preface

Ketchum's history of feminist restaurants and cafes in Ontario, Canada, in the mid 1970s to early 1980s encourages us to consider the importance of space to the formation of feminist solidarities and political organizing, while Pergadia's analysis of the geological understandings that undergird the work of both Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler invites us to rethink the temporalities through which gendered and sexed subjects, as well as academic disciplines, are formed. [...]to purely verbal literary forms, Chute claims that new experimental forms of graphic texts emphasize the "embodiment inherent to comics in its processes of production - in which the hand-drawn mark indexes the body of the maker- [and so] helps to instantiate the form . . . as one that is deeply embodied" in the comics form. The final essay of this issue, Samantha Pergadia's "Geologies of Sex and Gender: Excavating the Materialism of Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler," shifts our attention away from the temporalities of individual life trajectories toward the overarching temporalities through which gendered and sexed subjects are formed as well as the disciplines that examine these issues. Through close attention to Rubin and Butler's "shared sense of temporal organization that stems from the geologic," as indexed by their respective use of fossil and rock tropes, Pergadia's article further underscores queer theory's competing understandings of matter and its constitution as a field, as well as its unresolved tensions that crosscut ongoing debates among new materialist feminists.