Survival

To survive is messy, elaborate, and layered. Survival conjures hills alive with survivalists, as well as such misconstrued terms as "survival of the fittest," the defiance reflected in Gloria Gaynor's 1980s disco anthem "I Will Survive," as well as states of being "a survivor" of abuse, war, or rape. Survival's topicality extends beyond controversies around life and death expectancy, planned life termination, as well as the continuing fascination with suicide and now ecocide. Posing "survival" invites the question: What didn't survive?

The newest issue of the award-winning academic journal Women's Studies Quarterlyexplores these timely questions and the untimely ethics of survival by tracing back to classic, contemporary, and subterranean feminist texts.

Frances Bartkowski is a feminist theorist and literary critic, teaching English and Women's Studies at Rutgers University-Newark since 1989. Her books includeFeminist Utopias; Travelers, Immigrants, Inmates: Essays in Estrangement;Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary; and the textbook Feminist Theory: A Reader.

Elena Glasberg writes about visual arts, music, literature, and ice in publications includingPolitical Legal Anthropology Review, Genre, the Scholar & Feminist,Journal of Historical Geography, New Zealand Journal of Photography, andWomen's Studies Quarterly, and teaches in the Writing Program at NYU.

Taylor Black is a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU and currently working on a book project,Time Out of Mind: Style and the Art of Becoming, which explores the practices and uses of style in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Quentin Crisp, and Bob Dylan.