Editorial Introduction

As we write this introduction, many of the inherent challenges in moving a journal to a new home under a new editorial team have been worked out. We brought Feminist Formations to the University of Arizona in August of 2011 and have been working hard to build the kind of infrastructure that can foster the feminist knowledge production that is described in the journal's mission statement:

Feminist Formations cultivates a forum where feminists from around the world articulate research, theory, activism, teaching, and learning, thereby showcasing new feminist formations. An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, we publish innovative work by scholars, activists, and practitioners in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Our subject matter includes national, global, and transnational feminist thought and practice; the cultural and social politics of genders and sexualities; and historical and contemporary studies of gendered experience. The journal values established and emerging lines of inquiry and methods that engage the complexities of gender as implicated in forms of power such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, migration, ability, and religion.

What really excited us about the journal was its commitment to the kind of scholarship and praxis that avoids monological approaches to power. And we look forward to the next several years of intense collaborative work to help facilitate this robust forum. We continue to be excited about building on the work of the journal's previous editorial teams to take Feminist Formations in new directions.

We are especially excited to introduce you to two changes we have initiated to make the journal more vibrant and richly textured and to help us reach a range of new readers, writers, and cultural producers. The first change involves the appearance of the journal. In the tradition of Chicana feminist publishing, we have incorporated into our publication process the careful selection of politically engaged artwork to feature on our front covers.1 More than a cosmetic shift, we seek to pay tribute to the often underappreciated importance of the visual and to introduce you to feminist artists with whom you may not yet be familiar. On the cover of our previous issue (Spring, vol. 24, no. 1), you see Jesse Aguirre's Lady Waiting for Cortez (2010). Much of Aguirre's art speaks to his complex trajectory, from child migrant worker, to student of elite universities, to engaged visual artist. When we were first arranging to reproduce Lady Waiting for Cortez, we assumed we would use the achromatic design and printing technique we inherited. But when we saw how much of the piece's arresting beauty was lost in translation, we immediately regrouped to see if we could afford to print the work in color. And so we did. In the process, we made a commitment to experimenting with color throughout the full volume year of 2012.

The art we have selected for this issue is particularly well-suited to our use of color. Our featured artist, Edouard Duval Carrié, is Haitian-born though now based in Miami. His work has been influenced by the memorializing practices of Haitian artists, who bring together the past and present to achieve a visual synthesis of the aesthetic, religious, and historic (Reed 2010). This synthesis is reflected in the work reproduced on our cover, Le Monde Actuel Ou Erzulie Interceptée (The Real World of Erzulie Intercepted). Erzulie is a prominent spirit of the Vodou pantheon whose many manifestations include the mother of Haiti. Here, Erzulie is represented as a "boat person" who is vulnerable to legacies of U.S. imperialism. Duval Carrié's painting is an invitation to consider the interwoven gendered, racialized, and religious dimensions of U.S. bordering practices and to reflect on how contemporary passages are part of much longer histories of traversals and crossings in many forms.

The second major change to the journal you will notice is that, beginning with this issue, we are launching a permanent section called "Poesía." As with our decision to prominently feature visual art and artists, our team discussed at length the importance of pushing at the bounds of academic knowledge production and making space for...