Editor's Introduction

This issue is the product of several departures, layovers, connections, and arrivals. Paula J. Giddings retired from Smith College and Meridians as of June 30, 2017, closing a successful twelve-year run as Editor. Paula is succeeded by Ginetta E. B. Candelario, a long-time member of the Meridians editorial group, who assumed the editorship as of July 1, 2017. Sarah LaBelle, Meridians' longtime Administrative Assistant, also departed after five years of dedicated and invaluable service to the journal. Our new Editorial Assistant, Leslie Marie Aguilar, comes to us—by way of Abilene, TX—from Indiana Review, where she served as Poetry Editor. Before leaving, Paula and Sarah began putting this issue together. The timing of their departure, however, meant that seeing it through to publication would entail several layovers and carefully timed connections during the transition process. As with all departures and arrivals, we are sad to bid our colleagues farewell, yet excited to arrive at our new destination. This is in part what makes the cover art for this issue especially fitting.

Favianna Rodriguez's De Avión en Avión (From Plane to Plane) is a "self-portrait" of her feelings while flying. A collage of airline ticket stubs from flights she has taken "to wonderful places," the piece is a vivid depiction of her life as an artist. From geographic locations like "Tokyo or Berlin or Mexico City or . . . Los Angeles"¹ to resonant moments in time, Rodriguez's piece aptly presages our contributors deft and surefooted navigations of complex, contradictory, and at times inhospitable intellectual terrains and questions. As we approach the end of our second decade of publishing scholarship, essays, and culture works produced by and about women of color, we have decided to return to our signature features. Similar to Volume l, Number 1, this issue includes Essays, Counterpoints, Cultureworks, Memoir, Media Matters, and In the Trenches pieces. As our founding Editorial Group outlined:

Counterpoints initiates a self-conscious examination of the analytical and political vocabulary of the fields in which feminists work . . .

In the Trenches asks where practical application and community activism take women around the world and in what forms these manifest themselves . . .

Cultureworks will include creative work, interviews with artists, photo or art essays, poetry, short fiction, and drama . . .

Memoirs analyzes the formation of consciousness and examines the production of racial, sexual, and national subjects . . .

Media Matters focuses on the debates, meanings, politics, and uses of visual, musical, or cybernet representations in popular culture . . .

In the Archives will publish documents from institutional or organizational repositories . . .

We open this issue with an essay by Barbara Tomlinson, whose intervention historicizes on-going debates about the meaning and (mis) uses of intersectionality as theory and elucidating metaphor. Tomlinson argues that "white reception of intersectional thinking" inside the academy repeatedly distorts intersectionality's explicit movement beyond accepting white women's subjectivity as the universal, fixed, and generative center of feminisms. She argues further that the geometric metaphors deployed by scholars such as Crenshaw (intersectionality) and Hill-Collins (interlocking) help to "provide insight into social relations and structures of power" that frame gender, race, and class—as well as other axes of inequality and domination—as dynamically and mutually constitutive concepts rather than being mere metaphors "caught in the vice of geometry."

Likewise, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles' piece on Marie Chauvet examines a tradition of scholars who focus their attention on Chauvet's life, rather than her work. Jean-Charles argues that the excessive focus on Chauvet's looks and repeated distortion of her biography illuminates how superficial, identitarian forms of intersectionality produce a milieu that names, claims, and frames Chauvet as a Haitian woman writer without the sort of rigorous intellectual attention that critical intersectionality affords her body of work. Interestingly, and in keeping with our theme, it is from Haiti's transnational diaspora that the first serious engagements with Chauvet's work emerges.

Continuing with this exploration of the history of claims upon and uses to which feminist writing and scholarship is put in situ and internationally, Cornelia Möser...