Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Susan Tomlinson Why, with notable exceptions like Patricia Highsmith and Gertrude Stein (an author whose work I am desperate to publish about in Legacy; tell your friends), has the emerging American queer canon centered on male authors; and why has the discourse on American queer writing been largely defined by approaches to male writers and their work? To borrow from "Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?," Mary Helen Washington's presidential address to the American Studies Association in 1997, what happens to queer thought when you put American women writers at its center? What happens to American literary studies when you put women writing queerly at its center? How does that reorientation reshape the work we do and reaffirm its urgency? "American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought," guest-edited by Travis Foster and Timothy Griffiths, is our first special issue since Katherine Adams, Caroline Gebhard, and Sandra Zagarell's "Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the Twenty-First Century" (vol. 33, no.2) in 2016. Legacy doesn't publish that many special issues—roughly one every four years—because with only two issues a year and so many general submissions to consider, we are committed to publishing a range of work that spans several centuries of women writing in the United States. Our only criterion for taking on a special issue is that its subject transform existing critical conversations and create new ones in our field and beyond. The articles, archival feature, and review essay in this issue, framed by the guest editors' powerful introduction, will do just that. Just as Washington exhorted the ASA membership to make the association "more than ever a place that encourages, promotes, and supports—consistently and enthusiastically—scholarship which moves us toward institutional change . . . a place in the forefront of American society in the sense that here you have a chance to step outside of the general apartheid mentality that continues to dominate our social life in one form or another," our challenge as a journal is to affirm Legacy as a space that supports and affirms a profession worth saving. [End Page ix] Susan Tomlinson Editor Legacy work cited Washington, Mary Helen. "'Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?': Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1997." American Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30041597. Accessed 7 Feb. 2020. Copyright © 2020 The University of Nebraska Press