Introduction

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

When we began to put this issue together, we saw performance as a thread that ran through some pieces, such as the three articles that analyze film. But as we discussed the various entries, we began to see performance as the theme of the entire issue. We want to persuade you that this is so-that various notions of performance link the pieces in this issue.

What do we mean by performance? We have more than one definition. We think of performance as bringing to life a character in a play or playing a social role in private or in public life. We see performance as the demonstration of a skill or the attempt to achieve a standard of excellence before a critical audience of any size. This definition includes the sexual performance that B. Petronio explores in a short story, while Holly Farris, in her short story, examines social roles, how they are performed, and how one may step out of one's role. We also think of social ritual as performance. Cordelia Candelaria s essay in honor of Gloria Anzaldua is a performance that calls upon readers of Frontiers, as part of a community of feminists, to commemorate a life, a work, and a mind that has transformed us.1

We perform art when we experience it. In the gallery showing of Claudette Schreuders's sculptures at the Art Museum of Arizona State University, we could walk around the pieces as if we had entered the artists memories of her home and neighborhood of post-apartheid South Africa. We could see a representation of her schoolgirl self labeled "The Missing Person." As we enter into her neighborhood, the white denizens have heard a commotion at the home of someone who encountered an intruder. Neighbors have walked out of their own fortress-like homes, where they dwell fearfully behind high walls. In the street, they meet each other-in many cases, for the first time-and an indigenous African police officer. As readers you cannot walk through Schreuders's neighborhood as we did, but you can study the faces of the people in it, white and black, women and men, and contemplate their performance of suburban life in contemporary South Africa. v

Anesa Miller shares with us a photograph, a poem, and a sketch; each gives a different yet complementary performance. When Miller wrote the poem, she studied the aging family photograph on the cover of this issue. The little girls in Punjabi costume are sisters, Miller's mother and aunt. After Miller finished the poem, she realized that her memory had wrongly placed the sisters on the open prairie of a family farm. She subsequently asked an artist to sketch them, placing them in the more physically accurate landscape, the yard of an urban home. We can engage in the drama of Miller's texts, interpreting the three pieces separately and together, noting the way that memory writes and rewrites our performances.

As we grappled with our interpretations-our own performances-of Schreuders's and Miller's works, we were struck by how artists appropriate traditional forms of art and structures of language and yet work to tell us something new. Several articles look closely at this tension, the concern for agency and the worry that the "new" simply reinscribes the old. Yolanda Venegas asks how Helen Hunt Jackson, a white woman activist who worked for the rights of Native Americans, could write a text intended to awaken white Americans to the injustices faced by Native Americans that instead numbs white readers to the effects of their conquest of indigenous people. Hyaeweol Choi investigates the novel of a white American missionary woman to illuminate how Protestant missionaries in early-twentieth-century Korea worked to create a "new" kind of woman who bore more resemblance to the Victorian True Woman than she did to the New Woman of Korea or the United States.

Some of the pieces in this issue examine how agency can be performative. Molly Wood considers how travel to a new place enabled one woman, the wife of a diplomat, to create several new identities for herself. Laurie Cella presents blonde performers who make fun of people's notions of blondes by performing being blondes. By manipulating the codes of blondness, they tell a subversive story of how they create themselves. Theresa Geller makes a similar argument about action films by positing that when the hero is a "tough chick," she queers, or throws into question, the conservative assumptions and plot of the genre. Viewers may therefore begin to ask queer questions, questions that probe the norms of sexuality, gender, race, and nationalism. Chris Robe contends that Tillie Olsen argued, years ago, that films hold the potential to encourage viewers, albeit viewers with certain attributes, to ask unsettling questions about the social order. In Olsen's novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, we see the young, working-class daughter, Mazie, asking disconcerting questions after viewing a cinematic Joan of Arc.

We welcome you, dear readers, to the many performances within this issue.

NOTE

1. For these and other definitions of performance, see Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996).