Stubborn Futures: Caring Against Anaesthetic Time
Journal Article
Overview
abstract
In this farewell essay, the coeditors of Gender and Language reflect on leading the journal through a 6-year period marked by escalating global crises and rising hostility toward feminist, queer, and trans scholarship. Drawing from their previous Editorials on refusal, hope, and potency, the coeditors explore yet another affect that animated their tenure: stubbornness. This essay suggests that stubbornness, as more than mere obstinacy, must be reclaimed within a transqueerfeminist ethics as a rebellious insistence on caring, persisting, and imagining otherwise. From this perspective, stubbornness is uniquely suited to counter the political numbness of what Heyes terms “anaesthetic time.” Everyday editorial labor is presented as a microactivist gesture of concern that can sustain the language, gender, and sexuality community amid global turmoil.
