Introduction

Dear Readers,

This issue of Frontiers is our last as coeditors. By the time you read this final communication from us, the journal will have moved from Arizona State University (ASU) to Ohio State University (OSU), where it will be edited by Judy Wu and Guisela Latorre. Two years after we became editors, in 2003, Frontiers celebrated its thirtieth birthday; two years into Judy and Guisela’s watch Frontiers will turn forty. This long and healthy life as a leading multi-disciplinary, multicultural feminist journal has been the work of many dedicated hands—so many that a full editorial genealogy from the first collective at the University of Colorado at Boulder to the new OSU editors cannot be completely reconstructed here. At this moment of transition, however, some recognition of where the journal has been and what it has achieved seems to us fitting and proper.

Founded in 1975, Frontiers remained in Boulder until 1991, when it moved to the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque. During its years at the University of Colorado the journal did not have a lead editor or editors but was managed by a collective who rotated executive responsibilities. Thirty-three women served on the Frontiers collective over its sixteen years in Boulder, many of whom alternated between the collective and an ever-changing team of consulting editors. Seven women served five or more years on the collective, and three—Lee Chambers-Schiller, Hardy Long Frank, and Kathi George—served ten or more. When Frontiers moved to the University of New Mexico it also acquired a new governing structure: a lead editor (Louise Lamphere) and associate editor (Jane Slaughter), supported by a UNM editorial collective, as well as the board of Frontiers, Inc., the result of the journal’s incorporation as a nonprofit organization. In 1994 Jane Slaughter took over as editor, with Shane Phelan and Diana Robin becoming associate editors. Two years later Frontiers again moved, this time to Washington State University, under the editorship of Sue Armitage. Along the way the journal also acquired a national board of consulting editors. Sue and her managing editor, Patricia Hart, and assistant editors, Karen Weathermon and Sandra Martin, brought great continuity to the running of the journal over its seven years in Pullman. Together, the team published a series of path-breaking special issues on gender and racial and ethnic groups in the West. Sue was also responsible for negotiating the journal’s present happy relationship with the University of Nebraska Press.

By the time of Frontiers’s fourth migration, to Arizona State University in 2003, the journal had long been associated with feminist studies in the US regional West. This orientation was by no means solely a function of its consistent location in Western universities. Although the original editorial collective chose the name Frontiers to position the journal on the leading edge of feminist scholarship, the title also came to signify the journal’s focus on the history and cultures of the region in which it had always made its home. Reinforcing this association was the journal’s early and sustained lead in publishing work on women and gender within the emerging field of racial and ethnic studies, especially in the West, and the New Western history.

When we became editors of Frontiers, we were deeply mindful of the journal’s intellectual place and physical location in the West, and we had no desire to deny our roots. But we also wanted to take the journal in new directions. If the name Frontiers was originally meant to suggest intellectual border crossing, we wanted as well to explore borders and boundaries as spatial realities by expanding the journal’s reach not only beyond the West but outside the nation. The new Frontiers editors, Judy and Guisela, will further extend the journal’s horizon line, while sinking some new regional roots east of the Mississippi, in the Midwest. We wish them and Frontiers all good things.

This last issue of Frontiers is a general issue, but its thematic threads suggest some of the avenues of inquiry that the journal has tracked under our editorship. In the...