In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming translation of L’Afrique et ses fantômes (2015) and Singe de Kafka (2008), Seloua Luste Boulbina shows how French opposition to the Islamic hijab, as described by Fanon, mirrored British opposition to the Indian practice of sati by claiming to defend women while really defending the interests of European men. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for women to define and assert interests of their own, apart from the perspectives imposed by politically opposed groups of men. Fanon recognized this complex silence. But Fanon also failed to read the perspective motivating the writings of fellow Martinican author, Mayotte Capécia (Lucette Ceranus Combette), which prevented him from seeing any independence in women’s capacity for interracial love and prevented him from giving a more complex psychological and political meaning to mixed ancestry.

This essay conducts a comparative reading of Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the Hindu epic Mahabharata and Mahasweta Devi’s story “Draupadi.” While scholars have examined Devi’s tribal protagonist Draupadi in conjunction with the high Hindu goddess Draupadi of the epic, I suggest that the former’s viswarupadarshana (revelation of form) should be read in contrast to the role of the Mahabharata’s Hindu God Krishna. This comparison shows the feminist and postcolonial import of Devi’s story, as it demonstrates the continuity of caste-based tribal exploitation from antiquity to globalization. Along with this critique of tribal women’s subalternity in the national imaginary, Devi’s story stages a terrifying singularity that disrupts the sociopolitical logic of gender. Draupadi occupies the position of the subject of knowledge to invert the Indo-Aryan (mythology based) ontograph. By unraveling the “she” that must be perpetually murdered for (this kind of) historicity to take root, Draupadi pours (back) into an encounter between agent and subaltern the affectivity ideologically excised for an illusion to be seen as truth and, hence, as history.

This article uses the circumstances of black intimacies within the nineteenth century to analyze the ways in which the law, by definition, limits human possibility and agency. This limiting of possibility and agency is then visited upon LGBT people in the moment of marriage equality. The article attempts to show how that limiting is, in fact, part of the definition of legal personhood. While expanding forms of agency prescribed by the state, the law has also worked to narrow the forms of social agency produced and enacted by minoritized communities. This article, in sum, takes the marriage right as an example of a legal agency that confers personhood and narrows the intimate universes and social capacities produced by racial and sexual minorities.

This analysis connects the resurgence of affect theory known as “the affective turn” with the locus of attention surrounding abjection and examines the workings of abjection within the logics of disgust and shame, as well as the political potential of shame. The abject not only informs structures of knowledge and power that govern how subjectivities and group formations are founded and regulated, but provides elements of fluidity and ambiguity that allow us to challenge the affective patterns associated with the abject and locate resources in shame that contribute to restructuring the terrain of politics beyond a simple conversion of shame to pride.

Inspired by the Kristevan notion of abjection and her view of the corpse as the “most sickening of wastes,” I propose a notion of photographic incandescence—the affective and carnal possibility of a photograph to undo the self. I first discuss the notion of abjection and its relation to incandescence and explore how this incandescence is connected to Kristeva’s view of the corpse. Second, I discuss the notion of photographic incandescence in light of an analysis of Susan Meiselas’s photograph, Cuesta del Plomo, and Roland Barthes’s notions of piercing and fulguration. Finally, I engage Gloria Anzaldúa’s practice of putting Coyolxauhqui together in its attempt to “re-member” the self through the act of creativity, an experience not without pain or the possibility of failure and unreconcilable carnal excess.

This essay introduces the work of the “first generation” Korean feminist photographer Youngsook Park (b. 1941). Highlighting the spirited and critical “wildness” of her feminist aesthetic agenda, with a topical focus on her iconic Michinnyeon Project (1996–2005, “The Mad Women Project,” retranslated here as “The Crazy B*tch Project”), this dossier also contextualizes her more current projects such as Michinnyeon · Balhwa-hada (Blooming/Uttering) (2016) and Could Not Have Left Them Behind (2017) along with her broader lifetime achievements thus far.

This dossier introduces and celebrates the work of Belladonna* Collaborative—a radical feminist press, reading series, and collective—on its twentieth anniversary. Included in the dossier are two documents from recent Belladonna* events: the first is a partial transcript of a conversation between poets Bernadette Mayer and Stacy Szymaszek, and the second is an introduction by Rachel Levitsky to Belladonna*’s first Lesbian All-Stars reading. The documents are prefaced by a brief headnote on the mission and history of Belladonna*.