This special issue on “Contested Terrains” features feminist scholarship that explores the varied geopolitical landscapes on which contestations about feminist theories and practices regarding women of color and Third World women are situated. The experiences and perspectives of women of color and Third World women have been frequently erased, distorted, and manipulated both by dominant feminist discourses and by dominant geopolitical discourses. Long after the proclaimed demise of second‐wave feminism in the academy, neoliberal feminist discourses continue to dominate within neocolonial geopolitical regimes. These neoliberal discourses reduce women's liberation to the right to work, to accumulate private property, and to choose lifestyles based on Western patterns of consumption. Such discourses fail to address the pervasive impact of colonialism, structural racism, and Eurocentric cultural imperialism on women's lives in both the so‐called First World and the Third World. Within the Western context, dominant feminist discourses highlighting personal choice overshadow discussions of the public good and leave the most vulnerable members of neoliberal states—often women and girls of color—“free” to fend for themselves and responsible for what are deemed their own failures (Reference Davis and KelleyDavis and Kelley 2012). At the same time, neoliberal feminist perspectives portray women from the Third World as lacking freedom and the ability to self‐govern. Portrayed as helpless victims of incorrigible Third World patriarchies, Third World women are constructed as dependent on interventions from the First World for their liberation (Reference Spivak, MacLean and LandrySpivak 1996; Reference Abu‐LughodAbu-Lughod 2002; Reference UrsUrs 2014). In both cases, the role of colonial and neocolonial perspectives and policies in creating, shaping, and sustaining women's oppression is largely ignored.

This special issue contests dominant neoliberal discourses by foregrounding the ways in which race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, age, and other forms of difference intersect with geopolitical locations such as colony, nation, and empire. The complex and intersectional oppressions of women of color and Third World women have different histories and engender different needs, aspirations, and struggles. In order to do justice to differences among women of color and Third World women, this special issue starts from the premise that differences and disagreements among women have value. Tensions among women—locally, regionally, nationally, and globally—are a potential source of productive feminist questioning, reflection, knowledge, and practice. By allowing differences to surface and in giving ourselves room to explore those differences, feminists may dispel dangerous illusions of unity, become sensitized to points of view that might otherwise be overlooked, work toward deeper understandings of ourselves and others, open new possibilities for growth, clear the ground for more ethical relationships, and foster more meaningful and lasting changes (Reference hookshooks 1984; Reference Pohlhaus and GrasswickPolhaus 2011; Reference MedinaMedina 2012).

Differences and disagreements are compatible with solidarity among diverse women. We can disagree while still working together as allies and co‐conspirators aiming to attain shared goals. This issue embodies the assumption that gender justice across cultures is an aspirational feminist goal, the achievement of which depends on attending to the specific geopolitical terrains on which women of color and Third World women struggle. Unfortunately, conventional geopolitical discourses often flatten the complexity of the lives of women of color and Third World women and ignore their diversely embodied, material, and psychic realities by emphasizing conflicts and alliances between nation‐states (Reference Dixon and MarstonDixon and Marston 2011; Reference DixonDixon 2015). To better understand the more specific contours of women's struggles for—and diverse understandings of—justice, the feminist analyses included here invite us to rescale geopolitical landscapes (Reference Dowler and SharpDowler and Sharp 2001), shifting our attention from the macroscopic perspectives of international affairs and globalization to the smaller‐scale connections between space and politics that play out at the level of intimate lives, community practices, and everyday tactics of survival and resistance of women of color and Third World women, both inside and outside the academy.

Working across differences can be exceedingly difficult when those differences are accompanied by vast disparities of wealth and power, including disparities in social and cultural capital. Participants in feminist discourses who are subjected to testimonial and hermeneutic injustices will have to work much harder than dominant voices to make themselves heard, while those occupying more dominant—local, regional, national, or global—positions may remain actively, willfully ignorant (Reference Sullivan and TuanaSullivan and Tuana 2007; Reference FrickerFricker 2009; Reference MedinaMedina 2012). For these reasons, tensions among women should not be romanticized; disagreements are experienced differently and disproportionately by diverse participants with varying issues at stake. Under these circumstances, some may argue that women of color and Third World women have an “epistemic privilege” (Reference MohantyMohanty 2002) concerning events and conditions relating to their oppression. To honor such privilege, this issue foregrounds the experiences and perspectives of women of color—whether living in the Third World or in the First World—from disadvantaged geopolitical locales. The identifiers women of color and Third World women in the subtitle of this issue are not, however, meant to prioritize any particular theoretical or methodological approach. Although the language one uses inevitably suggests a discursive framework of thought, the identifiers women of color and Third World women, as well as geopolitical divisions of the globe into First and Third worlds (or other conventional geopolitical mappingsFootnote ¹) merit critical examination. How best to describe the differing geopolitical contexts of different feminisms in the era of economic, political, and cultural globalization is—and should be—itself a site of contestation.

