Preface

Abstract

preface The collaboration, thoughtfulness, intellectual energy, and enthusiasm that our editorial collective puts into each issue almost always ensure that we feel a great deal of pride when it goes to print. All the same, we feel a special sense of pride this time. This issue com memorates the scholarship of our former editorial director Claire Gold berg Moses and her pioneering innovations in feminist publishing. Many of the essays here were specially prepared for our "35 Years of Feminist Scholarship Conference" held in April 2011 to celebrate Claire on her retirement. The conference convened current and former Fem inistStudieseditorial board members and other colleagues for a day of scholarly exchange, reflection, and celebration. We include tributes paid that day by former editors Deborah S. Rosenfelt and Suzanne Raitt, relat ing how Claire's stewardship steered Feminist Studiesto become a journal of national and international repute and how a feminist sense of egal itarianism and shared ownership guided her commitment to build ing an editorial collective. It is only fitting that an issue that pays tribute to Claire Moses finds as its thematic center a series of reflective considerations on the state of the field and its key disciplinary shifts. We begin with a genealogi cal interrogation of sorts. In "The History of Lesbian History," Martha Vicinus draws on her disciplinary location as a historian to review the last thirty years of scholarship on lesbian history and its associated theoretical paradigms. Vicinus revisits her earlier reading of Havelock Ellis's StudiesinthePsychology ofSex, Volume2, Sexual Inversion. Vicinus turns the reader's attention to Ellis's own contradictory ambivalence in his 551 552 Preface efforts to attach meaning to the word "lesbian." Vicinus points out that this conceptual ambivalence finds parallels in later understand ings of the category "lesbian." The piece offers an insightful and tex tured engagement with the relevance of the term "lesbian," the role it has played in expanding our understanding of women's friendship and intimacy, and the ways in which race and class have fractured and expanded mainstream analyses. JudithKegan Gardiner's "Female Masculinity and Phallic Women — Unruly Concepts" becomes a perfect companion piece for Vicinus's "The History of Lesbian History." While Vicinus explores the last thirty years of scholarship on lesbian history, Gardiner turns her analytical lens to a selective discussion of the last fortyyears of theorizing on the category "female masculinity." Moving from the 1970s to the present, Gardiner's discussion engages Robert Stoller's Splitting: A Case ofFemale Masculinity, Judith (Jack) Halberstam's Female Masculinity, and Judith But ler's "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" as well as Henry Rubin's sociological study Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men. Gardiner's interrogation offers a lucid analysis of the shifting nomenclature for and understandings of female mas culinity. The piece critiques earlier psychoanalytic studies in which female masculinity was considered a psychological syndrome, as well as contemporary gender queer expressions of female masculinity that potentially make space for nonmisogynistic expressions of the phal lus, FtM trans expressions of masculinity, and masculine expressions of femininity. One of the questions guiding Gardiner's analysis of the scholarship is the extent to which, despite the expanded expression of gender variance, the codes of what constitutes masculinity remain fairly intact. She argues that despite the desire to separate masculin ity from maleness, masculinity as an idea continues to be reified and cautions us to ask how "progressive" contemporary theories of gender variance really are. Leisa D. Meyer's "'Strange Love': Searching for Sexual Subjectivi ties in Black Print Popular Culture during the 1950s" pivots on Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's characterization of the 1880s to 1920s as marked by a "politics of respectability," wherein black women's sexual restraint and moral reform were seen as integral to the well-being of the com munity at large. Rather than embracing the silencing effects that result from the pursuit of "respectability," Meyer provides persuasive Preface 553 evidence to show that there was a great deal of public talk about sex and sexuality within the black community. Meyer examines a range of periodicals published out of Chicago in the 1950s, including the ChicagoDefender, Ebony,Jet, and Tan...