How does water talk, and other hopeful questions about and beyond gender and language

Abstract

The inaugural issue of Gender and Language focused on unanswered questions and unquestioned assumptions. This essay revisits these questions, thinking about next steps not only for the field, but also for the larger feminist, anti-racist, anticolonial world our work aims to build. In particular, I consider two questions with impacts for thinking about how to deepen the political impact of our own work, in the realms of social and environmental justice. First, how can we ensure the kind of work we are publishing in this journal has an impact beyond university conversations? Second, have we gone far enough, as a field, in reconsidering not just questions of gender and of language, but also of what we imagine as persons?