Editors' Note

We are delighted to open the second issue of volume 18, as we did the first, by featuring one of the highlights of the 2005 Berkshire Conference: Tani Barlow's contribution to the plenary session "Beyond a Boundary: Women, Borderlands, and Frontiers across the Globe." Like her co-panelist Afsaneh Najmabadi (whose presentation we featured in our last issue), Barlow raises critical questions of method and theory that have emerged from the specificities of her own work in gender history, but have profound implications for all of us. In a provocative intervention on "History and the Border," Barlow challenges us to think about what it means to go "beyond boundaries"—to transcend, to cross, even to erase. These very acts of moving beyond, she argues, stand as affirmation of a boundary's ghostly presence. Working through a range of troubled and troubling evidence—from commercial advertisements for fertilizer to "real women" like Yoshiko "Shirley" Yamaguchi—Barlow demonstrates how we can displace borders with what she calls historical catachreses. Through close readings of anachronistic, occult bits of evidence, she suggests, whose intelligibility is anchored to specific historical junctures, we are able to move beyond the linear pull of historicity and catch glimpses of an ambiguous, unstable past—a "present" that is not about transition to something, but represents a moment in time all its own.

Appropriately enough, the first two articles in this issue are also about "Challenging Boundaries," though in different ways and with very different kinds of evidence than those at the core of Barlow's project. Charlene Boyer Lewis, in "Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: 'Ill Suited for the Life of a Columbians Modest Wife,'" examines the fascinating life story of the woman who married Napoleon's brother, Jerome, in 1804 and who, through her "scandalous" behavior and taste for provocative French fashion, became the focus of major debates over gender and national culture in the new American republic. In contrast to much of the historical literature, which focuses on the ideal of republican motherhood, Lewis demonstrates how Bonaparte's challenge to prescribed gender roles and expectations, including motherhood, provided alternative models for women and fed into important cultural debates during the republican experiment. Gendered boundaries and debates also feature prominently in Caroline Waldron Merithew's contribution to this issue, though her article transports us across both temporal and class lines in the United States in its exploration of working-class housewives in the coal fields and their struggles to expose the gender and class hypocrisy of all-male unionism in the 1930s. Focusing on the Women's Auxiliary of the Progressive Miners, "'We Were Not Ladies'" explores how battles between the Progressive Miners and the United Mine Workers opened up a space for women to wage their own struggles against a homosocial unionism that ignored the gendered dimensions of class. In their calls for "Bread and Freedom," women refashioned the rhetoric of motherhood and claimed their spaces in union-led struggles for better working conditions.

The second set of articles takes up the question of the state and mechanisms for "Policing Women's Bodies" in two very different national contexts. In "Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy," Deirdre Moloney focuses on how the United States sought to police women immigrants who broke gendered rules of heterosexual propriety: those who bore children outside of marriage, and those who were accused of prostitution or of having sex outside of marriage. While moral turpitude was seldom the explicit reason for deportation, it was often implicit in accusations that a woman was "likely to become a public charge"—accusations that were grounded in the belief that women were morally vulnerable and economically dependent on men. The end result, as Moloney demonstrates, were highly racialized immigration policies that limited migration opportunities for women, especially those deemed to be "non-white." In "Problematic Modernity," Dora Barrancos shifts our focus to the Argentinian state with a careful examination of how and why neoliberal forces, despite their modernizing, secular rhetoric, were able to forestall women's access to divorce and contraception. Looking at two periods of liberal hegemony in Argentina (at...