Editors’ Note

We feminist scholars and thinkers have made important contributions to the broader understanding of how culture, politics, and institutions interrelate and intertwine. The knowledge that gender can function as a pervasive tool for the construction of social hierarchies has greatly informed our thinking about the interconnectedness between ideology and practice. The contributors to issue 37.2 of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies present us with new and exciting ways to reflect and deconstruct further the idea that gender operates as connective agent often linking culture, politics, and institutions in inextricable ways.

The act of thinking and rethinking non-normative sexualities in the realm of national belonging and colonial legacies is critically highlighted in this issue. By underscoring the importance of queer visions and bodies, Charlie Zhang’s “Queering the National Body of Contemporary China” and Marilena Zackheos’s “Amazon Island” encourage us to consider the highly productive space of queerness in developing a feminist critique of nationalism and colonialism. Zhang’s analysis of the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the People’s Republic of China using a queer theory lens allows us to understand better how intersectional tropes of gender, class, race, and sexuality are deployed in moments of civic pride in China. In a similar fashion, Zackheos explains to us how the poetry of Luz María Umpierre-Herrera presents lesbian desire and queer subjectivity as perhaps the most effective tool to dislodge symbolically Puerto Rico’s persistent colonial status. Both writers insist that by questioning heteronormativity we will truly be able to see the fragile seams that hold nationalist and colonialist fictions together.

It has now become common knowledge among feminists that the concepts of domesticity and the home, once believed to be estranged from public affairs, are indeed integral parts of nationalist constructs. But what are the specific social mechanisms that allow for feminized spaces and individuals to figure into the language of the nation? In turn, can women deploy the discourses of domesticity to promote greater inclusion and agency within the nation-state? These are some of the guiding questions that Anna C. Simonson in “Perfect Recluses, Great Workers, and Black Beasts” and Terre Ryan in “‘Changing the Conversation’” take up, even though they situate their texts in very different times in U.S. history. In her article Simonson argues that British writer and traveler Frances Trollope deplored the state of women’s equality in the U.S. nation-state during the nineteenth century by observing the domestic lives of women in Cincinnati. The themes of women, domesticity, and national belonging are also important matters in Ryan’s essay on Michelle Obama. Here the author looks closely at the first lady’s campaigns against childhood obesity by promoting healthy nutrition, initiatives that drew fire from feminists who felt Obama succumbed to traditional gender roles in the White House. However, Ryan complicates this assessment by contextualizing her campaigns within the antebellum tradition of “Republican Motherhood,” a nationalist role rarely conferred upon black women.

Women’s writing about sexuality in honest and subversive ways has often been of great interest to feminist scholars. Such writings challenge patriarchal anxieties about the “threat” to the “health” of the nation that such expressions supposedly pose. Jing Song, Sara Upstone, and Caitlin M. Alvarez all turn to the liberatory potential that such writings can represent for women. For Song in her essay “Urban Educated Women as Marginalized Mainstream in China,” the novels of Wei Hui and Mian Mian provide important insights into the sexual lives of urban educated women in China during the turn of the millennium, in spite of the Chinese government’s active attempts to silence their writing. Expressions of women’s sexuality in literary texts, however, do not always point toward a progressive feminist politics, as Upstone warns in her article “Beyond the Bedroom.” The famous Fifty Shades Trilogy by E. L. James is a case in point, Upstone contends, as the books are explicit in their representation of women’s participation in bdsm sexual practices but are also candid about their conservative gender roles outside the bedroom. Unlike the work of Hui and Mian...