Editorial Introduction

Summertime is when our office goes into overtime to work on the special projects that have been stewing during the “too-muchness” of the semesters. As I write this introduction in the June Tucson heat, we are preparing for our fall editorial board meeting; sending out invitations for our forthcoming dossier on Annamarie Jagose’s Orgasmology, curated by Robyn Wiegman; circulating a Call for Papers for our forthcoming special issue on “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” coedited by Jennifer Nash and Emily Owens; reviewing a number of excellent special-issue proposals in the pipeline; and preparing for the end of Nana Osei-Kofi’s term as book review editor. Stay tuned for information about all these projects by “liking” our Facebook page, following us on Twitter, and visiting our website.¹

Summertime also brings office shuffles. Because the journal is housed in a gender and women’s studies (GWS) department with a PhD program, we have the great fortune of employing graduate students as managing editor and editorial assistant. The annual transitions are a bit dizzying, but delightfully so. And this arrangement creates more opportunities for graduate students to gain experience with the varied kinds of work that are possible in the world of GWS—journal publishing and editing, teaching, grant-writing, feminist advocacy, and research. As we have just moved through the transition to our new editing team, I want to welcome our new managing editor, Liz Kinnamon, and editorial assistant, Brooke Lober. Liz’s and Brooke’s interests, talents, and feminist commitments make them ideal members of the team, and I have already been enjoying working with them and seeing the journal through fresh perspectives. Liz’s research interests include critical race theory, political economy, and the affective worlds of social media. And Brooke is currently writing a dissertation on the impact of Zionism and anti-Zionism on US feminist formations from the late twentieth-century to the present.

I also must express my deep gratitude to the former managing editor and editorial assistant. Dylan “Rocket” McCarthy Blackston deftly handled all of the largely invisible work that goes with managing a journal and keeping it on schedule; and, at the front of the house, Stephanie Murphy was extraordinarily generous and patient with the peer-review process. I could count on Rocket and Stephanie not only with mechanical operations, but with the substantive intellectual questions about how best to promote generative cutting-edge, anti-racist feminist knowledge-production. Both are preparing for their comprehensive examinations: Stephanie’s is on critical theory and cultural studies, American ethnic studies, and contemporary feminist and queer epistemologies; and Rocket’s, on gender, embodiment and biopolitics, visual culture studies, and postcolonial and transnational studies.

I now have the pleasure of introducing the current issue. From Valerie Galloway’s spirited cover art to Anh Hua’s essay on the importance of the creative for radical change, through Laura Pichardo-Cruz’s poetic redemption against the ghosts of war and exile, much of what you will find here is meant to stir the imaginative, and stages a productive tension between playfulness and critique. Galloway’s Florid fills our cover with the gorgeous excess of pink and green flowery hair evocative of 1960s pop. Born in France and now living in Tucson, where she received her BFA in photography, Galloway’s influences include film noire and avant-garde photography.² A follower of the “handmade movement,” she works with a combination of found objects (illustrated pages from vintage dictionaries and maps, hand-cut mirrors, jars, recycled frames) and her own photography and paintings. And from a different angle, Pichardo-Cruz likewise makes extraordinary use of found objects in her pair of poems, “Lindo Corazón” and “Aña After the Rains.” The force of cathexis for Pichardo-Cruz’s narrators is such that the marañones of El Salvador and the dead bugs suddenly littering the streets of Miami are infused with the power to heal, reunite, and re-member.

The creative and imaginative is carried through to our essays, including in our opening essay which foregrounds performativity and embodied movement. In her richly...