Introduction
This digital issue is the final installment in a series of volumes commemorating the 50th anniversary of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. In preparing for this milestone, the editorial collective spent considerable time thinking with and about the history of the journal and of feminist theorizing and publishing more broadly. We revisited our own history, ...
Our Seeds of Change
Our feminist youth engagement work and participatory research was situated within a program model, Public Achievement (PA), born from the brilliance of Black women educators and organizers during the Civil Rights Movement. Our movement ancestors paved the way and shared feminist theory and practices for social change across time, rooted in the knowing that education is ...
When Did You First Learn About Feminism?
This research zine is a creative essay about feminist daughterhood based on my dissertation research with activist girls and their mothers and mother figures. I chose to centre my analysis on the relationships between activist girls and their mothers and mother figures because mother-daughter relationships are not well explored in the field of girls’ studies. Girls inhe...
When You Move I Move
“Cariño! Let’s go forest bathing,” a student shouts as she enters the classroom. I look at the Cultural Energizer (warm up) to see what I’ve planned and decide to forego it. This is typical, the young women of color in the class dictating what we should do everyday. Some days they might want to talk about the current event, others a Bad Bunny song “Lo Que Pasó Hawái”
Envisioning and Embodying Freedom
PIP [Power, Identity, and Privilege] was my foundation for activism. It gave me the knowledge,
the strength, and even the power to be able to advocate for my community on a larger scale
What does it mean to be a Girl of Color (...
Radical Reimaginings
Radical Reimaginings is a 5-minute creative video highlighting a multi-year, arts-based, youth participatory research project (YPAR) conducted in collaboration with Black middle and high school girls through the Black Girl Futures program and its signature initiative, Girl Talk! The video uses visual storytelling, youth voice-overs, archival media, and community footage...
Optical Illusion: Making Black Girl Math Worlds Visible
2019 The World
When Disney announced the casting of Halle Bailey in The Little Mermaid, racist remarks exploded on the internet which continued when the live action flick was released in 2023. The is...
Math Belongs to Us Too
In this essay, I draw on the composite narrative I developed through my work with four Sub-Saharan African (SSA) young women (Mendrika, Manyoni, Njo, and Sanyu)[1] on a project focused on co-exploring social issues and Critical Mathematics Education (CME). CME recognizes that mathematics, mathematics learning, and mathematics teaching ...
Stories in Squares: Instagram as My Feminist Archive and Activist Space
Introduction: A Digital Awakening
“Instagram isn’t square anymore”
That’s what I told a friend recently as we scrolled through my feed, filled now with rectangles, reels, a...
Digital Exile and Feminist Resistance
This multimodal project explores how young Iranian women social media influencers in the 21st century circumvent authoritarian surveillance, forced migration, and digital censorship to continue practicing their feminist activism transnationally during the period from 2018 to 2025. This work features an interactive map that chronicles the stories of women such as Aida Po...
Translation as Feminist Method
Before beginning this interactive essay, I invite you to listen to the following song. You may not understand the language, and that unfamiliarity may feel unsettling. I encourage you to stay with that discomfort—listen closely nonetheless.
Learning from several Ethnic Studies-based courses throughout my education has taught me many things surrounding colonization and the lasting effects of settler colonialism. This helped me understand the causes and roots of oppressive structures we continue to face, our resilience, if it is resilience at all, and the patterns we still see today. However, my own knowledg...
Conjuring of a Fat Queer Disabled Asian American Specter
Beginnings and Ends
Notes for Beginnings and Ends
To Be Heard Is to Be Known
We didn’t start this project intending to write a reflection, let alone develop a methodology. What we started with was a shared resonance—something felt across time, bodies, and conversations. It began with a text, a hunch, and a kind of queer, trans trust.
Omi had been working through their discomfort with the...
The Embodied Futures of Screendance for the Next Generation
We write this work as a feminist collective of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a faculty member at the University of Utah. Based in the School of Dance, we draw upon the interdisciplinary creative practice of screendance as an emerging research methodology to remediate (dance) archives through a feminist lens. As both students and teachers of these class...
Introduction
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies turns fifty this year and to commemorate this important milestone, the Frontiers editorial collective at the University of Utah produced a 50th anniversary Oral History Project.