The essays collected here encompass wide‐ranging topics, reflecting diverse theoretical or methodological approaches, and speak to complex layers of contestations. Yet a common thread running through them is the recognition that the perspectives of women of color and Third World women are crucial in generating feminist scholarship. As demonstrated by the articles collected in this issue, feminist analyses foregrounding the contested terrains inhabited by women of color and Third World women often embody three characteristics: decoloniality, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity.

First, taking seriously the past and present roles of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and capitalism in the production of knowledge, policy, and relationships, the analyses gathered here attempt to decolonize feminist theory and practice. Many essays included here provide a provocative glimpse into a site‐specific contestation—a set of disagreements that exists at a particular place and a moment in time. Yet many of these differences point directly or indirectly toward unresolved tensions within feminist praxes themselves, tensions that cannot be fully understood without recognizing the continuing legacies of colonialism and imperialism that shape us and the landscapes we inhabit. As Patricia Hill Collins observes with regard to Black sexual politics, “the past is ever present”; new racial injustices “reflect sedimented or past‐in‐present racial formations from prior historical periods,” some of which persist relatively unchanged and others of which are transformed but not undone by contemporary forces of globalization and transnationalism (Reference CollinsCollins 2004, 53, 55). As several authors here contend, it is critical to decolonize the contested material, symbolic, and psychic terrains on which women of different nationalities, races, and ethnicities live.

Second, the essays included here share a commitment to understanding the experiences of women of color and Third World women from an intersectional perspective that views oppressions, subjectivities, and disagreements as having multiple axes to which political interventions must be sensitive (Reference CrenshawCrenshaw 1989; Reference Crenshaw1991; Reference Cho, Crenshaw and McCallCho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013). By including attention to intranational disputes within the Third World as well as international geopolitics in its intersectional analyses, this issue also attempts to counter a “euro‐american bias” in feminist theorizing that too often recenters whiteness and the “First World” as that from which all else is “different” (Reference PuarPuar 2011, 2–3). As Maria Lugones suggests, intersectional analyses must be “interactive” (Reference LugonesLugones 2003, 68–70). Several of the essays here understand racism and cultural and economic imperialism as events, processes, or encounters (Reference CrenshawCrenshaw 1989, 149; Reference PuarPuar 2011, 5) wherein injustices perpetuated, confronted, navigated, and resisted by women with varied histories, needs, and aspirations are dynamic as well as multidimensional.

Third, as is appropriate for a special issue foregrounding geopolitical differences, this one is highly interdisciplinary. Several of the essays here point toward the need to analyze the injustices faced by women of color and Third World women by means of careful examinations of their historically specific, local conditions. In developing their analyses, the authors here draw on empirical research conducted by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, ethnographers, and psychologists. As Peter Higgins suggests herein, determining what policies are just in differing geopolitical locales will be “an interdisciplinary project in which philosophers play but one necessary role” ($$). In addition to collaborating with social scientists to determine the empirical facts on the (contested) ground, several contributors adopt interdisciplinary approaches incorporating the interpretive and imaginative methods of arts and literature. Insofar as coloniality shapes not only what we know, but also what is conceivable, it becomes “necessary to break with customary modes for identifying and organizing [knowledge], and to devise other modes of interpretation beyond the given presumptions of a rational, synthetic system, a developmental teleology, or symmetries of cause and effect” (Reference LoweLowe 2015, 137).

The themes of decoloniality, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity are interwoven throughout the contents of this special issue focusing on the material and discursive terrains contested and inhabited by women or color and Third World women. We begin with Nikita Dhawan's searing critique of European philosophy's self‐conception as “always already anti‐imperial” ($$). Taking as an example the currently popular claim that Kant's cosmopolitanism is an antidote to colonialism, Dhawan suggests that hegemonic views of European philosophy as hospitable to all citizens of the world misrepresents the Enlightenment's epistemological investment in imperialism, delegitimizes non‐European perspectives, and makes the project of decolonizing philosophy unnecessary. The colonialism that shaped (disciplined) Enlightenment philosophy, she argues, finds its legacy in the normative and physical violence exerted toward today's Syrian refugees in Germany. In order to legitimize non‐European perspectives, she concludes, we cannot merely integrate previously marginalized knowledge into the existing philosophical canon; we must “undo the uneven distribution of epistemic agency globally” ($$). Postcolonial feminist analyses, such as Gayatri Spivak's ideas of transnational literacy and planetary ethics, Dhawan concludes, make a critical contribution to imagining a “post‐imperial philosophy” in the era of globalization.

