This digital issue is the final installment in a series of volumes commemorating the 50th anniversary of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. In preparing for this milestone, the editorial collective spent considerable time thinking with and about the history of the journal and of feminist theorizing and publishing more broadly. We revisited our own history, collecting oral stories from those who were a part of building the journal’s legacy; we explored our own archives and revisited pieces that impacted the field; and we looked at the current landscape of feminism and feminist publishing. These journeys through history, memory, and the archives revealed to us that Frontiers has made a tremendous impact in feminist scholarship and practice.

However, we know the life of the journal is still unfolding (after all, 50 is the new 30, or so we are told!). In this last celebratory volume, we look ahead to the work of young activists and scholars that are building the future of the movement. Today, youth are leading on issues ranging from racial justice to LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive justice, and immigration reform, reshaping feminist movements by centering the experiences of marginalized groups. Frontiers has also historically highlighted youth activism, from the Los Angeles School Blow Outs to the Egyptian uprising and trans youth online advocacy. This issue thus continues this tradition by focusing on youth-led organizing, activism, and creative engagement with feminism, aiming to highlight the ways in which young people—especially young women of color—are transforming feminist thought, community, and praxis today.

This special digital issue, “Feminist Youth Engagement: The Future of the Feminist Movement,” presents fourteen pieces that showcase how youth are reimagining feminism – blending digital media, social justice work, and political action to create new futures. The contributions employ a variety of multimodal, arts-based, and creative expressions to explore feminist theory, pedagogy, and resistance in ways that challenge and reinvent traditional academic essays and forms.

Here, when we think about the future, we think not about what is yet to come, but about what already exists under the surface. While the use of the wave metaphor to describe the feminist movement is not without controversy,^[1] it serves to illustrate what we are trying to do here. Waves might seem like water that comes and goes, but they are really just energy moving and changing, even if we don’t see it. So, when we are talking about the future of the feminist movement, we are talking about the present, about the waves that are already in motion, forming under the surface. Recognizing that nascent activism needs to be cultivated, Charla Agnoletti, Jordan “Dani” Lee, Yamileth Salinas De Val, and Adriana Iturbe created “Our Seeds of Change,” a guide structured as a zine for adult allies who want to support the work of youth activists that opens this special issue. This metaphor of planting and growing youth leaders extends throughout several other pieces, showing how nourishment can have a huge impact in the engagement of youth. In another zine, Hannah Maitland’s “When Did You First Learn About Feminism” traces the history of feminist “inheritances” and how the relationship between mothers and daughters contribute to the development of activist identities. In “When You Move I Move: Critical Race Feminism in a High School Student Leadership Classroom,” Carla Cariño describes an activity she did with her high school students to demonstrate how, when given the space, young women of color become leaders of their communities in ways that “disrupt hegemonic patriarchal white leadership styles.” Tashal Brown and Shena Sanchez’s piece, “Envisioning and Embodying Freedom: The Intersectional Activism of Girls of Color through Poetic Collage,” also highlights the percolating leadership of girls of color in a project that asked them to reflect on the ways in which they practice activism in their everyday lives.

We believe that looking forward is especially important in the current political climate, where hard fought rights have been taken away, white Christian nationalism is on the rise, and hopelessness about the future is at an all-time high.^[2] Even though the future may feel grim, the work of scholars, students, and activists presented in issue gives us reason to remain hopeful, because as Sara Ahmed articulates in Living a Feminist Life, “[h]ope does not only or always point toward the future, but carries us through when the terrain is difficult, when the path we follow makes it harder to proceed.”^[3] In “Radical Reimaginings: Black Girlhood, Feminist Praxis, and Arts-Based Inquiry in a University-School Collaboration,” Ayanna Troutman, Oluyemisi Oladejo, Taryn Brown, and Kenesma John present a short video created by Black middle and high school girls in which they reimagine the kind of Black girlhood allowed to exist in the educational system.