Conceived in 2019, the project’s goal was to gather and archive oral...
Kathi George
In her long career, Kathi George has edited a variety of books, from scholarly manuscripts to textbooks, trade books to fiction. After thirteen years editing Frontiers, George moved to San Diego in 1987 and as a freelancer has had such clients as Harcourt, Random House, Stanford University, ZYZZYVA, Brighton Press, Tehabi Books, Sun & Moon Press, S...
Kathy Kaiser
Kathy Kaiser is a writer, editor, and manager with a broad background in editing articles and books as well as working as a freelance editor. Kaiser was part of Frontiers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, as a community member who served on the Journal’s editorial board. In her interview, she identified the importance of merging community and acad...
Claudia Isaac
Claudia Isaac is a Regents’ and Distinguished Professor of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her primary field of research is in urban and community-based development, which includes leadership in areas such as: poverty alleviation, food systems planning, affordable housing, neighborhood planning and land use, metropolitan redevelo...
Elizabeth (Betsy) Jameson
A historian by training, Professor Elizabeth Jameson served as the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, and as the Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New Mexico. While at the University of Calgary, she served as the Chair of American Studies. She is the author of two monographs, All That Glitte...
Sue Armitage
Throughout a thirty-year career, Professor Susan Armitage contributed to the history and study of women in the western United States through her research, publishing, teaching, and public outreach. Her career began in 1973 at the University of Colorado-Boulder as a visiting Assistant professor of History and director of the Boulder Women’s Oral History Project. In 1978,...
Krista Benson
Krista Benson is an Associate Professor of the Integrative Studies Program at Grand Valley State University. They are an interdisciplinary scholar who blends diverse inquiries into women’s studies, gender and sexuality, colonialism, and racism with a special focus on marginalized youth. Their current project centers on the imposition of heteropatriarchal gender norms on...
Guisela Latorre
Guisela Latorre is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She specializes in modern and contemporary U.S. Latinx and Latin American art with a special emphasis on Chicana/Latina feminism. She has explored these topics in articles, chapters, and two books: Democracy on the Wall: Street Art of the Post-Dictatorship Era in Chi...
Mytheli Sreenivas
Professor Mytheli Sreenivas is the Chair of Women and Gender Studies at The Ohio State University. She serves in a joint appointment with OSU’s History Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern South Asian History and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Sreenivas specializes in modern South Asian history with a special focus on w...
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Judy Wu is Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Wu also serves as the director of both the Humanities Center and the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, and Belonging at the university. Prior to UC Irvine, Wu was a professor at Ohio State University from 1998 to 2015 in bo...
Introduction & Guide
In the nation languages of the English-speaking Caribbean, “fresh” indexes recentness and newness, but also the opportunity to come again, harder than before. It connotes boldness, impertinence, and promiscuity—a shameless disrespect for propriety, for knowing one’s place. Across the artwork and articles in the Frontiers print journal and the essays in Frontiers Augmented online, guest editors Tonya Haynes, Halimah A. F. DeShong, and Andrea N. Baldwin center public scholarship, serving up fresh voices and perspectives. They seek to both offer something new and to return to well-worn themes with a clear and unfaltering voice.
Who Catching the Power?
Part of my coming to terms with myself is understanding what motivates me to get involved in movements. It is a kind of possession that takes place, much like what I have witnessed in my spiritual practice. This piece explores the three women who shaped my spiritual consciousness and how their engagement with their own divinity continues to affect and possess me.
I, Mi, Ik: A Dreamscape Looking Inside-Out
Mi wang Ingi meisje, en
Mi wang Blaka meisje
Je kan het niet ...
Ancestral Stiles: Caribbean Abolitionist Home Practices
The first time she went to church, she was a dewy six years old. Her grandmother wanting her safe and protected, in the tradition of many Jamaican matriarchs, believed the sooner her spirituality was developed the better her life would be. Grandma did not have much to give her, but she could make sure that for church she was clean and in a new pretty dress with matching...
