnson 2022), over half of the women and girls murdered in 2021 were killed by a family member, an estimated 45,000, or more than five every hour. In particular, violence against black women, mainly in the United States, is disproportionately high—in the home, at school, in their workplace or neighbourhood, with black women falling victims of rape, partner violence or homicide (‘Violence Against Black Women’ n.d.). Moreover, according to the Global Citizen report (McCarthy 2020), women everywhere also experience disproportionate effects of climate change, owing to more restricted access to resources and violence escalating at times of instability. Even in the attempts to tackle the most urgent crises, such as ecological problems and pandemics, women are experiencing their effects most acutely, from the unfair division of labour in pursuit of sustainability (Kuznetski and Alaimo 2020) to the recent coronavirus lockdown, which Laura Boncori termed a ‘neverending shift’ for mothers working from home (2020: 677).

This special issue examines this tension between the extreme and the ordinary in addressing crises, with a focus on literary works by contemporary women writers and the way these crises are depicted. Adopting a historical-comparative perspective, we aim to offer a deeper insight into various social movements caused by past and present political and economic crises, armed conflicts, environmental disasters or other unsettling events, and the impact they have had on women’s present and future lives, through their representation in diverse cultural artefacts, such as narrative, poetry and autobiographical works, produced by women. The central axis of this collection of articles is narratives of displacement, such as migration. Moving along this axis, we explore issues related to diaspora, feminism, environmentalism, memory and identity, among others, from a clear and cutting-edge transnational and intersectional perspective. Are there any common formal and narrative traits present in contemporary women’s narratives that point at their relationality and interconnections? Can we say the women authors covered in this collection make vulnerability the starting point for giving their struggles global visibility? How do literary revisions of history, especially with attention to its blind spots, such as the ordinary lives of women and environmental processes, as well as visions of the future and contemplating scenarios, plausible because of the troubled now, produce alternative temporalities, which may be seen as simultaneously apocalyptic, or serve as ‘portals’ (in Arundhati Roy’s terms, Roy: 2020) to possibly better worlds? Do these literary practices display an approving acknowledgement of diversity and complexity and the blurring of binarisms among all human beings and other ‘critters’ (after Donna Haraway: 2008) on Earth? How is our enmeshment and mutual interdependence with the physical world, living matter and the bodies of others explored by women writers, drawing on the ‘corporeal turn’ (Bracke et al.: 2017) of the first two decades of the twenty-first century? In order to answer these questions the contributors to this volume explore a variety of contemporary textual representations that exemplify the development of new forms of understanding human, non-human and gender relationships across the globe.

Speaking of crises as a mark of our times, Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Merve Sarikaya-Şen contend that ‘this does not mean that disasters are new to humanity and that there are more wounded subjects than before’ (2021: 2), but what seems to have changed is the increased visibility of these wounds. According to Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega, the growing prominence of these wounds, traumas and vulnerabilities has to do with ‘the evolution of psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, media coverage, and a shifting system of empathy and sympathy for the pain of the other’ (2017: 2) and, as a consequence, ‘paradigmatic shift in the conception of what it is to be human’. As Onega and Ganteau conclude, ‘in today’s wound culture, victimhood and its representations have been granted increased visibility’ (2017: 3). In addition to this, as we have claimed elsewhere, the disastrous effects of these multifarious crises have become more noticeable because ‘borders and distances have become more transparent because of travel and migration, and structures less fixed because of the onslaught of the digital age’ (Pellicer-Ortín and Tofantšuk (Kuznetski) 2019: 12). The media that, mainly in the western world, seem to have been taken for granted, now lead to an extreme overexposure to disasters in our everyday lives.

Currently, the world is torn by such conflicting tendencies as the rise of right-wing neoliberalism in diverse European countries and the appearance of the incel movement, classified as a terrorist threat (Beckett 2021), on the one hand, and such powerful counter-movements as Black Lives Matter #MeToo and, recently #NousToutes, on the other. The historical victory of the Pro-Choice movement in Argentina, resulting in legalizing abortion in that country in December 2020 (BBC), happened in parallel with the infamous Roe vs. Wade, or federal abortion rights, overturned in the USA two years later (CNBC 2022). All these events may lead us to assert that we are living in convoluted times marked by the discord and radicalization of socio-political movements, either left- or right-oriented.

