Editors' Note: OSU Bids Farewell to Frontiers

As we prepared Frontiers issue 38.3, we realized that we had reached an important milestone in the journal's history at the Ohio State University (OSU); 38.3 is the last issue that our editorial team produced before the journal transitions to its new institutional home, the University of Utah. Much had happened since we first took over the journal in 2012. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu left OSU to take a position at the University of California, Irvine; Mytheli Sreenivas joined our editorial collective two years ago; and Krista Benson became the sixth and final editorial assistant to work with Frontiers during its tenure at OSU. These were but a few of the changes we experienced during the past five years. We are proud to say though that throughout these shifts in editorial staffing we still maintained a strong and focused intellectual vision for the journal, making sure that Frontiers continued with its long-standing reputation as one of the premier journals in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. We feel that with issue 38.3 we are going out with a bang, so to speak, as the feminist intellectual and creative work we are featuring here speaks volumes about feminism's commitment to the critique of neoliberalism, the careful deconstruction of cultural representation, and the insistent attention to race.

As a global phenomenon, neoliberalism has emerged as perhaps one of the most pervasive ideologies and social practices that has ensured the maintenance of power hierarchies. "Intersections of Feminisms and Neoliberalism" by Raili Marling and Redi Koobak and "'Choosing' Wisely" by Rachel A. Vaughn both address the failures of neoliberalism as a democratic project. Marling and Koobak consider genealogies of Estonian feminism as it developed during the postsocialist transitional period, which was largely defined by its neoliberal politics. These authors insist that this neoliberal context discouraged Estonian feminists from turning to transnational feminist theories that would have allowed them to engage in productive critiques of coloniality and inequality. By contrast, Vaughn focuses on the concepts of choice and individuality, two cornerstones of neoliberalism throughout the world. This writer offers an important critique of the choice-based rhetoric in contemporary food politics. Vaughn astutely draws parallels between the limitations of reproductive choice and the more radical turn to reproductive justice, thus stating that speaking of food justice, rather than food choice, can more broadly address inequities in the access to adequate nutritional resources.

While neoliberalism has become a fairly unambiguous locus of feminist protest and critique, cultural representation—whether it be art, film, literature or mass media—has emerged as a more ambivalent site of feminist contestation. The contributions to this issue by Bonnie J. Morris, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Shenshen Cai, and Audrey Chan all point to the complex implications and at times conflicting messages produced in cultural representation. In "Before Harriett Blogged" Morris examines journaling as an important practice for women's and girls' subject formation. This author testifies to the importance of women diarists writing about their lives within a misogynist world. Parreñas Shimizu's article "Claiming Bruce Lee's Sex" also looks at women's writing but problematizes the discourses that can emerge from these texts. Examining two memoirs written on Bruce Lee, one by his wife and the other by his mistress, this author maintains that both texts rely on fixed ideas of masculinity that uphold normativity and romanticize virility. In addition, looking at a popular Asian celebrity, Cai focuses her article on the phenomenon of women's self-representation. In "Talented Celebrity Rene Liu" the author explains how Rene Liu—the famous Taiwanese actress, singer, writer and director—crafted her own media persona to give voice to the so-called "left-over women," the term often used in China to refer to unmarried professional women living in urban settings. Like Liu, artist Audrey Chan—whose mesmerizing and deeply spiritual work titled Center of the Universe is featured on the cover of this issue—aspires to give voice to her grandmother, whose life experience encompassed larger gender histories in China and the...