The next three essays, by Higgins, Douglas Hanes, and Laura Engel, both contest and extend Dhawan's concerns. As philosophers who work in the analytic tradition, Higgins, Hanes, and Engel do not target Euro‐American philosophy itself as colonial or imperialist. Yet each contests specific Western analyses of immigration and development policies with a sensitivity to the ways in which even well‐intentioned policies may reproduce injustice.

Higgins argues for a much needed feminist approach to nonrefugee immigrant admissions. Drawing lessons from Alison Jaggar's articulation of a feminist methodological approach to the political morality of abortion, Higgins proposes a feminist methodology for assessing the justice of immigrant admission policies. He deliberately refrains from offering a substantive view on what policies states ought to adopt, noting that the justice of immigration policies will depend on a host of factors that may vary across time and place. However, he does describe several factors important to assessing the justice of a state's immigration policies from a feminist perspective. These include: the types of economic development in each state; how the specific social groups that exist in each state are affected by different quantities and kinds of immigration; the patterns of migration into and out of each state and the effects of migration on social groups in other societies. Higgins argues that a feminist approach attentive to these factors would recognize that immigration policies affect people not simply as individuals per se, but as members of social groups whose opportunities and life prospects are unequally affected by “formal rules, informal norms, and stable practices (that is, social institutions)” ($$). Thus, we cannot determine whether an immigration policy is just without attention to gender, race, economic class, sexuality, (dis)ability, age, religion, and nationality as salient categories of analysis.

In his essay, Hanes examines the potentially exclusionary nature of some care theorists’ proposals to extend citizenship to migrant careworkers and their dependents. Hanes's central concern is that an exclusive focus on careworkers in citizenship proposals leaves behind care's Other, namely the exploited commodity producers on whose labor we also depend. Using Dorothy Roberts's analysis of the distinction between “spiritual” and “menial” housework, Hanes argues that while the “stigma of care work” has disadvantaged white women, women of color have been defined by “the stigma of meniality.” Under the forces of globalization, Hanes argues, the care/noncare division of feminized labor reproduces hierarchies among women in the global South, and between consumers and producers in the global North. Granting careworkers citizenship while denying it to commodity producers could exacerbate the inequalities and the conflicting interests that would further jeopardize efforts to improve the status, pay, and protections for all women's work. Hanes concludes by proposing several ways of better understanding the interrelationships of care and noncare work while retaining the critical and political value that care has for feminism.

Laura Engel's essay turns our attention from immigration policy to development work, arguing that development theorists and practitioners need to pay greater attention to women's sacred values if they are to help them flourish. Starting from Serene Khader's analysis of “adaptive preferences,” Engel argues that care in distinguishing among four types of adaptive states—beliefs, choices, desires, and values—can serve to prevent inappropriate intervention into the values that structure a person's sense of meaning and self. Considering the example of a woman who may forgo getting enough to eat in order to be a good wife, Engel warns that attempts to transform her values are likely to cause her psychological distress and diminished agency. Furthermore, some values are “sacred”; these values preclude deliberation and comparison given their communal status as infinitely valuable. In cultures where the practice of genital cutting embodies the sacred value of female purity, for example, a woman who speaks against the practice will risk condemnation by and alienation from her community. Noting that even deliberating about sacred values violates them, Engel urges development practitioners to consider the potentially extensive emotional and psychological damage that may result from asking a woman to contest community practices in determining whether, and what type of, intervention is justified.

Whereas the first four essays in this issue address broad philosophical concerns regarding the justice of immigration and development policies affecting women of color and Third World women, many of the subsequent essays use diverse disciplinary methodologies to provide more intimate portraits of specific practices, events, and struggles on varied geopolitical terrains.

