We are pleased to announce the launch of the website for Feminist Critique: East European Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies [1]. It has been a long preparatory period since the idea of the journal emerged for the first time. We, editors-in-chief Maria [2]Mayerchy [2]k [2] and Olga Plakhotnik [3], developed the idea, conception and the structure of the journal. The journal is affiliated with the "Center for Cultural-Anthropological Studies," a non-governmental organization in Kyiv. The journal's web-portal was developed with a generous support of the Krytyka Institute and the personal participation of Oleh Kotsyuba [4], Krytyka's Chief Online Editor. We are deeply grateful for this collaboration. We are also thankful to our colleagues and friends Andriy Mokrousov, Yuliya Bentia, Lyosha Gorshkov, Olenka Dmytryk and Halyna Yarmanova for their wise ideas and friendly support. Our gratitude also goes to our designer Yaroslav Gavrylyuk and type-setter Maiya Prytykina, and to Krytyka's team of programmers.
Feminist Critique is a feminist journal. We consider feminism to be a political positionality and methodological toolkit that are specifically sensitive to power relations and inequalities. As the recent international events show, we still do not have an effective language to grasp political realities. Feminist Critique is our attempt to establish a platform for creation and development of such a language (or, to be precise, languages).
Feminist Critique is a queer-theoretical journal. We seek to problematize universalist and a-historical claims and ways of thinking, binaries and normativities. Instead, we call on heteroglossia, the transgression of neoliberal, progressivist, and triumphalist frameworks. The first publication of our journal is a translated excerpt from The Queer Art of Failure, and this is not a coincidence. We consider it to be a pivotal text for our project because Eastern Europe is always seen as lagging behind, not successful and not progressive enough for the dominant "Western eyes." But we can ask in Halberstam's vein: What if we question the very logics of progress and success, or, at the very least, show its historicity?
Feminist Critique is a slowly paced journal – a journal for slow writing and slow reading. It is largely an academic project; all submitted original papers will go through a double per-review. At the same time, a venue for faster reactions also exists: this is the Feminist Collective blog. We invite cutting-edge and sharp commentaries on recent politics from broader queer-feminist communities, activists, and academics.
Feminist Critique's publishing process, however, will not be slow. After completion of reviews and the preparatory work, each article will appear open-access on our website in HTML and PDF formats, including pagination in the bound and type-set issue. This will allow the correct citing of each publication even before the compilation of the entire issue.
Feminist Critique invites submissions in three languages - Ukrainian, English, and Russian. This represents our political project to de-centralize knowledge production in a globalized world. As soon as we find an individual, community, or organization that would like to volunteer the translation to/from the Belarusian language, this fourth language will be added to the journal. The journal will have an ISSN and will be registered in SCOPUS database upon the publication of the first two issues.