Feminism has responded to these tensions by developing critical lines of thought, for instance, intersectional, transnational and decolonial feminism, to address the complex nature of current crises. Intersectional feminism fosters the view that the repression suffered by women must be examined taking into account the multifarious mechanisms that configure female identities, namely not only gender, but also class, sexuality, race, age, disability, etc., because these facets produce subjects excluded from hegemonic historical discourses, thus exacerbating their vulnerability. In Floya Anthias’ view, thanks to intersectionality we can ‘look at the way in which different social divisions inter-relate in terms of the production of social relations and in terms of people's lives’ (2008: 13). The term intersectionality was coined by legal feminist theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, who employed the metaphor of the intersection to denote different identity categories coming together in oppressing women. According to Crenshaw, unless various identity and anti-discrimination politics saw sexism and racism as intertwined, women of colour could not be included in the feminist struggle. Consequently, intersectional research has developed in the fields of politics, sociology, geography and the natural sciences, now pervading feminist studies at all levels, including queer, crip and other feminisms, intertwined with the field of transnational feminism.

Founded upon postcolonial studies, gender studies and material feminism, transnational feminism emphasizes structural inequality, material conditionality, and critical consciousness. It thus has the potential to become a political tool to analyze women’s situations in the global world and provide a feminist alternative to predetermined colonial, liberal and western models of thought. The ground for its theorization was settled already in the 1990s by Inderpal Grewal and Karen Kaplan who enquired: ‘Does the new global matrix engender liberatory spaces that deconstruct the old regimes of the nation-state or does this phenomenon continue the process of uneven development that marked our earlier colonial and neo-colonial social formations?’ (1994: 9)—a question that still reverberates in contemporary feminist discourses. For instance, Constance S. Richards (2000) defended a transnational feminist approach at the turn of the century, by moving beyond narrow and localized feminisms, or Third World feminisms, which depend upon centre-periphery models, thus asserting the limitations of global perspectives. Therefore, it seems that the new conceptualizations of feminism need to attend to those women that have been ignored by previous feminist movements under the cover of globalization.

Nevertheless, in spite of endorsing some of the main values behind intersectional and transnational feminism, we should remember that their global commitments can also contribute to an extreme generalization of feminist tenets, and even to the appropriation of feminism by the mass media and neoliberal practices. For instance, Layla Branicki analyzes how the important feminist tenet of ‘care’ was reproduced and turned against women in the discourse of crisis management during the first wave of Covid-19:

We are asked to take care of ourselves and each other by socially isolating. If we are parents, we are asked to care for children and their education as schools close. If we have been lucky enough to keep our jobs, we are expected to continue to care about our work and our productivity. We are even asked to care for the economy, by getting back to working and spending as normal. (2020: 877)

This way, Branicky concludes, care as liability, resource and solution was turned into ‘unbalanced expectations about who is doing the caring’; a reproduction of masculinist ideals of competitive performance and unjust loss of access to this same care as resource (ibid.), while in fact the true feminist understanding of the ethics of care, as defined by Carol Gilligan in 1993, is ‘non-violent conflict resolution, contextual and narrative understanding, the activity of care, and networks of relationships and responsibilities’ (in Branicki 2020: 877).

An important objective of this special issue is to highlight the role of literature in exposing the aforementioned controversies and pointing directions to possible solutions. As Julia Kuznetski has stated in defence of the dystopian genre, it is more successful in science communication than science itself, with a particular focus on climate change, ‘while science has all the facts, which are often ignored, it is culture that gives us the key to understanding, by providing a different angle at the processes and, most importantly, by making us reconsider the position of the human as being not in confrontation, but a part of the cycle we have largely initiated’ (2021: 50). This appears especially relevant in times of crisis and uncertainty. Remarkably, the European Renaissance started with poet Petrarch receiving the wreath of laurels from a Roman Senator on April 8, 1341, amid the years of the Black Death, to suggest hope placed on the arts in times of hopelessness. We may draw a parallel with the present-day United States and the beginning of Biden’s democratic term there, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, with Amanda Gorman, a twenty-three-year-old African American female poet, reciting her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, written on the night of January 6, 2021, in response to the Capitol attack by the Trump-led far right. Both historically and geographically remote events signify the role of poetry and literature in raising civil awareness and opening avenues for what Jill Lewis called ‘active empathy’ (2019: xvii-xx), that is, writing and reading as a form of activism stimulated by aesthetic imagination.

It can thus be argued that contemporary literature has contributed to the aforementioned visibility of the wounds produced by the times we are living in, seen by Derek Attridge as ‘the singularity of literature’. Literature is singular because it responds more intensely to our ethical drives than philosophy, politics or history, on the grounds that we can experience literary works not as objects but as events in our lives which exceed our rational accounting (2004: 3). Following some of the main tenets formulated in the field of Trauma Studies (Caruth 1995; Hartman 2003; Bloom 2010), narrative appears to succeed in offering the sites where contradictory and even painful and traumatic events shaping the identity of the modern subject may be revised, unveiled and exposed, forcing the contemporary readers to leave their comfort zone and see experiences of suffering and displacement through the Other’s eyes. Thus, writing practices come forth as a fruitful ground illuminating previously unheard individual and collective experiences of marginalization and abuse, while the propagation of these narratives has increased the society’s interest in these unveiled stories (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2007: 3).

