TFW: The Year in Review

By admin on December 31, 2013

Today is the final day of 2013.

And this year has been one that pushed many people around the world to deeply consider and interrogate the various social locations that shape our lives. From the distinct ways that structural violence, micro-aggressive actions, deleterious public policy, negative cultural representations, and “natural” disasters illuminated the vestiges of privilege, to the ways that the same spurred global and local transformative justice movements, solidarities, and resistance among the disenfranchised, TFW has provided a space to think critically about the events that shaped 2013. We felt and witnessed so much this year that beckoned us to consider a feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist response for these times.

While some U.S. citizens fought to protect their right to own and carry more guns, others—like Renisha McBride—were murdered by gun-toting Americans who felt obliged to stand their ground. And yet as Marissa Alexander’s case reveals, not everyone has the right to stand her ground. We continue to battle global epidemics like HIV/AIDS as well as witness the poor suffer throughout the world due to insufficient health care; and yet, the conservative right worked with great care to limit affordable health care for the most marginalized in our country. Women’s health care was a favored target, and the most marginalized women are, as always, the most deeply impacted.

It is 2013, the supposed age of post-racialism, and President Obama is still perceived as someone’s “nigger,” black and brown people are still disproportionately represented in the prison industrial complex, black men and boys are still stopped and frisked in NYC, the shooting and sexual assaults of black girls still don’t matter (even to some black men), and black and brown folk around the world still represent a large portion of the global poor.

And yet, laborers have taken to the streets to protest low living wages and disappearing benefits; women around the world have refused to silence their voices in the wake of throwback legislation that seeks to delimit and curtail their sexual and reproductive liberties; indigenous peoples from Canada to Palestine have resisted the stealth oppressions of settler colonial regimes; and many peoples have been moved to forge solidarities.

We had much to consider in 2013, indeed. And we grew, too, with almost 22,000 Facebook fans and over a million visitors to our site. We welcomed Heidi R. Lewis, Eddie Ndopu, TC Tolbert, Andrea Plaid, Monica Torres, Brooke Elise Axtell, and Harsha Walia to the Editorial Collective. We inaugurated our Sunday Op-Ed feature, our Arts and Culture column, our Elementary Feminisms column, and Feminists We Love, beginning the year with a profile of Jamilah Lemieux and closing the year with Mia Mingus. The University of Arizona, Barnard College, Colorado College, Connecticut College, and a number of individuals sponsored our work. And, perhaps most important for our continued sustainability, we learned to practice some self-care.

We are happy to have offered a space for reflection on much of the aforementioned. So as we anticipate what lies ahead for us in 2014, we return to several hallmark moments at TFW that occurred this year. We hope that our return to some of our 2013 highlights ignites your passion for justice as much as it did ours when we initially published these pieces. Happy New Year from all of us at The Feminist Wire!

“What We Aren’t Talking About When We Talk About Gun Control,” by Monica J. Casper

“Exhuming the Ratchet Before It’s Buried,” by Heidi R. Lewis

“Rape in India: Domestic and Global Politics,” by Soma Chaudhuri, Amita Chudgar, Meski Glegziabher, Julie Hagstrom, Sean Pue, and Karin Zitzewitz

“Able Normative Supremacy and the Zero Mentality,” by Eddie Ndopu

“Love In a Time of Scandal,” by Brittney Cooper and Treva Lindsey

“Race, Feminism, and the Academy: I Got Out of Pocket,” Tressie McMillan Cottom

“For Tanya With Love,” by Editorial Collective

“Delhi: From Shame to Defiance,” by Harsha Walia

“Courageous Dispatches,” by Lisa Jean Moore (wrap-up to the Masculinities Forum)

“Transforming Rape Culture from Steubenville to Anywhere, USA,” by Lisa Factora-Borchers

“Poetic Justice: Drake and East African Girls,” by Safy-Hallan Farah

“Radical Love, Race, and Feminist Futures,” by Brooke Elise Axtell, Monica J. Casper, Heather Laine Talley, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons (wrap-up to the Race, Anti-Racism, and Feminisms Forum)

“The Rise of Beyoncé, The Fall of Lauryn Hill: A Tale of Two Icons,” by Janell Hobson

“10 Ways Men Can End Violence Against Women,” by Sacchi Patel

“An Introduction to TFW’s Forum on Assata Shakur: America’s Grammar Book on Black Women and Terrorism,” by Tamura A. Lomax

“An Open Letter to Facebook,” Women, Action and Media

“Myths of Progress and Cartographies of Hate,” by Darnell L. Moore and Monica J. Casper

“Why Do White Guys Hate My Hijab?” by Zainab Khan

“Dispatch from the ‘Very House of Difference’: Anti-Black Racism and the Expansion of Sexual Citizenship – OR – We Need to Do So Much Better at Loving Each Other,” by Kai M. Green and Treva Ellison

“3 Reasons Why You Should Be Paying Attention to Moral Mondays in North Carolina,” by Heather Laine Talley

“Table of Contents for ‘A Celebration of Assata and the Black Radical Tradition,” Editorial Collective

“How to be Black in the Age of Obama, George Zimmerman, and Paula Deen,” Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

“In the Aftermath of the Trial,” Editorial Collective (wrap-up to our forum on Trayvon Martin and the George Zimmerman trial)

“Fruitvale Station: Some Reactions,” Editorial Collective