Fwd – somewhere between a feminist academic journal and an essay collection

 

The feminist research webzine Fwd first started to take shape in February of this year. Several graduate students taking the same class gathered together and began making plans. At first, this was done with a conviction no more serious than, ‘It would be a waste to let these papers that we worked so hard on during the semester just rot, so let’s put them up somewhere.’ Then one of us suggested that if we were going to make a publication, we might as well do it properly, and, as a few more interested graduate students decided to take part, the scale of the project grew.

 

Before we knew it, our report recycling project was reborn with the respectable name of “Fwd, A Feminist Research Webzine”. And by the time we—with much passionate discussion and hard word—finished our inaugural issue, “Backlash”, we had become a 16-person organization.

 

▲ May we all of us not get tired but continue merrily making it happen! (Photo by Boradori)

Due to the nature of being a master’s degree student—having barely over two years to complete the requirements of a graduate program—it was far from easy for us to gather together, plan something, and deliver a real product. The reason we were able to pull it off anyway was probably that we share similar perspectives on the world’s problems.

 

Most of us had ideas that were still a bit too unorganized to become academic papers, but that were clearly too good to waste as a few lines of complaining in a social media post. We talked about how, though we had come to grad school to research theory and create our own, we wanted to use this form of writing that was freer than an academic paper to lay out our perspectives honestly and find stepping stones to new discussions. So Fwd’s target form became ‘somewhere between an academic journal and an essay collection’.

 

The shared “perspective” (really, “regret”) of most of Fwd’s contributors was with the very way in which most public forums related to feminism were constructed. Most of us had come to identify as feminists due to the influences of the birth of Megalia and the Gangnam murder in 2016, and we couldn’t clearly distinguish between the Internet feminist arguments that spilled forth nearly daily from Twitter and Facebook and our own perspectives and criticisms. My reasons were shaped by witnessing a variety of controversies on Twitter, and I affirmed and even built my perspective by intervening, with a critical eye, in such controversies.

 

In this context, we began to feel a sliver of doubt about the way that online discussions unfolded. Too many things were divided as if they could be either A or B, and factional thinking that holds that ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ was being reproduced. Concepts with complicated contexts and histories, like patriarchy, women’s liberation, backlash, oppression, and subordination, became flattened signifiers that floated around. Gradually, the questions that couldn’t actually be resolved within this rigid logic structure began to pile up.

 

And that’s when we got the idea for Fwd. We thought there might be new things to say that could start the discussion anew from the perspective of those who were so-called “Megalia feminists” and had come of age with a close relationship to online discussion spaces, those who therefore had the most problematic and divisive questions—and especially, those among this group who decided to engage with this thing called “theory”.

 

Frequently asked question: how do you develop your contents?

 

About half of the people who hear that a group of poor graduate students are doing something like this are curious about how on earth we manage it, and the other half are sincerely worried for us. We started this webzine with—in our own way—grand intentions, but because we were starting from scratch with no experience, we of course blundered around quite a bit. (Actually, we are still blundering around.) But now that we’ve gone through the planning for two issues, our process has mostly taken shape, so I’d like to talk about our writing process, that thing that so many people are curious about.

 

▲ Fwd’s main page. ⓒfwdfeminist.com

Those of you who have visited Fwd’s website (fwdfeminist.com) will already know this, but the webzine is divided into two categories: Fwd research and Fwd culture/current criticism. The former includes planned articles that our writing staff themselves toiled away for several months, as well as articles submitted by outside contributors. The planned articles are the part that Fwd’s writing staff most participated in and place importance on. At this point, all of the planned articles for our inaugural issue, “Backlash”, and our second issue, “What Comes After The Family?” have been finished.

 

To dive more deeply into the process of making one issue, it first involves having a meeting of the whole writing staff to decide broadly what the issue will be about. For example, suggestions for the second issue’s keywords were “a critical look at the ‘normal’ family” and “bihon [unmarried by choice]”. A group of 5-6 interested members of the writing staff forms for each keyword, and each group has a couple of study sessions. These sessions center around books related to the keyword, especially classic ones that help the team forge a shared perspective on the issue. Afterwards, each member starts to think about the particular structure of the article they will write.

