Introduction

Dear Readers,

In this issue of Frontiers , we are pleased to inaugurate two new features. The first is an interactive column, “Feminist Currents,” by Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Boris and your editors see this column as a way of strengthening our feminist community by providing a space for reflection and debate on some of today’s most pressing concerns. In this issue, on the Frontiers website, and elsewhere online, Boris has posed a question about group identity—race and gender—and the 2008 election, to which you are encouraged to reply by e-mail to Frontiers . She will collate, edit, and comment upon your responses on our website and in her column in an issue appearing after the election.

This issue of Frontiers heralds a second, new link between the journal and its readers through electronic technology. On our website, www.asu.edu/clas/history/frontiers , we have created an exhibition page intended to complement the artwork featured in every issue of the journal. Our first artist to be published online and in the journal is Mara Jevera Fulmer, whose poignant essay on the creation of art based on oral interviews with formerly homeless women in Detroit appears in this issue. Because black-and-white print production could not do justice to the scale, complexity, and brilliant colors of Fulmer’s public murals, we decided to reproduce them online, using the illustrations in the journal to highlight the stories of the women themselves. We intend similar linkages of journal to web site in future issues, and we are also interested in online exhibits of works by women artists or on themes related to women’s experience that we cannot readily reproduce in a small, black-and-white format.

In keeping with our now well established practice of alternating special and general issues, Frontiers 29:1 is a general issue. It will be followed by a special issue on intermarriage and North American Indigenous peoples, guest-edited by Cathleen Cahill, Jacki Rand, and Kerry Wynn, with an introduction by Tanis Thorne. Two other special issues are also in the works: “Knowledge that Matters: Feminist Epistemology, Methodology, and Science Studies,” guest-edited by Mary Margaret Fonow and Nancy Campbell; and “Women’s Clubs at Home and in the World,” guest-edited by Karen Blair and Gayle Gullett. Although a general issue, Frontiers 29:1 is very far from being what former editor Susan Armitage once termed a ragbag—a little of this and a little of that. On the contrary, our hope is that readers will find a good deal of resonance among the contributions in these pages.

The pieces are united by a common concern with art and identity. Four of them—essays by Lisa A. Long, Diana Mafe, Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Holly Blackford—explore this theme with particular reference to exile or diaspora and familial, especially mother-daughter relationships. Lisa A. Long’s essay compares women’s roles as depicted in Vietnamese and Hmong literatures in both present-day Vietnam and United States. Diana Mafe analyzes The Body Beautiful, a film by African British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah about her relationship with her mother, a white English woman scarred by a mastectomy. Myriam J. A. Chancy explores lesbian lives and identities through novels by Dominican American, Cuban American, and Cuban writers. Audrey Ferber explores a woman’s relationship with the disabled daughter of her recently deceased best friend. The figure of “Ma” in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “little house” books is the subject of Holly Blackford’s consideration of the gendered meanings of American frontiering. One way or another, all these works underscore the failure of cultural categories to capture the complexity of lived experience. Together, they call for and move toward new cross-cultural models rooted in that specificity.

The other three contributions in Frontiers 29:1 specifically address what it means for women to make art about women’s experiences. Besides Fulmer’s story about narrating homelessness through visual art, we feature, on the cover and in a series, Naomi Shersty’s...