Carmen Nave's analysis of locally emergent marriage practices in Kumasi, Ghana, uses ethnographic and historical evidence to consider Ghanaian marriage as a particular locus of what Lugones has called “the colonial/modern gender system.” Nave argues that Western feminist understandings of marriage and the family as key sites of the subjugation of African women often lack local and historical contextualization. To provide such contextualization, Nave traces the emergence and current local expression of “companionate marriage,” a Western ideal of marriage commonly associated with romantic love and personal choice, and that is often seen as a gender‐progressive marriage ideal. In Kumasi, the “companionate” ideals that emerged during the colonial period, Nave explains, disempowered women by limiting wives’ claims to husbands’ reciprocal support and isolating women from their matrilineal kin. Today, customary marriage is often considered harmful to women and distinct from other forms of marriage; Nave argues that such assumptions impose categorical differences between “traditional” and “companionate” marriage where none exist, and occlude the complexities of women's lives and struggles in intimate terrains shaped by colonial efforts to redefine the family.

Karie Cross Riddle examines armed conflict in Manipur, India, reminding us that contestations among women may be life‐threatening and less than easily resolved. Central to her argument is an intersectional analysis of women's struggles for peace and their (often compromised) agency as peacebuilders. Based on field research she conducted in 2014 and 2015, Riddle argues—using Kimberlé Crenshaw's notion of “structural intersectionality”—that different women belonging to different ethnic groups (Meitei, Naga, and Kuki women) have qualitatively different experiences of war and peace because of their different social locations. Scholars, journalists, and others, Nave suggests, often privilege the experiences of Meitei women because of their greater accessibility, ignoring both the suffering and the agency of the more geographically remote Naga, Kuki, and other women. Riddle further observes that interethnic peacebuilding groups that rely on gender‐based solidarity tend to privilege the experiences of the women coming from the majority ethnic group, whereas other peacebuilding groups, bound by ethnicity, often distrust and resent women who come from different ethnic enclaves. Using Crenshaw's notion of “political intersectionality” as a normative tool, Riddle argues that ethnic and religious hierarchies often disrupt women's attempts to build a sustainable peace and that women's peacebuilding agency must aim at an inclusive “justpeace” if it is to succeed.

In their essays, Sara Salem, A. Marie Ranjbar, and Swati Moitra argue explicitly for understanding feminist methods and practices through a lens sensitive to the particular historical, political, and geographical terrains that women must navigate. Salem employs a late twentieth‐century documentary film, Four Women of Egypt, as the lens through which she analyzes the connections between Egypt's shifting geopolitics and shifting understandings of gender in the mid twentieth century. The film reveals women's memory as a contested terrain, according to Salem. The narratives of the four women featured in the film suggest that “the discourse of state feminism [during the Nasser era] had complex and contradictory effects” ($$), providing women access to social spaces they had long fought for—including work and education—while simultaneously closing down the spaces for women's independent organizing. Yet the diverse women interviewed share a nostalgia for the women's movement of the 1950s. Salem attributes this nostalgia to the geopolitics of Egyptian decolonization combined with the popularity during that time of Marxist framings of gender inequality. Following the transition during the Sadat era to an open‐market economy, the Egyptian women's movement shifted away from structural critiques of imperialism and capitalism and toward neoliberal human rights discourses. This shift as well as the Egyptian women's nostalgia for the Nasser era can only be understood, Salem concludes, by attending to the geopolitical and transnational contexts of social movements.

Ranjbar explores tensions between acts of silencing and silence as an act of dissent through an analysis of several modalities of silence employed during the mass protests that followed the declaration that Ahmadinejad had won Iran's 2009 presidential election. Protesters asking for a new election and expanded civil rights were (mis)interpreted by both Iranian and US media through “an ideological Western/Islamic binary” ($$). Ranjbar positions the subsequent silent protests in Tehran's public squares as a response to local and global misinterpretations of the protest movement. Drawing on feminist literary studies, she conceptualizes silence as “a pluralistic, multifaceted, and multi‐sited force” ($$) used by Iranian citizens to actively resist geopolitical conditions that subjected Iranian citizens to state silencing. Ranjbar reminds us that silence cannot be read uniformly across borders, however. Tehran's silent protests were efficacious because of Iran's geostrategic importance to the West; silence is unlikely to have a similar efficacy in less internationally visible locales.

Moitra approaches questions of silence and silencing from a different direction in her investigation of reading practices in nineteenth‐century Bengal. Contesting the theoretical privileging of silent/solitary reading as “modern,” Moitra considers the practice of “communitarian reading”—reading together, reading aloud—as a defining aspect of Bengali women's culture during the colonial era. Communitarian reading practices are misread, Moitra suggests, as a sign of women's passive acceptance of their exclusion from colonial (modern) education. Moitra reframes women's practice of reading together in the domestic sphere as a form of “clandestine sociality”; such a reframing views the practice as opening new possibilities for women's participation in the public sphere of colonial Bengal. By rearranging what counts as “private” and “public” spaces, Moitra explains, Bengali women resisted gendered strategies of containment and “made ‘habitable’ the demands of reform and modernity upon them” ($$).

