Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Gayle Gullett and Susan E. Gray Dear Readers, In this issue, for the first time, Frontiers publishes images in color. We thank the University of Nebraska Press, especially Manjit Kaur and Terence Smyre, for making this possible. We are excited about our new resource because it gives us the ability to expand the kinds of artwork we can offer to our readers. To give one example, we have long been interested in the work of the artist Susan J. Sauerbrun, whose images we feature in this issue; but, we refrained from publishing either her paintings or drawings because neither reproduced well in black-and-white. When you view Sauerbrun's images, you will quickly see how much they depend on her striking use of color. Given that these color images make this issue historic, we find it fitting that Sauerbrun entitles her paintings, including the one on the cover, Magdalena Donneworth, for her female relatives, dating back to the seventeenth century. In this issue Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, continues her interactive column "Feminist Currents." A year ago Boris posted a question about the relationship between feminism and clothing on the Frontiers Web site (http://shprs.clas.asu.edu/frontiers) and on our page in Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28584178375). Many readers sent in their varied and often conflicted responses; clearly the women's movement has not resolved this old question. Boris, undaunted, weaves their answers together in her column and poses a new question about the heated debate over national health care: what are women's concerns as women regarding health care politics and policies? You can post your thoughts on Facebook or e-mail them to us at frontiers@asu.edu. If you wish to read the column "Feminist Currents" on our Web site, note that we have a new URL, http://shprs.clas.asu.edu/frontiers. We think you'll enjoy the Web site for a variety of reasons. You will find expanded presentations [End Page ix] of some of the art that appears in Frontiers, and you can keep up with Frontiers news. For example, you can follow the progress of our upcoming special issue, "Gender and the City," guest-edited by Maureen A. Flanagan and Maryann Valiulis. Turning to this general issue, we believe you will find it to contain a particularly rich mixture of articles. Our editorial eye, which seeks commonality even among the most heterogeneous pieces, sees the six articles in this issue forming three distinct groups. The first two articles, by Shameen Black and Srimati Basu, respectively, analyze the possibilities and perils for women in our world of increasing global connections. Black argues that cookbooks, in particular those written by Madhur Jaffrey, can encourage various kinds of cosmopolitanism, including the cosmopolitanism of sensory pleasures. Basu, on the other hand, who examines The Vagina Monologues, points out that the monologue allegedly given by a "veiled woman" does not allow this woman to speak for herself, a trick of ventriloquism that undermines possibilities of dialogue, much less of global feminist solidarity. The next two articles call upon academics to rethink certain assumptions that they have embraced sometimes as nearly canonical. Novian Whitsitt observes that most scholars accept Harriet Jacobs's assertion in her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that she, as Linda Brent, successfully evaded her slave owner's sexual demands; Whitsitt posits, however, that Jacobs, using the African American technique of "masking," includes in her narrative a second, more plausible story of how she, a victim of rape, survived and kept her children. Dana R. Bennett writes that academics who study women's political history in the 1920s have tended to focus mostly on suffrage with an occasional look at women's participation in national politics. To understand the decade's gendered politics, Bennett posits that we must study as politicians the women who ran for and served in local offices, particularly state legislatures. The authors of the last two articles chose the same research tool, oral interviews, the better to study how women construct their identities. Kathleen S. Yep interviewed Chinese American...