Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies back issues from January 1996:
Introduction
Jan 01, 1996; ... This issue of Frontiers contains several "firsts." Our initial article, "Negotiating Textual Terrain," was produced by an exciting new medium, the electronic conversation. The topic of the article, teaching ethnic autobiographies, was first discussed by the participants in standard panel form at ...
New ways of telling: Latinas' narratives of exile and return
Jan 01, 1996; ... In the liminality of this moment in history, when discourses, disciplines, and politics converge and contend with one another, when border-crossing has become a site of resistant and liberatory possibilities, I see Latin American women writing in the United States mapping out paradigmatic shifts ...
"Broke in spirits": Death, depression, and endurance through writing
Jan 01, 1996; ... Women's history has often been described as an attempt to recover lost and hidden histories. Within those hidden histories are the voices of generations of mothers and grandmothers, women who may have been too reticent to share many aspects of their lives, even with those closest to them ....
The politics of hair
Jan 01, 1996; ... Throughout the history of humankind, women's hair has been fashioned to exhibit beauty, removed to cause humiliation, and interpreted as a sign of strength, power (often destructive), or powerlessness. Because hair continually replenishes itself, it has been imbued with magical, symbolic power ...
Sugar and Spice
Jan 01, 1996; ... I asked my sister to style my hair for a date: "something really special," I said. She was curling my bangs in front of my lightbulb-framed vanity mirror when she suddenly picked up the scissors and cut off my french braid. I turned around and aimed hairspray directly into her eyes, yelling, ...
High Strung, High Twang, Before Butterflies, Tangles #5
Jan 01, 1996; ... For several years now, I have been working on paintings that use my own body as a means of exploring self-consciousness and sexuality from a woman's viewpoint. My most recent paintings and drawings focus on depictions of hair, with a special interest in how the hair can express the psychological ...
A Read-Aloud Story
Jan 01, 1996; ... Marian undressed in the open part of the crowded locker room. Some of the other women strode nude and triumphant from their lockers to the scale or to the full-length mirror to brush their hair, but, except to shift her weight from one leg to the other, Marian didn't move from the patch of worn ...
Wigs
Jan 01, 1996; ... At the Chase City Goodwill Suzy goes to look at baby clothes for Randy and blouses for herself I busy myself at the hat rack where I find two synthetic wigs. I bring them to Suzy and say, "Look. A buck a piece. We can't go wrong." We buy wigs to compensate bad spells. Binnie, ...
Hairstory
Jan 01, 1996; ... Can you wear my hair? It takes courage to wear my hair My hair screams Politics & Passion am dead/locked dread/locked naturally nappy natty/dreaded natty/haired rooter in tne future I got roots Perhaps u don't understand I say "I got roots" Meditate on that Ruminate on that Contemplate that ...
Reliquary for My Braid
Jan 01, 1996; ... I had made the decision to cut my hair after many years for several "practical" reasons. Now it was there on my lap, freshly severed from my head. I felt as if this braid was an animal curled up there and still warm from my body heat. That was in 1974. I kept it ignominiously in a bag for twenty ...
Leila's Hair Museum
Jan 01, 1996; ... I started collecting hair art when I began my career in the beauty business over forty-six years ago. I began to consider the idea of a museum when I had too many hair wreaths to store under my bed. I opened Leila's Hair Museum in 1990 after the completion of a new building that also houses my ...
Hair is the Refuge
Jan 01, 1996; ... of the soul which flees the skull in headache, wild scolding. Boredom with a body lost to memory. Haircut a danger: hurt to a sensitive spirit. Lock snatched by a sorcerer, stuffed in a corn husk burned or smote: the same befalls them who ...
Big Mama Washed Her Hair
Jan 01, 1996; ... almost six feet tall gray hair to her waist rolled in a hard knot on her neck on sunny days in the backyard in a tin pan she washed her hair shaking flipping her head back Medusa appeared as wet strands ...
The Intractable Lessons of Bad Hair
Jan 01, 1996; ... Mother had fed the guests, sent the cook off to market, sorted the laundry, inspected the bathrooms, reminded the gardener to water the ferns, and bought carrots, leaks, and flowers from the Kenscoff vendors on their way to Port-auPrince. The effort it took to set everyone in motion for ...
Pins, Crown, Barrettes, Barrettes (detail)
Jan 01, 1996; ... Hair art was very popular during Victorian times. Hair was saved and then woven or sewn into symbolic pictures, elaborate designs, and jewelry. It was used to commemorate the dead and to express love in marriage and between friends. A portion of an advertisement quoted by Frances Lichten in ...
Hairdos and don'ts: Hair symbolism and sexual history in Samoa
Jan 01, 1996; ... Hair is one of the classical foci of scholarly musing about the body, attaining this focal status through the seminal essay of Edmund Leach, "Magical Hair." 1 My intention is to draw the strands of this debate into a coherent conversation and to contribute to the colloquy by exploring ...
Another Mother for Our Child
Jan 01, 1996; ... We talk about having a child, Stormi and I, believing that two women together can raise a child as well as a woman alone or a woman with a man. We speak in the future tense, our sentences tagged with the word someday. Someday we will have our child, and it will be born from Stormi's body. If I ...
To live in the Borderlands means you
Jan 01, 1996; ... Gloria Anzaldua is author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, I987) and Making Face, Making Soul/ Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, I99o); she is also coeditor, with Cherrie Moraga, ...
Frontiers
Jan 01, 1996; ... Elizabeth Jameson was a cofounder of Frontiers and is the coeditor of The Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, I987) and the forthcoming Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women's West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, I997). I first thought about ...
