everyday struggling
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The title of this issue, ‘Everyday Struggling’, sounds a little awkward, a little odd. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, and appears to have too many syllables. ‘Everyday Struggles’ might have been neater, and its meaning clearer. But despite (or indeed because of) its awkwardness, we settled on this title for the way it highlights the active, ongoing nature of struggle. Struggles are not something only externally imposed, objects to be overcome, but are experienced at a visceral, personal level, and are formative of subjectivity. We liked the image ‘everyday struggling’ evokes of a wriggling body, never still, always engaged with itself and the world. A struggling body might tighten bonds or loosen them, and everyday struggling may be visible or hidden, vocal or silent. Struggling, then, gives a sense of action more than outcome, an emphasis we felt was awkwardly appropriate to the flavour of the articles included in this issue. In strikingly different ways, each author interrogates the question of resources, critically examining the relationship between what a body needs for life (for example, health, freedom from violence, shelter, human care and of course economic means) and what one has access to. The shortfall between the two produces everyday struggling in a material sense, and necessitates the use or development of more personal resources, in the form of narrative, testimony, action or reflection. Since it is experienced differently, everyday struggling is also expressed differently for different groups and individuals; this difference raises a further question of representation in each article. The authors in this issue are grappling not only with the various ways in which their research subjects (people or texts) experience and express everyday struggling, but with how to convey this to an external readership. It is an ongoing task to find ways to represent everyday struggling in all its complexity, without solidifying responses as simply transgression or capitulation. This task of representing everyday struggling is important for feminist work for a variety of overlapping reasons. One reason is simply to keep open the question of how to represent the relationship between resources, experience and narration from a feminist perspective. There has never been a time when feminist thought was not concerned with mapping ways out of oppressive or limiting circumstances – and reasonably so. Yet, while the idea of a structural account (whether singular or multiple) of power and resistance has always seemed rather inadequate to the task of representing what one might call simply tenacity, so too is an approach that searches relentlessly for acts feminist review 82 2006 c 2006 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/06 $30 www.feminist-review.com (1–5)
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or moments of resistance that come to stand in for that tenacity. The fetishization of the event or moment as evidence of agency, itself understood as liberation from constraint rather than, say, facility within constraint, seems to dominate feminist work. In focusing on fre
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