This is even more so when we realize that literary works have the power to generate a world that promotes ‘a vision of individuals as interdependent and of humanity as radically relational’ (Ganteau 2015: 100-1). As stressed by Judith Butler, ‘although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own’ (2004: 27). This interaction with the Other, being relational and exposed, makes us vulnerable ‘to touch and to violence’ (2004: 27), leading to an overall precarity. One form of this is eco-precarity, experienced by human subjects when confronted with the natural environment (Nayar 2019)—a topic explored, for instance, in contemporary dystopian novels with an environmental agenda. Relationality of all living beings on earth, human enmeshment and interconnection with each other and other species might be deemed ‘unimportant’, because other species lack the Cartesian rational mind, and even dangerous, because of having the agency to radically change the course of history, as happened during the recent Covid-19 pandemic, when a tiny virus brought the whole world to a halt. However, in terms of material feminism, another vital feminist trend that is configuring today’s feminist panorama, there should not be a separation of ‘some transhistorical “Man”’ acting upon ‘the inert, external matter of the world’ (Kuznetski and Alaimo 2020), but rather an acknowledgement of reciprocal interdependence of the human with other forms of life, termed trans-corporeality by Stacy Alaimo (2010). Transcorporeality makes the human subject porous, transient, unfinished and vulnerable, and thus open to porosities and vulnerabilities of others, which is felt most acutely in times of crises, such as the present one.

When applied to literature, relationality may be seen as a successful means to help us reflect on and become more empathetic towards many of the inequalities still affecting many lives, not exclusively women’s, but markedly surfacing in the writings of women, for the reasons described above. Therefore, Constance Richards maintains, the act of ‘writing literature continues to be a viable arena for the exploration of the subject, and as such, a radical act for women and for all who have been silenced’ (2000: vii). Literature can give us the opportunity to both explore ourselves and cooperate with others, whereas literary criticism also enables the self-construction of identity and can be considered as a political act. This way, we agree with Richards’ idea that literature is a fruitful tool that ‘affords the transnational exchange of cultural realities in the period of late capital’ (vii) on the grounds that the exchange of cultures represented in literature implies the sharing of experiences, relationality, solidarity and empathy among women across the globe. Moreover, the act of imaginative reading should also be considered from this perspective, as it can succeed in engaging the reader’s normal life, converting and conceiving ourselves as we encounter different subjective realities.

This aspect reverberates in the contemporary literature produced by women worldwide, which has become a fruitful arena in which to question, challenge and reconfigure women’s global and local identities and voice their experiences of estrangement. Drawing on the essential notion that art acts as an empowering sphere where previously marginalized female identities can acquire a distinctive voice, the contributors of this special issue share the conviction that it is necessary to address the current (un)certainties and contradictions of female (or fluid, non-binary) identity and that there is still a pressing need to account for the representation of women in the public spheres.

The articles assembled in the first part of the special issue—by Sara Strauss, Rocío Cobo-Piñero, Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín—deal with representations of identity positions of women, in situations of diaspora and/or alienation, simultaneously reflecting on the different generations of diaspora and the impact of the different waves of feminism on women’s lives. Thus, Strauss scrutinizes Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-Prize-winning verse novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) as a specimen of intersectional, fourth-wave feminism. She focuses on the intergenerational differences between the mostly black British female characters and the outside world, in which they are marginalized because of gender, race, age or sexuality, and the peculiar tensions that emerged from these feelings of marginalization and the recourse to intergenerational memory as a way to promote a sense of liberating belonging. Similar problems are experienced by the protagonist of Jamaican-born writer Claudia Rankine’s experimental visual-poetic transgeneric work Just Us (2020), analyzed by Cobo-Piñero, who puts forward the original concept of ‘black poetics of affect’ so as to disrupt ‘the fantasy of a post-racial society’. Of particular interest to Cobo-Piñero is the racialized and gendered marginalization developed in the context of Covid-19, which the poet also illuminates in her work, and which finds echoes in the fictional treatment of pandemics as approached by Julia Kuznetski and Chiara Battisti in their respective articles. First-generation migration and the trauma of maternal loss, as well as the voicelessness of the marginalized minority subjects, is at the centre of the novel Brixton Beach (2009) by British-Sri Lankan writer Roma Tearne. In her analysis of this novel, Andermahr employs Butler’s concept of the hierarchy of grievability (2009) and the belief in the power of art to disrupt that hierarchy and to mitigate the pain of the grieving subject. The art of experimental narrative and the way genre is manipulated in order to respond to crisis is also the focus of Pellicer-Ortín’s article on A Stranger City (2019) by the British–Jewish writer Linda Grant, a novel recounting the recent events of Brexit and its effects on a variety of diasporic subjects, with a special focus on the experience of women. Like Cobo-Piñero, Pellicer-Ortín puts forward the argument that the new versions of female alienation in the twenty-first century require new forms of narrative or artistic expression, which both Rankine and Grant make use of, employing the device of narrative polyphony, but in their distinctive ways.

