Editor's Note: Critical Interventions into Place, Nation, Creativity, and Feminist Knowledge

In this issue we are excited to present you with innovative takes on themes and issues that have fascinated feminist scholars for many years. The rich and rigorous research and analyses featured in these texts represent new and important contributions to long-standing academic traditions in feminist thought. These writings encourage readers to rethink and recontextualize these themes and thus breathe new life into enduring paradigms in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

A heightened consciousness of how place and nation affect gender relations and dynamics fueled much of the intellectual impetus behind various articles in this issue. Agata Szczeszak-Brewer’s “Joyce’s Vagina Dentata: Irish Agriculture and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood” relates how nationalist discourses and gendered constructs in the work of celebrated Irish novelist and poet James Joyce are intimately intertwined by the recurring theme of the vagina dentata. In Joyce’s narratives the place specificity of Ireland provides a fertile ground for the emergence of the vagina dentata motif as a symbol of an ethnic and gender otherness that threatens to disrupt the racial purity of the nation.

Dorothy Fujita-Rony’s article “A Shared Pacific Arena: Empire, Agriculture and the Life Narratives of Mary Paik Lee, Angeles Monrayo, and Mary Tomita” also examines the theme of space, gender, and nation. Fujita-Rony analyzes the writings of three Asian American women as complex narratives about resistance to power and to US and Japanese colonialism in the Pacific arena of California and Hawai’i. These stories that relate working-class women of color’s struggles, the author contends, are greatly differentiated from the male-dominated accounts of labor resistance in California agriculture that privilege race and class over gender. In addition Fujita-Rony presents an alternative reading of space and place by presenting the US rural West as part of a “shared Pacific.”

The complex discourses associated with place are also explored by articles that conceptualize the Midwest as a feminist frontier. Erin M. Kempker’s article “Coalition and Control: Hoosier Feminists and the Equal Rights Amendment” documents the second-wave feminist movement in the politically conservative state of Indiana. Like the patriarchal politics of turn-of-the-century Ireland or the early twentieth-century US West, Indiana of the 1970s was leery of the potential threats to the social fabric that women in the budding feminist movement represented. In contrast Chris Lezotte’s account of female muscle car enthusiasts in Southeastern Michigan in her article “Women with Muscle: Contemporary Women and the Classic Muscle Car” reveals how midwestern women might express a conservative form of feminism through their leisure activities. The Midwest in both these essays is presented as a new borderland where conservative and feminist sensibilities rub up against one another. In the midst of their respective research projects Kempker and Lezotte found that women can assert various forms of self-determination within the rubrics of the republican and conservative cultures in this region. Both writers also underscore the difficulties inherent in articulating women-centered positions in the Midwest. Kempker describes in great detail the marginalizing racial politics among Indiana feminists, who ultimately failed to bring black women into the fold, while Lezotte argues that the mostly Republican women who participate in muscle car culture still have to “negotiate membership” within the largely white male social sphere of automobile clubs and shows in Southeastern Michigan. The Midwest in both these articles emerges as an important site where gender politics complicate facile definitions of the cultural and social makeup of the region.

Although feminism as an activist and intellectual project has undoubtedly come of age and matured for many decades now, numerous contributors to this issue are nevertheless encouraging readers to rethink and reevaluate the political and social implications of feminism as a school of thought and social movement. Angus Fletcher in his article “Willa Cather and the Upside-Down Politics of Feminist Darwinism,” for instance, compels his readers to reconsider nineteenth-century suffragettes’ Darwinian model of masculinity and gender relations. Rather than promoting social stratification, hierarchies, and biological determinism, Fletcher argues, feminist...