Foreword

The late bell hooks wrote, “to be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.” hooks insightfully treated the liberating possibilities of marginal existence. But, of course, the costs and pitfalls of being in the margins often present themselves in everything from the latest news to the realities of the everyday. This collection focuses on what the margins of gender look like now. What are the trends in activism and scholarship that express change either in the margins or in a response from the hegemony? Are there solutions and movements that have been particularly effective in gaining recognition of marginal existence or effecting positive, real-world change? Are there powerful coalitions across populations and generations that have formed to bring the margins into focus? Myriad disciplines and perspectives have been brought together in these pages to answer these broad questions. Sana Sayed examines the macro issues at stake in thinking about achieving greater gender equality in Pakistan from both a historical perspective and in terms current movements in her chapter “Democracy When? Working Towards Women’s Equality and Empowerment in Pakistan.” Quratulain Shah takes up where Sayed leaves off in looking specifically at the Aurat March in Pakistan as sign of progress in the fight for gender equality and cross-generational and cross-regional collaboration toward coalition building in her chapter “Contemporary Feminist Activism: Aurat March in Pakistan.” Suzanne Linn Kamata and Yoko Kita’s chapter “Gen Z Japanese University Students’ Attitudes toward Domestic Labor and their Implications for Gender Parity” also considers generational divides and common ground as regards gender equality in Japan. Despite clear portrayals of the challenges activists and future generations face, all of these chapters offer hope for shifting perspectives on gender equality in precarious international environments. My own chapter “Replacing the Implicit Association Test in the Service of Feminist Pedagogy,” like Suzanne Linn Kamata and Yoko Kita’s, considers gender disparities in the context of the university setting. However, I focus instead on pedagogical practice in the U.S., rethinking approaches to teaching hidden bias and its implications in terms of intersectional identity. Olga Gould-Yakovleva’s chapter “An Outsider’s Peek into the Nightmare: A Qualitative Narrative Case Study on the Gender-Related Social and Emotional Abuse” also explores the U.S. educational setting as a site of gender inequality and trauma. Her work uses the personal experiences of a gender nonbinary educator as its foundation. Finally, Ly Thi Phuong Tran et al. offer insight into the work of Y Ban and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tu, contemporary Vietnamese writers whose work is investigated in this chapter in terms of Feminist Stylistics. “Modern Prose Works of Vietnamese Women Writers from the Perspective of Feminist Stylistics” offers a close examination of shifting literary perspectives and their impact on Vietnamese culture and society today. Together these chapters offer a nuanced yet global perspective on the state of contemporary feminism and its relevance inside and outside of the classroom, on the street and in the minds of everyday activists and people. By closely exploring the margins and our work therein, we pay homage to bell hooks’ words and demonstrate our power as less and less marginal.   Sincerely, Molly C. O’Donnell