Introduction: Sexism - A Problem With a Name

This special issue is premised on a claim: to make sexism the explicit object of academic enquiry is to generate new knowledge and understanding. To understand how sexism works, to ask why sexism remains stubbornly persistent in shaping worlds, determining possibilities, deciding futures, despite decades of feminist activism, is to work out and to work through the very mechanics of power. Sexism seems to operate as a well-oiled machine that runs all the more smoothly and efficiently for being in constant use. The effects of this constancy are wearing on those to whom sexism is directed. In this special issue we reflect on how and why sexism remains so persistent without isolating sexism from other machineries of power. We hope to intervene collectively in the reproduction of sexism, to throw a spanner in the works or even to become, to borrow Sarah Franklin's evocative phrase, a 'wench in the works'. It takes conscious willed effort not to reproduce sexism. (1) This special issue is part of this effort. WHY SEXISM? Why focus on sexism now? Why focus on sexism here? It might seem that I have already provided an answer to this question by acknowledging the persistence of sexism. As the contributions to this special issue explore, even if sexism seems like some tangible thing, knowable in and from its constancy, something we come up against, repeatedly, it is remarkably difficult to pin down. And that too is one of the reasons to focus on sexism: because so much of what we experience as sexism is dismissed as just what we experience. Focusing on sexism now and here matters because too often sexism is identified as either in the past tense (as what we dealt with, what we have overcome) or as elsewhere (as a problem 'other cultures' have yet to deal with). Sexism is present. That is one starting point. To answer this question 'why sexism now?' more fully I will give you the story of how this special issue came about. It began its life as a conference held at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths in 2014. (2) It was in fact the inaugural conference for this new centre. In over 20 years as a feminist academic (including being based in Women's Studies for 10 years) this was the first academic event I had ever attended with sexism in the title, or in which sexism was identified as the key thematic. This fact, I think, should be startling, especially given, as Ulrika Dahl notes in her contribution, we might expect challenging sexism to be part of the job description for feminist academics. If anything, the word sexism seems to have 'dropped out' of feminist theoretical vocabularies. I want to offer some speculations on why this might be the case. One reason might be the strategic mobilisation of the language of feminist success: as if disciplines have been transformed by feminism such that critiquing sexism is no longer necessary; or as if we have finished that task and we have now moved on. I say 'as if' for a reason. In recent years students have relayed to me how feminism itself is often, within their disciplines, identified as passe, as old-fashioned, dated. In a curriculum review we conducted in my own college, we were struck by how many courses--including Cultural Studies--did not engage with feminist theory at all, even when feminist work had obvious relevance to the topic. We found numerous courses organised around or even as a white male genealogy. We find that: once the pressure to modify the shape of disciplines is withdrawn they 'spring back' very quickly into that old shape. Feminists have to keep pushing otherwise things quickly reverse to how they were before. The history of the 'spring back' mechanism is impossible to separate from the history of feminist exhaustion. Which is to say: the very necessity of having to push for some things to be possible can be what makes them (eventually) impossible. Something might not come about not because we have been prevented from doing something (we might even have been officially encouraged to do something) but when the effort to make that thing come about is too much to sustain. …