Like Moitra's essay, the essays by Adelle Sefton‐Rowston and Haley Konitshek draw our attention to the political import of practices of reading and writing. More than merely passive processes of mimetic display, Sefton‐Rowston contends, reading and writing provide a means for psychological transformation and self‐reclamation. Through close readings of two novels by Australian aboriginal authors—Alexis Wright's The Swan Book and Marie Munkara's Every Secret Thing—Sefton‐Rowston illustrates how sovereignty over one's own creative representations of the self can rewrite colonized subjectivities outside of the master–slave relation. Indigenous characters who withdraw and disengage from the state of reality in the stories of aboriginal authors may appear “crazy”; however, such craziness represents psychological empowerment for those who are subjugated to colonialism and patriarchy. Of particular interest to Sefton‐Rowston is the way in which both Wright and Munkara contest the patriarchal and neocolonial representations of Australian “reconciliation.” The psychological sovereignty of both First Peoples and settlers cannot be found in Western notions of freedom and equality but instead, these authors suggest, must involve being moved to see the craziness of the nation's colonial past.

Konitshek also looks to literature (and other creative arts) as a source of psychological empowerment for colonized subjects. Reading Hortense Spillers's “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” alongside Karen Barad's analysis of posthumanist performativity, Konitshek explores the performative relationship between materiality and signification, arguing that creative performances of liminal figures such as “Sapphire” can reclaim and transform power (rather than merely reproducing it unchanged). Critical of Barad's claim that “language has been granted too much power” (Reference BaradBarad 2003, 801), Konitshek explores the contested discursive terrains marked by “Sapphire,” noting how this naming of Black women both emerges from the material conditions of slavery and gives rise to new “abuses of the flesh” ($$). She considers, for example, how the figure of the Black matriarch in the Moynihan Report undermined the material well‐being of many Black families. Drawing on Spillers's suggestion that the Black mother's power to name should be cultivated, Konitshek advocates reclaiming Sapphire's monstrosity as the ground for Black female insurgency through the development of subversive reading practices. Reading matters, Konitshek concludes, and its urgency is especially acute for those whose subjectivity is “captured” through the material power of language.

The next three articles in this special issue deal with contested feminist discourses and practices situated at intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Juliana Martinez examines the controversy over the first ever Mujer T—originally conceived as a beauty pageant for transgender women—in 2013 in Bogotá. At the center of the controversy were questions concerning whether traditional (and often racist and ageist) notions of femininity could empower historically marginalized women—in this case trans women. Noting that debates surrounding the event largely talked about and spoke for trans women, rather than enabling them to speak for themselves, Martinez coins the term “diversity ventriloquism.” This phrase aptly describes the practice by which dominant subjects appropriate the voices of diverse others while preventing those other voices from surfacing and/or gaining legitimacy. Mujer T and its aftermath hold important lessons, Martinez argues, for how to navigate the tensions generated by policies of inclusivity. These events in one of the largest cities in the global South also raise pressing questions for feminists regarding the ways in which dominant feminist discourses may silence those it seeks to include. This thread runs through the remainder of the essays in this issue.

Karen Hanna's contribution examines intergenerational conflict among leaders of several Filipina/o/x activist organizations in the United States [Correction added on July 21, 2017, after online publication: The sentence has been changed.]. Using David Eng's concept of queer diasporas, Hanna contends that dominant discourses of Filipino nationalism reproduce transphobia, homophobia, and heterosexism as the symptoms of inherited traumas that are the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. These legacies normalize the trauma of migration, giving rise to “logics of emergency” that guide traditional diasporic activism and marginalize other concerns (such as transphobia) while simultaneously erasing a cultural history in which women and nonbinary individuals held positions of authority. Arguing that the historical trauma suffered by colonized subjects “wounds across geographical space” ($$) as those subjects migrate abroad for their economic and physical survival, Hanna highlights the need for activists to engage in collective grieving processes that interrupt historical trauma and recover Indigenous sensibilities and practices.

