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When we wrote the introduction to the first part of our double issue on “Gender, Violence, and the State in Contemporary Speculative Fiction,” published as issue 80 (2021), there were signs everywhere of political and social developments that were putting increasing pressure on women, gender-non-conforming folks, and queer people. Scholarly discourses in Europe and the United States, that is those discourses we are most familiar with, registered these developments and scholars alongside activists on both sides of the Atlantic began their efforts to historicize, contextualize, and explain them. At the same time, many researchers gradually had to come to terms with the fact that cultural critique and theory do not necessarily impact the world outside the academy. Despite having seen the warning signs of strengthening anti- feminist, anti-queer, anti-gender, and anti-trans agitations for many years and being intellectually aware of the need to critique Western narratives of progress, many of “us”—if we may evoke such a tenuous collectivity for a moment—had been too naive in our stubborn hope for a future marked by less violence and discrimination (whether institutionalized or not), more equality before the law, and more opportunities for marginalized individuals and groups to see their concerns represented and have their grievances heard and addressed. These hopes have not been confirmed, or at least, they have not been confirmed evenly.
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