Following the theme of reimagining education, two pieces in this issue focus on math education and Black girls, focusing not on a future when math education will be inclusive, but one that empowers these youth to see themselves as capable math learners who take up space. In “Optical Illusion: Making Black Girl Math Worlds Visible,” Oyemolade Osibodu and Myrtle Sodhi interrogate how, in educational spaces, Black girls’ learning processes are rendered invisible, particularly when it comes to math. Through the use of visual arts, the authors work with young Black women to create a space in which they see themselves as math learners. Osibodu’s single-authored piece, “Math Belongs to All of Us: A Composite Narrative about Sub-Saharan African Youth Math Experiences,” creates space for students to challenge the false narrative about their belonging in math and to craft their own narrative around their learning process. We hope that the work of young activists and scholars presented here will motivate you, like it motivated us, to continue the fight for freedom, liberation, and equal rights for all.

We chose to make this special issue a digital one because we recognize that technology has a central role in contemporary movement building and youth-led political activities.^[4] Some of the most prolific mobilizations in the 21st century started online, from #Metoo to #BlackLivesMatter. Digital technology allows rapid spread of movements and connect with people with similar lived experiences in other parts of the world. Digital spaces also enable activists to remain engaged even when they are physically distant from the places where movements take place as well as to enact their own, smaller-scale acts of resistance. For example, in “Stories in Squares: Instagram as My Feminist Archive and Activist Space,” Bhawana Shrestha illustrates how social media connects people in the diaspora across the world and becomes a tool of witnessing where South Asian women globally can come together to interrogate cultural expectations and narratives and where traditional gender expectations can be challenged and questioned. Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla and Niloufar Esmaili’s “Behind the Screen: Exploring the Realities of Being a Woman Social Media Influencer in Iran” offers a digital map that traces the diaspora of Iranian feminist activists and their continued work online. The authors explore how social media political influencers in Iran continue advocating for changes in their country even though they have had to leave Iran to escape persecution. In “Translation as Feminist Method: The Struggle against Digital Sex Crime in South Korea,” Melina Jung recounts how a network of interpreters from around the world joined forces with the South Korean feminist activist group eNd to ensure that news about the dismantling of a large scale digital sexual exploitation network was shared with the world. Jung discusses this movement, including her own participation in it, to theorize translation as a feminist practice of resistance and solidarity.

In addition to drawing on arts-based research, several pieces also serve as interventions in social justice issues. Nayali López’s spoken word performance “El Paletero” confronts colonialism and human displacement through an analysis of her changing neighborhood. The erasure of community, embodied here by the popsicle street vendor, mimics the erasure the poet experienced in white academic spaces, where cultural symbols are superficially admired, but never meaningfully included. Elijah X Lin also speaks about erasure in “Conjuring of a Fat Queer Disabled Asian American Specter: Illegible Performances as Youth’s Obligation,” employing poetry and audio recordings to engage in a non-scripted conversation with the readers about multiplicity and the impossibility of inhabiting a body that is, often times, partially legible even within feminist circles. Similarly, in “To be Heard is To Be Known: A Queer Reflection of Youth Theory,” Omi Santa Cruz and Cydney Cardonna reflect on how queer and trans youth of color contribute to feminist theory through acts performed outside academic spaces. We close out this issue with “The Embodied Futures of Screendance for the Next Generation,” where Alexia Maikidou Poutrino, Sophie Greenwood, and Kiri Avelar use dance as a critical archival intervention to rewrite historical narratives that excluded women’s voices. In these examples, the arts serve as a bridge to connect feminist theory and practice.

As we look ahead, the pieces in this issue show us that the future of feminism is intersectional, inclusive, and fueled by the passion of young people to build a more just world.

Notes

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Author Biography

Dr. Ana Carolina Antunes is the Book Review Editor and Treasurer for Frontiers. She is originally from Rio de Janeiro Brazil, but she has lived in Salt Lake City, UT since 2006. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from the Education, Culture & Society Department at the University of Utah and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies in the same institution. Dr. Antunes develops participatory projects with young people of refugee and immigrant backgrounds in afterschool settings and it is interested in how racialized and gendered readings of bodies mediate relationships in the educational system.

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