The second part of the special issue features articles dealing with the gendered aspect of environmental catastrophes, including pandemics and climate change, and the reconsideration of the relationship of the human with non-human others, as a form of ecological precarity. Merve Sarikaya-Şen’s article on Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020) serves as a bridge between the two parts by exploring the escape of the main characters from the polluted City to the Wilderness as a postapocalyptic way to confront climate change, and also as a metaphor of climate migration. Focusing on the consciousness of the female protagonists, Sarikaya-Şen makes a case for women’s collective vulnerability in the face of environmental disasters and forced displacement. Further on, Julia Kuznetski meditates on how the global pandemic has laid bare our physical vulnerability as bodies, being exposed to the hazards of the material environment and the bodies of others―an angle also taken by Cobo-Piñero, Pellicer-Ortín and Sarikaya-Şen. Kuznetski particularly focuses on a revision of history as Herstory in Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars (2020), to show how silenced and underrepresented women can be rendered powerful agents making history, in the same way as environmental processes and non-human agencies do. Chiara Battisti, in her turn, explores the vulnerability of the body through its relationship with technology on the basis of The Tiger Flu (2018) by Chinese Canadian novelist and poet Larissa Lai. Battisti reads it as a dystopian novel with a feminist, ecofeminist and queer agenda, which connects this reading to those by Kuznetski, Sarikaya-Şen and Strauss. Battisti’s drawing attention to how women can harm each other, but ultimately heal, is of importance for the whole special issue and can be said to be a motif in many of the articles included here. Notably, Kuznetski and Pellicer-Ortín focus on the narrative figure of a female caregiver as an active agent of the feminist ‘care ethic’ at a time when this second-wave ideal is running the risk of being subverted by neoliberal backlashes, as described earlier.

What is more, all the articles comprizing the special issue are united by the same objective: to explore survivalist strategies by either reconsidering the boundaries of gender and the human/non-human world, or proposing new forms of female or/and intergenerational relationships and solidarity which reposition within space, time and community, or even all of this together. With reference to Butler, most articles emphasize a profound relationally and interconnectedness in human societies, which makes us vulnerable to crises, simultaneously aware of this vulnerability, and open to seeking ways of overcoming our individual wounds through connection and empathy with others (Butler and Athanasiou 2013). It can thus be observed that this special issue aims to address the most pressing concerns of contemporary feminism, such as misogyny and antifeminist backlashes; gendered racism; systemic violence; issues of identity and transgenerational intersections in the diaspora; effects of climate change, environmental crises and transcorporeal relationships with the environment, as expressed through the aesthetic medium of literature. The corpus of literary texts scrutinized in the special issue works on the intersection of these topics and methodologies, including identity, cultural and diaspora studies, feminist poetics, postcolonial studies, post-humanism, new materialism, ecofeminism, narratology and psychology. We also believe that the contributors presented here, who originate from different European countries (Estonia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom), can turn this special issue into a singular transcultural event connecting diverse cultures and academic traditions. Furthermore, the backgrounds of the writers and the texts examined are also varied, offering such multifarious perspectives on current women’s lives as those belonging to Black British, African-American, British–Jewish, American, Irish-Canadian, Chinese Canadian, British, and Sri-Lankan women. However, we would like to demonstrate that what connects the texts, authors and ideas explored in the subsequent articles is much more relevant than what makes them different. We believe that all these literary expressions by contemporary women can act as ‘portals’ to invigorated visions of women in which relationality, vulnerability and resistance are the bonds that connect them across the planet. Thus, we offer an invitation to the readers to follow us in exploring what can be found beyond that portal, and whether what we find is frightening, disquieting, challenging, empowering or groundbreaking, is still for us to discover and judge.

Acknowledgements

The research for this special issue and article was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2021-124841NB-I00) in collaboration with the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) and the Government of Aragón (H03_20R).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).