Introduction

This issue begins with Julia Balén's poem, Remembering Wittig, which honors the life and laments the death of Monique Wittig (1935–2003), novelist, poet, and social theorist. In experimental language, Wittig explored the nature of women's subjectivity, developing arguments that influenced women's studies and queer theory. She contested the relationship between biology and identity, arguing that the categories of male and female were not natural. As she famously informed a very surprised audience at the 1978 meeting of the Modern Language Association, lesbians are not women. Wittig reasoned that by refusing to live as either traditional men or women, lesbians demonstrated the possibility of escape from the fixed labels of male and female. This issue contributes to the still vigorous conversation about gender and subjectivity that Wittig did so much to advance.¹

The first four articles consider the complex relationships among artists, the subjectivities they explore in their work, and the subjectivities of the audiences for that work. Allison Cummings examines how three contemporary African American women poets wrote in hopes of transforming the subjectivity of their imagined audiences. James Conlon wonders why so many, mostly male, artists portray women reading—an activity for women that Conlon contends artists find subversive. Many have portrayed women readers in ways that negate their subjectivity, with some significant exceptions that Conlon explores.

Janice Stewart and Angela Hague explore subjectivity in the work of two white, middle-class, North American women artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Stewart describes how Emily Carr, a Canadian, transcended the cultural convention that only men could be serious artists by imagining herself as an indigenous woman. Her new identity, however, rested upon her ability to seize possession of native art; Carr became an artist by practicing colonialism. Hague's focus is the U.S. writer Shirley Jackson. Whereas other scholars have suggested a relationship between Jackson's documented neu-roses and the terrifying lives of her fictional women, Hague contends that the pathology of her female characters—their alienation, isolation, and inability to develop a coherent self—accurately represents the subjectivity of many women in the 1950s.

The sculpture of Jennyfer Stratman serves as a bridge between the first section of the issue, with its focus on artists, subjectivity, and art, and the second, with its attention to interconnections between subjectivity and the body. In her artist's statement, Stratman declares that she seeks to represent her subjectivity in the "visual language of sculpture." Bodies and parts of bodies play a crucial role in this language that speaks eloquently of our contradictory desires for movement and stability, migration and assimilation, and uprooting and community.

The poem Foreign Faint by Janet McCann reminds us of the close, but ambiguous, link between subjectivity and the body. Virginia Blum postulates that women give their bodies over to plastic surgeons—often again and again—to realize an ideal, unattainable self. While Blum believes that psychoanalytic theory explains women's endless pursuit of the "other woman," she also argues that capitalism encourages the quest by marketing images of physically perfect female bodies. Examining portrayals in the media of the bodies of women athletes, Victoria Carty explicates the feminist debate over whether the athletes are represented more as subjects or objects. This section of the issue closes with Jenna Rindo's poem, Parturition, in which a mother celebrates her subjectivity and those of her newborns as expressed by their bodies and hers.

The final two essays consider how women in communities under stress both act as subjects and are subject to multiple discourses. FlorenceMae Waldron shows how immigrants in New England communities maintained Quebecois gender conventions to assert their identity as French Canadians in the United States. At the same time, however, the immigrant women negotiated a revised Quebecoise identity that accorded them more public and private authority than they had held in Canada. Kimberly Jensen documents that American nurses who served abroad in military hospitals during World War I frequently agreed that they faced egregious discrimination at...