 

Of course, writing staff meetings are also going on during this time, somewhere between once a month and once a week, to check on the progress of the issue [which is published a little at a time, weekly] and share questions and difficulties that have come up in the process of writing each article. Once the first draft of each article is finished, it is edited by a member of the writing staff, and then the whole staff reads it and gives overall feedback to the author. Articles must undergo this whole process in order to be released under the Fwd masthead.

 

As you can see from even this brief overview, the resource that we use the most during the process of creating articles is personnel. No step of the process would work without the active participation of the writing staff. This turns out to have both advantages and disadvantages; one of the advantages is that we come to feel a kind of responsibility for each other’s writing and understanding.

 

Almost every time we meet, one of the things we say jokingly is, “This is my article, but it’s not my article.” One of the peculiarities of Fwd is that we say that each article needs to not only have a sense of completeness in itself but also share a perspective with the other articles in the issue and have an organic connection with them. So from the planning stage, the writing staff share their interests and questions with each other in great detail, and the outlining stage involves several discussions and critiques. 

 

Each article that is written through this process is of course the article of its actual author, but it also reflects advice and questions given by her fellow members of the writing staff.  I don’t think you’ll find an example more suited than this to making you feel the truth of the saying “all knowledge is relational”.

 

But these advantages are also, simultaneously, the causes of our greatest hardships. For example, in order to learn lessons like “all knowledge is relational”, we often run into things like the following.

 

▲ A screen capture of an article - “A Look at the Abolitions of Women Students Associations” – from Fwd’s inaugural issue, in the middle of the writing process. (Photo by Song Yu-jin)

The screencap above shows the Google Doc system the writing staff mainly use for writing and editing documents. The yellow highlighting marks parts that someone has suggested revising [and the orange highlighting marks their comments]. The boxes crowding the right side of the screen are specific requests for revisions made by fellow writing staff. To finish a single article, we go through the feedback process three or four times and make at least ten and sometimes dozens of revision recommendations.

 

Around the height of the feedback period, if you open up the document, you can see three or four cursors racing crazily around the page fixing sentences and unresolved questions pouring forth. The article you’re reading right now will probably go through the same process before you see it. It’s a difficult process, but I think that Fwd survives because so many of my co-creators take it on happily and graciously.

 

A memorable reaction: “that ‘imagination playground’ nonsense”

 

A little more than half a year after we started in February, our dealing with some timely subjects has led to some unexpected things happening. Every Wednesday evening, when we upload new articles, there are a lot of reactions on social media. A few articles have created a temporary stir as they were shared on Twitter, private blogs, universities’ anonymous forums, or Internet communities.

 

What we have been most thankful for even among these reactions are the people who expressed agreement with our perspective and commented that the issues we raise need to be discussed more. When, at feminist events, academic conferences, etc., we introduce ourselves as members of Fwd’s writing staff, there are now people who are glad to meet us and ask us questions, and some of them have become serious supporters, even giving us unsparing emotional and material help.

 

On the other hand, there have also been a lot of critical reactions. Someone once commented, “‘Dichotomous’, ‘linear’, ‘reductive’ – do things not get published if they don’t include these kinds of expressions?” (comment on “‘The Corset-free Movement’ and the Dichotomized Body Narrative”, Song Yu-jin, “Backlash” issue). On our second issue, someone asked us to please stop using “that damned ‘imagination playground’” (comment on “What Comes After ‘the Family’?”, Sing-du, “Bihon – How Are They Similar and Different?” issue).

 

We were upset about these unexpected reactions, but at the same time, the criticisms made us think about the meaning of studying feminist theory at this particular time and place. The fact that some people could consider the language we were trying to make to be simple slander about certain feminist movements or empty nonsense about imagination gave us more concrete motivation than our previous worries had. On this point, I’d like to quote from the “Backlash” issue’s outro:

 

“The argument that we should move past the dichotomy of liberation and subjugation and examine the differences between women and their particular contexts has sometimes been treated as an empty approach that turns its back on the shared oppression that women face. But if, for sake of a unified banner of ‘women’s liberation’, we do not examine the differences in- and outside of our group, the potential of the people belonging to that group will end up being suffocated by that very banner. (...) What we want is for feminist theory and language not to be used to end debates, but to be used to imagine new possibilities. We hope our future issues will come across to readers as attempts to do just that.”

