Beyond the Mundane: Design and the Feminist Academic Journal

As Simone Murray (2004) and other feminist publishing scholars have noted, until recently there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to the processes, or as Jennifer Gilley (2017) remarks, the “mundane realities” of feminist publishing. In a similar way, little attention has been paid to the design worlds that feminists have and continue to create when they edit, publish, and produce academic journals. In this talk, I graph the ways in which online feminist academic journals draw on a rich history of feminist design invention. While in the 60s and 70s the Women in Print Movement utilized the affordances of the mimeograph, today feminists and other scholars have both embraced and critiqued online forms of publishing and their role in knowledge production (i.e., Kahn 2016; Nagel 2013; Christen 2012). Drawing connections between the design decisions and strategies of such iconic feminist presses as The Kitchen Table Press and today’s rich landscape of feminist academic journals, I argue for the existence of feminist design elements, genealogies, and traditions within the design arts. In particular, I will look at contemporary journals such as Wagadu, Ada, Decolonization, and Feral Feminisms to think about the elements of feminist design invention as involving slantwise orientations (Ahmed 2006), patchwork, disidentification (Muñoz 1999), and other design elements. I argue that contemporary feminist journals utilize design to challenge commercial models of publishing, narrow understandings of access, and individualistic understandings of how knowledge is made, developing in the process a multifaceted feminist design praxis.