Visual global politics

One of the exciting things about being editors of the International Feminist Journal of Politics is that we get to see the leading edge of global feminist scholarship. As we mentioned in our last editorial, IFJP welcomes proposals for Special Sections and Special Issues on front-line topics (see https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_special_issues_shortcut). Fortuitously, one has emerged through the normal submission process.

This issue centers feminist explorations of art and visual politics. Of course, these have always been feminist topics, but reading this issue you will find stimulating connections to other ideas that feminists are working on across the field.

In the era of big data, visual media apps, and social media reach, our political imaginations may too readily be drawn to the most dominant aspects of visual culture. So “new” technologies impel us to think more closely, more deeply, and more critically about the work of the visual in and on our global political landscapes and in the disciplinary landscapes of global politics.

But it is not simply or only a question of our time and its technology. Engaging with the visual, which includes the artistic and the aesthetic, is always a vital endeavor. Though traditional elitist representations should perhaps be of interest to us, we live in a world of struggle as well as the ordinary, the everyday, the “messy world of sensate perceptions – a world irreducible to rational meanings” (Highmore 2010, x). For those in academic disciplines, staying with the security of only words perhaps fails us more than we have imagined given how doing so can limit our imaginations. The visual realm, by contrast, can provoke more expansive imaginative thinking. The contributions to this issue reflect such provocations.

In this issue of IFJP we have excellent examples of work on the visual in/and global politics. In “Seeing (In)security, Gender, and Silencing: Posters in and about the British Women’s Suffrage Movement,” Dean Cooper-Cunningham gives us new ways to think about security and resistance work through revisiting posters from the British suffrage movement. The posters reveal strategies of resistance against silencing. Cooper-Cunningham shows how the suffrage movement leveraged visuals, militancy, and practices such as hunger striking to resist attempted silencing by the government across textual, verbal, and visual planes.

In “Smashing Containers, Queering the International through Collaging,” Anni Kangas, Daria Krivonos, Inna Perheentupa, and Saara Särmä creatively and queerly combine pedagogy, collage, and the international. Using collage as a metaphor, a subject of study, and a way of studying the international, the authors show us how shifting away from traditional centers of attention by “smashing containers” has the potential to trouble not only established conceptions of sexuality and intimacy but also territoriality and theory.

Our Conversations Section focuses on popular art and the experiences it enables, particularly through creating spaces in which to think free of overt oppression. Concerned with the violences of epistemic injustice, these pieces range from tapestry, to subversive border work, and to the queering possibilities of artistic practices, always providing glimpses into different ways of wandering, wondering, and being in the world.

We understand so little of the world of global and international politics that we say we care so much about. We touch so little of it in our academic endeavors, especially through our profusion of words. A broadened and enriched world of meaning about global and international politics can be perceived through the visual arts. Images leave traces. By refocusing our readers’ analytic lenses and our visual senses on the political import of images – and some of their traces – we hope to transmit more and different insights about global politics.