Introduction

Frontiers, 2004 by Gray, Susan E, Gullett, Gayle

With this special issue on gender and place, we are pleased to announce that Frontiers has moved to Arizona State University, where it acquired new editors, Susan E. Gray and Gayle Gullett. One of the first things we learned in bringing Frontiers to ASU is that, despite the delights of telecommunication, the physical relocation of a journal remains a complicated business. We wish to thank our estimable predecessor, Susan Armitage, and her colleagues at Washington State University, Patricia Hart and Sandra Martin, for their extraordinary efforts to make the passage of Frontiers from the Palouse to the lower Sonoran Desert as smooth as possible. Too many people at ASU helped to prepare a new home for the journal for us to mention them all here by name, but we would like to thank several in particular for their unflagging enthusiasm, their wise counsel, and their devotion of time and resources to the cause: Cordelia Candelaria, Chair of the Department of Chicana/o Studies; Nancy Gutierrez, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs; Beth Luey, Director of the Scholarly Publishing Program; Noel Stowe, Chair of the Department of History; and David Young, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

We are honored to undertake the co-editorship of Frontiers, the feminist journal that has most consistently offered multicultural, multidisciplinary work in language accessible to a wide audience within and without the academy. This standard we will strive to uphold. As this inaugural issue on gender and place signals, however, we intend to enlarge and re-envision the parameters of Frontiers's identity as a multicultural, multidisciplinary feminist journal.

In the mid-1970s, the original Editorial Collective (the advisory board of the host institution) chose the title "Frontiers" to emphasize that the journal would push the boundaries of feminist scholarship within a national context. Yet over time many readers came to see the journal as specializing in feminist studies of the U.S. regional West. Why they should do so is not hard to understand. Frontiers began in the West (at the University of Colorado, Boulder) and has remained in the West (at the University of New Mexico and Washington State University); its name associated the journal with the region, despite the assault of New Western historians on the "f" word. Frontiers initially resisted such a focus, but in the past two decades the emergence of both the New Western history and a number of ethnic and racial fields of inquiry, such as Chicana/o, Native American, and Asian American Studies, frequently concerned with events and issues located in the West, have encouraged the journal gradually to embrace the study of women in the region. But Frontiers has never officially identified itself as a "Western" journal. As Susan Armitage wrote in her first introduction "Frontiers wants to cross borders wherever they may be."

As co-editors, we intend to maintain the notion of border crossing in all the manifold ways that it has traditionally signaled the journal's identity and purpose. But we also propose that Frontiers now explore more systematically and rigorously the spatial dimensions of border crossings, and consider the U.S. West in relation to transnational social and cultural change. This fresh focus for Frontiers makes Arizona State University, located in the heart of the U.S. Southwestern Borderlands, a good new home for the journal. Our intention as editors is to seek works that will enable Frontiers both to preserve its Western roots and to travel beyond national boundaries. We hope with this inaugural issue to suggest some of the analytical and creative possibilities for the study of women and gender opened by situating a region between the local and the global.

Many of the pieces in the issue came to us as a result of a call for papers on gender and place made in January 2003. Others we received as regular submissions, and one, the photographs from Tran Trong Vu's "Blue Memory" installation at Arizona State University, we recruited. That we could derive a thematically coherent issue from such disparate sources suggests the timeliness of our inquiry. As the scholarly and creative works assembled here make clear, gender and place are no less mutually constituted than gender and race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. Moreover, a rigorous consideration of place helps to sharpen inquiries into the mutual constitution of gender and race, ethnicity, and class, long the central theoretical concern of Frontiers. The issue also suggests, as feminist geographer Linda McDowell has argued, the usefulness of place as a category of scale in framing comparative feminist analyses.1 The works in this volume conjure with a range of places as sites or locations, from the most ostensibly intimate, immediate, and bounded to the most far-flung, fluid, and public. Readers will find place considered as body, home, community, nation, and migration, or diaspora. They will also find landscapes of memory and imagination juxtaposed with social structural contexts.