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Editors' Note: Vol 1:2

By Judith Roof and Alanna Beroiza »»» The first essay of this issue, Milo Obourn’s “Racialized Disgender and Disruptive Futurity in Lorde’s and Engelberg’s Cancer Narratives” considers the relation between disability and “disgendering” as a “disabling process of racialized gender” by which “culturally-informed bodies come to inhabit a disgendered and tenuous subjecthood.” Thinking through complex modes of experience and representation rather than obscuring them with the terms of identity politics, Obourn’s essay asks us to think about how some genderings are already disabilities, how marked race can exist without a gender, and why disabilities cannot be reduced to any irredeemably negative status.That this disgendering often manufactures a negative subjective status helps to understand the ways in which the presumed narrative trajectories of gender, race, and disability are much more complex than categorical thought would presume, asking that we consider the both/and qualities of gendered, raced, and disabled subjectivities. The essay’s theory of disgendering complicates gender as an “identity” in the sense that gender’s presumed link to reproductive futures is not constructed in relation to the kind of absolute negativity that Edelman talks about in No Future. For Obourn, disgendering does operate within the imaginary confines of either/or logics that identity categories require to exist. Instead, disgendering disrupts logics of reproductive futurity by “[situating] us in relation to the future without…inherently presenting us with a promise” (26).

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Editors' Note, Genders Future Tense: "The Prime Task"

By Karen Jacobs and Judith Roof »»» A journal such as Genders, which might promulgate heterogeneity in the form of critical, analytical, philosophical and even personal works, offers a platform from which a divergent range of interrogations, approaches, interventions, and observations might circulate and contribute to, inform, and benefit from larger conversations among interested critics, thinkers, writers, and activists.