Editors’ Note

This issue begins with an essay from our general submissions. Ranjoo Seodu Herr offers a philosophical analysis of the relationship between Indigenous women’s rights and self-determination within the settler Canadian nationstate. In her research, Herr notes that “some Indigenous women . . . strongly support the collective right to Indigenous self-determination even at the expense of women’s individual rights.” Herr invites readers to engage with the full essay and then sit with the analysis regarding the paths forward for Indigenous feminists and civil rights.

The remainder of this volume is dedicated to the special issue “Deterritorializing Frontiers: Opening Space for Dis(mis)located Voices” with guest editors Lydia Huerta Moreno and Ana Gómez Parga. This special issue opens spaces for transfeminist dialogues from a range of perspectives and geographies in order to decenter Western structures of knowledge and to address the violence of academic imperialism.

The issue represents different geopolitical perspectives, sensibilities, and mobilities—Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, and Cuidad Juarez, Chihuahua. The contributions are in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, making it the first multilingual issue of Frontiers in its history.

To echo the guest editors, this issue required extensive editorial work by the guest editors and the Frontiers Editorial Collective. The work undertaken to produce this special issue was in itself a deterritorializing process and reiterated the stakes of this special issue. The submission process through our English-only online portal was not feasible for some authors located outside the US. The journal’s websites, instructions, and author documents additionally privileged English-only protocols. Initial communications were in English but that was not sustainable and did not make sense. So we soon switched to the preferred language of the guest editors and authors. Multilanguage reviewers were identified and submissions repeatedly transcribed. A special search had to be made to find Spanish and Portuguese copyeditors prior to submitting the special issue to the press. The process made us reflect on and critique how we operate as a feminist journal. We want to thank the University of Nebraska Press for their support and responsiveness throughout this process. However, this support did not take away from multiple layers of recognition of the assumptions of academic publishing, including feminist publishing. Additionally, the time period of work on this special issue occurred during the implementation of some of the most anti-immigration policies in the US, during travel bans and during economic turmoil and hurricanes in the places authors were living, working, protesting, and writing. Then came a global pandemic, further highlighting systemic racism and social inequities amid protests, hate, and political upheaval. Journal and press timelines and to-do checklists did not work under these precarities.

This process exposed the ways that the westernization of feminist publishing creates procedural obstacles for non-Western scholars and serves more privileged, English-speaking scholars in the US academy. As editorial assistant, Dr. Silvia Patricia Solis took on all primary communications with authors, guest editors, reviewers, and copyeditors. Without Silvia’s extraordinary direction and commitment this special issue would not have made it to print. This special issue, began as an investment on Global South feminisms, turned into a praxis of actually doing feminist collective work. Frontiers is sitting with this experience and making changes in how and what Frontiers can do as a feminist publication.

The beauty in this issue and in the labor undertaken to bring it to print is captured in the poetics, the activism, and in a collective reference to the writings of the radical women of color who edited and participated in the 1981 feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back. In that same spirit, we turn to Toni Cade Bambara in This Bridge, to express the radical possibilities in feminist practices, “Now that we’ve begun to break the silence and begun to break through the diabolically erected barriers and can hear each other and see each other, we can sit down with trust and break bread together. Rise up and break our chains as well...