Editors’ Note: Rethinking Transnational Feminisms

This issue marks an important transition for the Frontiers editorial team. We are beginning our fourth year of stewardship by welcoming two new members. Mytheli Sreenivas, a scholar who specializes in South Asian Women’s History, particularly in relation to kinship and reproduction, joins as a new co-editor of Frontiers. Leticia Wiggins, a doctoral student in the Ohio State University History Department, begins her term as our editorial assistant. We also say good-bye to Denise Delgado and Peggy Solic, who have worked diligently for Frontiers for the past two years. They were instrumental not only in producing our issues but also in organizing the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute, a week-long feminist summer camp held at osu in 2014 that attracted approximately one hundred scholars from around the world. Denise returns to her dissertation writing, while Peggy graduated with her PhD. Also, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu will be relocating to the University of California, Irvine, but will continue to serve as a co-editor of Frontiers from afar.

We acknowledge these important changes but also dedicate this issue to pursuing conversations that were the subject of our 2015 special issue on transnational feminisms. The scholarship, personal narratives, and artwork in this Spring 2016 issue engage with the global and the local by foregrounding how power shapes the gendered flows of ideas, people, and goods. The authors and artists in this issue also ask us to rethink how we understand transnational feminism as a field and as a methodology.

Sharon Heijin Lee and Annelise Heinz begin our issue by examining how the transnational serves to shape beauty and leisure practices in the global South and the global North. Lee explores the colonial and neo-colonial legacies in South Korea, particularly in relation to the United States, through the lens of plastic surgery. She also analyzes the complex feminist politics that condemn these practices in the United States and in South Korea. Heinz studies the craze for mahjong, a Chinese game that was particularly popular among white US women in the 1920s. She analyzes this consumerist practice of Orientalism and how it relies on the bodies and cultural knowledge of Asian people in the United States.

Richelle D. Schrock and Susan H. Swetnam remind us to rethink the political and the personal as well as the local and the global by deconstructing controversies related to women and organizations that cross national boundaries. Schrock analyzes the debates surrounding Hirsi Ali, a well-known Somali author who has been acclaimed as a women’s rights champion and criticized as an Islamophobe. Schrock grounds her analysis through fieldwork with Somali Muslim refugee women who live in the US Midwest. Swetnam chronicles her personal experiences with the Girl Scouts of the United States to offer an alternative history of the organization. She points out that this seemingly wholesome organization has been accused of fostering non-normative sexuality in the twenty-first century and un-American values during the Cold War. Swetnam examines how the Girl Scouts sparked her own interest in exploration and internationalism.

Jenifer K Wofford and Stephanie Lewthwaite focus our attention on how art helps us explore gendered and racialized forms of colonialism, hybridity, and violence. Wofford, whose work is featured on our cover and in this issue, is a Filipina American artist and educator who has also lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. Her work examines the anticipation and anxiety of reunions and departures, the discomfort of cross-cultural encounters in public spaces of transportation, and the embodiment of cultural hybridity. Lewthwaite analyzes the art and politics Delilah Montoya. Montoya, an artist based in New Mexico, explores the complex colonial heritage of that region by making visible the history of indigenous enslavement and the continuing importance of Mestiza or mixed Indo-Hispanic identity.

Jessie D. Turner, Kristen Kolenz, and Marie Lerma explore gendered and racial forms of border crossing. Turner uses creative nonfiction to analyze power and privilege based on her volunteer experience at a Catholic women’s and children’s shelter on the Mexico-US borderlands. Kolenz and Lerma...