 

▲ ”Your Feminist Book Moments”. Our methods for getting ideas for our next issue are endless. (photo by Sangsang)

The topics of the pieces written by Fwd’s staff are all different, but our concerns about the character and future of public debate are not lessening but growing more refined and specific. In order to talk about the limitations of fixed and dichotomous language and the problems of narrow-minded, reductive politics, we asked critical questions about our society’s backlash phenomena—the Oserabi phenomenon[Translator’s note: referring to the pen name of an author who wrote a book called That Feminism Is Wrong, this is the phenomenon of women criticizing today’s feminism in Korea for being discriminatory and hateful toward men], the abolition of women’s student unions in universities, the veil and Islamic women[Translator’s note: while this is not a major issue in Korea, some in the corset-free movement compare it to the issue of women’s long hair in Korea], the corset-free movement—through our inaugural issue.

 

In addition, we have asked what will come to be after the “(normal) family” is no more and what kinds of discussions we should be having to bring this about, and each of us has sought the answers through explorations of the subjects we are interested in—bihon, family care, male feminists and the family, women with disabilities, female marriage immigrants, and surrogate mothers. And we are currently thinking about ways to, based on this foundation, intervene precisely and from a keen, penetrating perspective in areas that need discussion.

 

For the enrichment of feminist debate!

 

It’s a little silly to give an introduction at the end of the article, but the name “Fwd” actually has several different meanings. There is “f-word”, referring to both forbidden words generally and the way “feminism” has been made taboo and used as an insult, and there is “forward”, meaning that we move forward through discussion. And there is also the abbreviated email term “fwd”; we feel we are conveying the arguments that have been made up to this point and threading them together with new ones. 

 

Building on the works of our predecessor theorists, Fwd plans to move forward while never forgetting the specific places from which the concepts and arguments that we use came from.

 

▲ Fwd’s booth at the “2019 Seoul International Women’s Film Festival Market F”. (photo by Boradori)

Fwd is also thinking about long-term plans that will allow us to continue for many years. While until now we’ve insisted on a particular publication process, in the future we intend to focus on making Fwd even more lively without exhausting the staff’s energy. We want to receive submissions from contributors who share our interests, as well as steadily widen the scope of our interests by periodically publishing pieces belonging to categories such as cultural criticism and criticism on current affairs.

 

Because we’ve decided to take responsibility for each other’s writing, the staff would also like to expand the scale of our pre-publication study efforts so that we’re reading and discussing even more books together. We have ambitions of turning this studying that we already have to do into a kind of open seminar in which we read several books with related topics over a long period of time, and making records of the resulting discussions or making them into issues of the webzine.

 

Right now, Fwd’s staff members have a variety of areas of specialization, academic backgrounds, and interests. These are too numerous to name, but they include feminist epistemology and political science, materialist feminism, the history of feminism, ecofeminism, neoliberalism and women, women’s bodies and labor, the bihon movement, women’s narratives, and feminist literary criticism.

 

From now, we plan to slow down Fwd’s pace a little bit and look carefully into each other’s fields, to dig everything out and move forward not in the direction of exhaustion but of abundance. And of course, on the way, we won’t hesitate to intervene at moments when we feel new issues need to be addressed.

 

We hope you will look forward to finding out how the young researchers cobbling Fwd together change and how we will reflect the fruits of our common causes and shared knowledge in our writings.

 

*Author Song Yu-jin is a member of Fwd’s writing staff. She wrote “‘The Corset-free Movement’ and the Dichotomized Body Narrative: Toward the Imagination of More Bodies” in the webzine’s inaugural “Backlash” issue.

 

Published Oct. 10, 2019

Translated by Marilyn Hook

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/8565

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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