Editors’ Note: On the Problems of Collective Amnesia and Institutional Erasure

As scholars in the field we often tell our students about the tremendous effect that feminism and gender studies has had on nearly every discipline in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond. We talk about how the academy was irreversibly transformed for the better by gender consciousness, feminist critique, intersectional analyses, and other critical frameworks that largely stem from our field. For students first introduced to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, this revelation can still come as a surprise, given how the gains of social justice movements—both inside and outside university campuses—have been undermined and overturned by patriarchal, neocolonial, homophobic, and racist politics. Collective amnesia and institutional erasure have set in to such a degree that college students in many sectors of the academy may never be exposed to gender issues.

We in Frontiers are deeply committed to publishing scholarly and creative work that seeks to challenge these reactionary politics by reminding universities and other educational institutions of the importance of a feminist education. We are thus excited to note that the articles and creative work published in this issue will resonate with students familiar and unfamiliar with feminist praxis. We are featuring here themes that may be recognizable to wider audiences such as care and aging, race representations, mother-daughter relations, and popular culture. The radical feminist perspectives offered by these writers, however, will unsettle any sense of complacency around these issues. Whether or not our readers teach gender studies and feminist classes, we encourage them to use these articles in their college classrooms and thus help to destabilize the collective amnesia and institutional erasure of our times.

Concerns over care and aging have taken up considerable space in US media discussions about the baby-boomer generation, the elderly, and health care. What is missing from such discussions is an understanding of how our social practices surrounding care and aging are informed by gender perceptions. Sophie Bourgault in her essay “Beyond the Saint and the Red Virgin” thus turns to famed French philosopher Simone Weil for feminist understandings of care. Weil’s writings on needs and obligations, Bourgault contends, pushed for a politics of compassion that was not merely relegated to women doing care work in the domestic sphere but that should also encompass government and public policy. In a similar fashion the work of drag performance artist Aloha Tolentino, featured on the cover of this issue, also compels us to consider how the gendered, racialized, and queered body of the Filipina nurse and caregiver is inscribed within transnational exchanges of labor. As a counterpart to both Bourgault’s text and Tolentino’s performance Scarlett Cunningham’s article “The Limits of Celebration in Lucille Clifton’s Poetry” turns to the black female aging body as a site of social neglect and repudiation. Through her unique take on the work of Maryland poet laureate Lucille Clifton, Cunningham praises Clifton’s honest and even unapologetic vision of a body in a vulnerable state of decline.

Mothering and parenting, like aging and care, have long animated public discussions about family crises, same-sex marriage, broken homes, child abuse, and so on. What contributors to this issue add to these discussions is a much-needed questioning of the repressive ideologies that inform these debates. “Renegotiating Relationships between Mothers and Daughters in Jennifer Johnston’s The Invisible Worm and The Illusionist” by Mara Reisman explores the implications of mending mother-daughter relationships not so much for the sake of familial stability but for the larger goal of national healing in the politically fractured Ireland of the late twentieth century. While such relationships are generally considered irrelevant vis à vis “weightier” concerns over social and national importance, Frontiers contributors establish a continuum between the two. Like Reisman, Marjorie Maddox in her poem “Mamie’s Advice” attempts to recover and highlight the role that the mother of slain African American teenager and civil rights icon Emmett Till played in national dialogues about lynching and extreme racial violence in the United States.

Reisman, who focuses on Jennifer Johnston’s literary work, and Maddox, who...