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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22.2 (2001) v-vi



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Introduction

Sue Armitage
for the Frontiers Editorial Collective


This issue of Frontiers opens with the prizewinning essay "Feminism, Eros, and the Coming of Age," by Roberta Rubenstein, which won the Florence Howe Award from the Modern Language Association for the best essay of feminist scholarship in 1999. Rubenstein offers an elegant study of recent novels by Doris Lessing and Marilyn French that explores the ways aging women come to acknowledge the waning of their sexual appeal and the impossibility of erotic equity. In both novels, strong and successful women, confident of their abilities in the public realm, regretfully relinquish "the self-renewing energy of eros" and come to terms with aging. Rubenstein's delineation of the crucial moment she terms "the crossroads of female aging and desire" is memorable. It opens an issue of Frontiers devoted to considerations of the gap between image and identity.

Two poems by Carol Barrett begin a section that locates personal sources of resistance. Evelyn Newman Phillips shows us how "everyday female domains"anchor African American strength in "Doing More Than Heads: African American Women Healing, Resisting, and Uplifting Others in St. Petersburg, Florida." Lisa J. Udel's "Revision and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women's Motherwork" illuminates a powerful source of resistance in Native concepts of motherhood. B. V. Olguín, in "Mothers, Daughters, and Deities," finds resistance in an unlikely place - prison - and an unlikely source, the poetry of Chicana Judy Lucero, herself a prisoner. In the face of constant Foucauldian surveillance, Lucero fashioned the figure of the Convict Mother Goddess, who found affirmation in resistance.

Next, Georgeanne Scheiner's "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee" searingly exposes the gap between image and reality in the life of the teenage star of the 1950s. Susie Lan Cassel's not-so-fictional fiction, "Breast-less by Choice," challenges the usual mix of prurient attitudes toward those most troublesome female appendages. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo perfectly captures the heady sense of rebellion that Madonna epitomized in the 1980s and shows clearly how the [End Page v] idolatry of the pop star Madonna by young Puerto Rican women functioned in their lives and in a changing society.

In "Four Generations of Maya Marriages: What's Love Got To Do With It?" Ana M. Juárez carefully explains how globalization has changed the marriage patterns of Maya women in the Yucatan, reminding us once again how vulnerable even the most intimate personal relationships are to economic forces.

Throughout the issue and on the cover we have featured the monotypes by artist Lynn Wiley, who aims, she says, to "put emotions into a visual and symbolic form." This series of monographs is titled "Running Around in Circles," a metaphor that seems appropriate for an issue devoted to women's efforts to use often imposed images in positive ways. We close with a philosophical/personal essay by Susan S. Stocker, "Disability and Identity: Overcoming Perfectionism," which is deeply concerned with how to forge a functional and fitting identity. For her epigraph she uses a statement from Carolyn Heilbrun that sums up the authorial intent of all of this issue's essays: "Freedom from fantasy is the beginning of human liberation."

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