Methodologies, Tactics, Strategies

Sometimes it is not enough to declaratively address the right topics if our ways of doing it are not supporting our efforts. This issue strives to present certain methodological, strategical, and tactical tools that can help us answer “how?”. How to act if we wish to have an inclusive, caring, emphatic, fair, non-hierarchical, forgiving, brave, and [insert a value] art or society? Certain positions, especially those whose gender or sexuality made them personally feel the injustices and the dissatisfaction with the prevalent ways of doing things, have a greater sensibility for those topics and, out of quite existential reasons, often also more imagination for inventing new ways of solving problems and creating the conditions for cooperation and
co-existence. This issue dives into the wealth of ideas on how to approach differently ideas that mainly originate in feminist and queer perspectives. Some of them are discussed in the articles by individuals or members of collectives who have deduced useful and inspirational practices from their own experience, from case studies, or from conceptual research.

Such methodologies, tactics, and strategies can also be called reparative practices. The term was introduced by queer theoretician Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick when she proposed reparative reading as opposed to paranoid reading – many authors make use of it in this issue. It covers all of the practices that do not accept the repressiveness of predetermined methods that canparalyse all that is non-normative, but respond to specific situations and complex relationships in order to support and correct them. They do not accept distant judgements, but are always already involved in order to support the surprising and the emergent and to develop tactics of resilience and mutual support even where the situation seems hopeless. This concept is also the foundation of the European project TESTING GROUND: Reparative Practices for New Cultural Ecosystem, which Maska is implementing together with Kurziv from Croatia and Krytyka Polityczna from Poland. Certain findings from the project research have also been directly and indirectly caught in this issue of Maska.

(Excerpt from the editor’s introduction)