Mobility Matters: A Black/Caribbean-Canadian in the Midwest
It was in Canada, our home [on] Native land,[i] a white settler colony, that I realized I was Black, a process that developed over time spatially and temporally. Indeed, the journey to the “here and now” is marked by multiple migrations from Jamaica to Canada and then to the United States of America. Both forms of mobility s...
Skin
In New York, I feel naked without eyeliner. I wear fake glasses during my distance learning classes, and sunglasses when I go for walks. It is brief, but necessary. The trueness of my color belongs only to me.
My partner asks me why I am so beautiful. I can never answer her, though I know it is love.
Every morning, I wake up silently. Eyes dry. Already angry. Disappointed by the air in my lungs.
I think I’m mad at the world. But I’m not.
The world spins as it always has, indifferent to the suffering of all but the wealthiest people.
<...Unraveling Colourism’s Hold
I was an ugly girl. Mainly, I agreed I was one because I didn’t believe people lied about ugly. People might lie and tell you that you look good, or they make like you enough that this colors their vision of you and thus, renders you pretty to them. But people usually call ugly as they see it fit to do so. I presumed that people were either...
For Ava-Grace
I met my niece, my only sister’s daughter on January 18th. She was three going on four months. I took in her tiny toes, and fingers, her facial features and wondered who she resembled most. I saw my sister’s eyes and her father’s nose, my mother’s lips and my dad’s ears. As I looked at her I whispered, “aunty has been waiting for you AG,” and she looked at me...
First Night, Early Days
Tonight was the night - 10:13pm my cell phone showed. In just a few minutes, my partner Alison and I were going to meet an “animator” who would take us to meet the “ladies.” Standing by a corner in an infamous “red light district” area in Barbados, my palms were sweating and my heart raced. I looked at Ali every few minutes with a nervous grin. We were at the meeting sp...
A POWAFul Story
I know what sisterhood feels like, but I am not talking about what siblings should share. This is something deeper because it is a connection that exists among women regardless of biological relations. “Blood thicker than water,” they say in Belize, but sisterhood like this sometimes actually exemplifies what those who share DNA should have. It is that kind of bond that...
Introduction
2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. Yet the turbulent events of late 2019 and early 2020 are stark reminders that Iranians continue to resist for their liberation. Since the very beginning of that uprising, the status of gender politics and its relationship to the revolutionary project has been a site of debate and contestation both among revolutionary actors and outside commentators.
Art Exhibition
The five artists showcased here all grew up in the 1980s, the first decade following the 1979 Revolution and the decade of the Iran-Iraq War. Their varying artistic approaches make their works distinct from the victimizing images of Middle Eastern women highly romanticized by the orientalist gaze.
Archive of Incomplete
This paper investigates the concept of “incompletion” in the art projects made during revolutionary times by focusing on the interrupted career of women artists in Iran during 1960s and 70s. By pointing at the vast number of incomplete artworks and unfinished films that were produced in Iran during the revolutionary era, this research highlights the importance of creating an archive for incomplete art projects.
Urban Experience in Tehran
Moving beyond narratives of a controlling state and restrictive social and cultural norms, this essay shows the nuanced experiences of women as they navigate public spaces and explores some of the ways in which the city and its public spaces work as both prohibitive structures and emancipatory contexts.
Rewriting Gender in Post-revolutionary Iran
Through an analysis of narratives from legal experts and practitioners of white marriage in Iran, this article reveals the motives for electing this practice, and the ways in which it is made legally and socially navigable. When situated within official state discourses and implementation of gender laws, this analysis brings to light the power and agency that Iranians have in controlling gender and sexuality norms and discourses.
Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith
This essay offers an account of the contemporary treatment of transsexuals in Iran, situating the official process in a discursive nexus that includes the law and psychology as well as psychiatry, and is engaged in establishing and securing a distinction between the acceptable “true” transgender/sexual and other categories that might be confused with it, most notably the wholly unacceptable category of the “true” homosexual.
Interview with Orkideh Behrouzan
Dr. Orkideh Behrouzan speaks with co-editor Azadeh Tajpour about her childhood in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and how these experiences are represented in her creative and scholarly work. In particular, this interview centers two of her creative pieces which bring to light the impact of war and militarism on one’s experience of gender and youth.