Editorial

    When the US feminist theorist Adrienne Rich made a trip to Cuba in the early 1980s, she encountered considerable anti-US sentiment and realized that she could not simply use her commitment to international feminism (not to mention anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics) to divest herself from her country of origin. Reflecting on her experience, she understood that as a US feminist scholar, she needed to recognize her location in the world – as, she put it, to name the ground she came from as well as the conditions she had been taking for granted. As a result, she formulated a plea for a feminist politics of location (Rich, 1986). For her, this politics of location would mean more than simply condemning the US government or – to speak in the words of Virginia Woolf – saying three times ‘As a woman my country is the whole world.’ She could not separate herself from the bloody and belligerent history of her homeland: its legacy of slavery, its unbridled imperialism, or its rabid anti-communism. With her politics of location, Rich took issue with the tendency within US feminism to speak in terms of ‘we’ without reflecting on who the ‘we’ actually was as an illusion of being the centre of the world, of speaking and writing as if one were speaking for everyone. This illusion had everything to do with the specific position that the US had taken in the world, historically and geopolitically. In order to avoid this, Rich argued that US feminists needed to become accountable for their own place on the map and for what this location implied for how they felt, what they saw, how they thought, and, of course, the ways they put all of this into writing.

    More than 20 years later, Rich’s argument for a politics of location is pretty much bon ton in US feminist scholarship. Gone is the ubiquitous ‘we’ and most US feminist scholars are wary of making universalistic statements. It is no longer acceptable to engage in feminist scholarship in the US from an unmarked position and many contemporary US feminist scholars now go to great lengths to situate themselves critically vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

    But what about European feminist scholarship?

    In this journal, the politics of location so passionately advocated by Adrienne Rich is often missing in the contributions of our authors. It is possible, of course, that European feminist scholars do not feel the urgencyof such a politics. After all, in Europe, there may be less inclination among feminist scholars to speak in the royal ‘we’, given that many of us are already irritated by the hegemony of US feminist scholarship. Moreover, as any European academic can attest, doing research in a European context invariably entails specifying one’s national context and comparing it to what is still regarded as the undisputed ‘centre’ of all academic endeavours – the US. When writing for an ‘international journal’ (whereby international is generally shorthand for US), the European author is expected to explain where she or he is from and how her or his topic is relevant to a ‘broader’ (i.e. Anglo/American) audience, if that author wants to get the article published. This state of affairs is without a doubt problematic and deserves critical attention in and of itself. However, it does not alleviate the need to embark upon a politics of location.

    Like the US, Europe has its own problematic history – a history of transnational slavery, colonialism, genocide and ethnic cleansing. This history is integral to the way nation-states have been constituted and is embedded in the social constellations and cultural imaginaries of contemporary Europe. It has shaped – and continues to shape – the traditions of thought from which feminist scholarship draws its inspiration and develops its critiques. Moreover, Europe has its own distinctive forms of denial. Indeed, denial may be an endemic feature of European identity. Take the Netherlands, my own country of residence. Given its chequered past as colonial power and its current realities of xenophobia, there is every reason for some critical ambivalence about the national identity. Nevertheless, the tendency here is often to ignore one’s own complicities with the less positive features of Dutch history and politics in favour of pointing an accusing finger at others – usually, the Germans, the Serbs, or, the always available culprit for whatever ills are facing the world, the US. Accountability for one’s own national belonging is not a high priority within Dutch feminism.

    I believe that, as European feminists, we have much to learn from Adrienne Rich. There is still much work to be done in analysing how the historical legacies of Europe as well as its current geopolitical conditions shape our own research agendas, our theoretical perspectives, our political and normative commitments. Our ambivalences, denials and blind-spots continue to require interrogation if we are to avoid separating ourselves from those histories and present realities that we would prefer to forget. European feminists also need to be critically and reflexively attuned to the subtle and less-than-subtle ways that the ‘we’ of European feminism gets constructed, who is included and who is excluded, and which issues are voiced and which are silenced. It is not enough to situate ourselves (with a sigh of resignation) as ‘not US-American’ or to grudgingly contextualize our work with a national label (‘the Belgian media’, ‘sex stratification in Spain’, ‘the response of the Bulgarian government to the declining birth rate’). A European feminist politics of location involves the ongoing and often painful work of making connections between the local and the global, of critically and reflexively interrogating the linkages between what happens ‘here’ and what is happening – or has happened – ‘over there’.

    This issue would seem to be atypically local, as it contains three contributions from Scandinavian countries. However, each explores and interrogates the local against the backdrop of the global. In ‘Pregnant Bodies: Norwegian Female Employees in Global Working Life’, Hege Eggen Børve explores pregnancy in the context of labour trajectories that extend across national borders and the differences that welfare state arrangements make in specific locations for women to negotiate their reproductive lives.

    Kristin Spilker and Merete Lie, also writing from Norway, take up the ways debates about reproductive technologies draw upon (globally) circulating discourses of equality/inequality and sameness/difference, yet in locally specific ways. They show why we need to be on the alert for biologically deterministic arguments about reproduction even in ostensibly egalitarian cultures.

    In ‘Sexual Selection Revisited – Towards a Gender-Neutral Theory and Practice’, Malin Ah-King provides a critical rejoinder to an earlier contribution in our journal about the usefulness of evolutionary psychology and Darwinian notions of sexual selection for feminist theory. She provides a cautionary note about the androcentric bias of this internationally popular theoretical paradigm and argues for increased vigilance concerning the gendered presuppositions of evolutionary psychology.

    This issue ends with a provocative and timely piece by Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova, in which the authors criticize Vladimir Putin’s recent proposal concerning family and childcare policy in Russia, which marks a shift from the 1980s rhetoric about women returning to their traditional roles in order to lighten their double burden.

     The authors suggest that there are snakes lurking in the grass of the new proposal advocating women’s wage-earning and state support for Russian mothers. What does this ‘new’ gender ideology mean?
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    We look forward to more contributions that engage critically and reflexively with gendered inequities within different local contexts across Europe, while keeping in mind how these inequities are also shaped and inflected by as well as interact with the world outside Europe.

REFERENCE
Rich, Adrienne (1986) ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’, pp. 210–31 in Blood,
Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. New York: W.W. Norton.
Kathy Davis