Contact

Abstract

Contact refers to the moment of encounter between different populations, and the social, cultural, and linguistic negotiations that ensue. It refers back to a specific time and place when difference and “otherness” is constructed. As a feminist keyword, "contact" can help us critically interrogate various axes of difference, and the conditions that enabled their emergence. Through the meeting of different populations and groups, it demands attention to issues of power and its role in shaping and enacting “othered” identities. It entails both larger, macro-historical events, and smaller moments of face-to-face, intersubjective interactions. Fundamentally, contact is about social change and the potential for it. Social change is interactionally emergent from the contestations that occur between individuals and groups in contact with each other. But the potential for change via contact can also help us see alternative possibilities, allowing us to push against existing typologies, universals, and binaries so that we can better capture the dynamic fluidity of social identities and group boundaries