The article by Sunera Thobani returns us to the topic with which the issue began, namely, the need to decolonize philosophy. Thobani's incisive critique of philosophy's colonialist tendencies is aimed directly at feminist and queer theory, however. Her careful analysis of the exchange among Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, and Talal Asad contained in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech illustrates how the West's relation with Islam is contested and negotiated in a particular scholarly site during a moment of global crisis. Thobani urges us to critically examine how white feminists and queer theorists may reproduce Western discourses that contrast the “civilizing” values of secularism, democracy, and freedom with fanaticism, misogyny, and homophobia they attribute to “Islam.” Drawing on Sara Ahmed's rethinking of “orientations,” Thobani argues that the stabilization of the epistemic power of the West relies on the violent suppression of counter‐hegemonic narratives through a privileging of gender‐sexual politics. Orientating the politics of gender‐sexuality around and toward the Western tradition, Thobani contends, enables the queer subject to be constituted as the embodiment of Western secular values who must confront the dangers seen to emanate from Islam. When the gendered‐sexual subject stabilizes the Western philosophical tradition by claiming its authoritative power of critique as her own, Thobani argues, she reveals “how such feminist/queer politics—grounded in white identity and experience—function to suppress counter‐histories of Muslim experience and to disappear Muslim queers (and queers of color in general) from the epistemic field” ($$). In so doing, the “critical” theorist abandons the opportunity to engage the transformative potential of counter‐narratives that foreground anti‐imperialist and antiracist critiques.

We conclude this issue with a dialogue among several feminist scholars concerning the terminology “women of color” and “Third World women.” This Musings conversation emerged from entering the contested terrains of identifiers and their import at the 2015 meeting of Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST), organized around the theme “Contested Terrains: Women of Color, Feminisms, and Geopolitics.” Four of the participants in the dialogue here (Saba Fatima, Kristie Dotson, Ranjoo Seodu Herr, Serene Khader) were among the participants in a heated dialogue at that conference concerning a change in verbiage (from “Women of Color” to “Third World women”) on the original call for papers for this special issue. Although the intent of that change had been to make the call more inclusive by reaching out to a more international audience, several women at the US‐based conference—who identified as “women of color” but not as “Third World women”—felt excluded and hence wronged by the change. As a result, the theme of this special issue was again changed to include both identifiers. As the fifth participant to the Musings dialogue here (Stella Nyanzi) explains, this expansion of identifiers may still serve to exclude and alienate women such as her. As a self‐described “Black African Muganda woman of the Buffalo clan from Uganda,” Nyanzi finds the identifier “woman of color” to be “North American and colonizing” and experiences the identifier “Third World woman” as violating in its “singular” and “monolithic” extension ($$). This concluding dialogue is nonconclusive. The contestations among liminal subjects occupying different geopolitical positions highlights the immense difficulty of navigating discursive terrains that are shaped by colonial legacies even as they attempt to decolonize.

Sara Ahmed notes that all objects and happenings have “histories of arrival” (Reference AhmedAhmed 2006). As the final Musings contained here makes explicit, this special issue on “Contested Terrains: Women of Color, Third World Women, Feminisms, and Geopolitics” has its own history of arrival. The trajectory leading to publication of a special issue of a scholarly journal is complex and reflects—among other things—the cultural orientations and disciplinary allegiances of contributors, guest editors, managing editors, editorial boards, reviewers, professions, and professional organizations. Behind the relatively smooth façade of the distributed finished product are a series of decisions and disagreements, both small and large—that lead to this object at this moment. Differing visions are negotiated in writing a call for papers and choosing a title for the issue. Different institutional and social locations affect where the CFP is circulated. Those who respond to the call do so from different geopolitical locations and bring different disciplinary orientations and languages to the task. Anonymous reviewers push authors to make changes; sometimes the directions in which they push conflict. Authors must navigate these contested terrains. Guest editors adjudicate the revised products but we do not always agree with one another.

The singular voice in which this Introduction is written both dissembles and reveals. It (falsely) connotes that we, as guest editors, share a unified perspective and elides our own very different histories of arrival in the US, the different communication styles that emerge from different cultural backgrounds, the different scholarly perspectives that result from engagement over many years with different sets of colleagues and bodies of literature, and the different institutional and political terrains on which we each live. At the same time, the singular voice in which we speak here also reveals (accurately) that we do, in fact, share common ground: we are both feminist philosophers who were trained in the US at roughly the same time, who continue to travel in some of the same professional circles, and who share a commitment to negotiating our differences. The “we” here is aspirational; throughout this process we have aspired to collaborate toward the common goal of creating a space within feminist philosophy for women of color and Third World women to speak about the contested terrains they/we inherit, inhabit, and seek to reshape.