Body Matters

WSQ: Body Matters considers the ways in which the physical body (re)defines feminist scholarship, art, and activism in light of environmental, political, and global emergencies and transformations taking hold at the present moment. 

Within the current paradigm of colonial exploitation, our bodies are sites of scrutiny, violence, commodification, racialization, policing, displacement, and strategic dehumanization. This moment demands renewed feminist critique of body politics and personhood. This special issue explores bodies marked by intersectional identities as sites of social and political violence but also as the vehicle for resistance, triumph, and decolonial justice.

Shereen Inayatulla is a professor of English and teaches courses in composition and critical literacy studies at York College, CUNY, located on Lenapehoking. Her areas of research include autoethnography, antiracist feminist pedagogy, and queer theory. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications such as the Journal of Lesbian Studies, Self+Culture+Writing, and The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric. Her 2023 coedited “Trans/Feminisms” special issue of Sinister Wisdom was a finalist for the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans & Gender-Variant Literature. 

Andie Silva is an associate professor of English at York College and Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include book history, print and popular culture, and feminist digital pedagogy. She is the author of The Brand of Print: Marketing Paratexts in the Early English Book Trade (Brill, 2019). She is also coeditor, with Scott Schofield, of Digital Pedagogy in Early Modern Studies: Method and Praxis (Iter Press, 2024) and Using Commonplace Books to Enrich Medieval and Renaissance Courses, with Sarah E. Parker (Arc Humanities Press, 2023).