Asian American frontiers
Jan 01, 1996; ... Gail Nomura is the author of "Tsugiki, a Grafting: A history of a Japanese Pioneer Woman," in Women in Pacific Northwest History, ed. Karen Blair (Seattle: University of Washington Press, I988). For Asian Americans the U.S. western frontier did not vanish in the I89o census but ...
Rethinking frontier literary history as the stories of first cultural contact
Jan 01, 1996; ... Annette Koldny is the author of The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 86o (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) and "Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers," American Literature 64:I ...
"Space: The final frontier": The invisibility of disability on the landscape of women studies
Jan 01, 1996; ... Karen DePauw is the author of "Adapted Physical Activity and Sport: Health Concerns and Research Implications for Females with Disabilities," in The Health of Women with Physical Disabilities: Setting a Research Agenda for the 90's, ed. D. M. Krotoski, M. Nosek, and M. Turk (Baltimore: Brookes ...
The postfeminist frontier is global
Jan 01, 1996; ... Patricia S. Mann is the author of Micro-Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, I994) and "On the Postfeminist Frontier," Socialist Review, 34:II z (I995). My aim as a writer has been to explain ongoing social change, to make structural ...
Which side am I on, anyway?
Jan 01, 1996; ... Ursula Le Guin is the author of The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Walker Publishing, I969) and Always Coming Home (New York: Harper & Row, I985). A frontier has two sides. It is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site, with all the danger and promise of liminality. On the front ...
New frontiers in Native American history
Jan 01, 1996; ... Clara Sue Kidwell is the author of "Indian Women as Cultural Mediators," Ethnohistory: The Bulletin of the Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference 39:2 (I992). Indians played a role in Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis as the resisting force against which Americans forged their identity ...
Between worlds: Interpreters, guides, and survivors
Jan 01, 1996; ... Frances Karttunen is the author of Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survisors (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, I994). My work, as represented by Between Worlds, is about people who have served as interpreters of their languages and cultures for interested ...
Connections
Jan 01, 1996; ... Sarah Deutsch is the author of No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, I987) and coauthor of "Contemporary Peoples/Contested Places," in The Oxford History of the American West, ed ....
Meeting grounds or "frontiers"?
Jan 01, 1996; ... Kate Shanley is the author of "Only An Indian" Reading james Welch (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, forthcoming, I997) and American Indian Autobiography: A Source Book (Chicago: Newberry Library, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian,1996. "Frontiers" is a word of ...
The world's women on-line!
Jan 01, 1996; ... The World's Women On-Line! arose from my experience as a new media artist, activist, and leader in the Women's Art Movement, and from creative research at the Institute for Studies in the Arts of Arizona State University. The objective is to bring the global resource of women's experience and ...
Saguaro
Jan 01, 1996; ... From a distance, or on a postcard, She is the peculiar perfection of power In the sand: elegant, durable, balanced, green. Most people never come close enough to see The holes the gila flickers carve, Or the dusty brown of her trunk That shadows her ...
When strangers met: Sex and gender on three frontiers
Jan 01, 1996; ... The West of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a cosmopolitan place-a meeting ground for people of disparate cultures and conflicting motives. Equipped with widely differing ideas about correct social behavior, Indians, Hispanos, Anglos, and others frequently misunderstood and ...
Marita Dingus
Jan 01, 1996; ... I was given the gift of sewing by my mother and my paternal grandmother: a gift defined as a tool for survival. I learned to sew my own clothes and to quilt, but also to use sewing to play. Major breakthroughs in my work came with an introduction to Black Studies at San Jose State ...
Compound walls: Eva Jane Price's letters from a Chinese mission, 1890-1900
Jan 01, 1996; ... Each town along the road running out of Fen Cho fu, China, paid to avoid having foreigners murdered within its boundaries.I No one wanted the difficulties likely to arise from having a group of foreign missionaries beheaded in his or her village. Therefore the party of eight missionaries, ...
Tabula rasa
Jan 01, 1996; ... As paper now receives ink So I received you, Soaking up the lust; Blotting and smoothing The rough, blurred edges; Bearing the inscriptions of Your desires: blank Until you covered me With you; bare but for Your ideas, your wants, your needs ....
Self-portrait on the border line between Mexico and the United States, Frida Kahlo, 1932
Jan 01, 1996; ... Here is a lady on a pedestal: pink frock, lace gloves, red slippers, a ribbon around her hair, standing on the solid name of her husband. In the U.S., everything grows electric. Soil, charged with song, hums like atoms, like strung wire. A skyscraper is not a tree. A skyscraper is ...
Gender issues in the Afghanistan diaspora: Nadia's story
Jan 01, 1996; ... Rather than restricting themselves to the study of isolated tribes and peasant villages, anthropologists have begun to study peoples who are "culturally displaced," refugees, diasporic groups, people without territorial homelands, and immigrants. Such groups are increasingly prominent today in ...
Romance, rodeo queens, and the 1950s
Jan 01, 1996; ... As part of a large project, in the last two years I have been interviewing rodeo royalty, that is, the rodeo queens, princesses, and Indian princesses from community-based rodeos in the Northwest. Along the way I have collected over one hundred photographs from newspapers as well as the private ...
Identity, difference, and dance: Female initiation in Zanzibar, 1890 to 1930
Jan 01, 1996; ... Performances of music, dance, and song have historically provided a critically important space for the public debate of social and political hierarchy in coastal East African societies.2 These forms of popular culture therefore provide a unique set of richly detailed sources that allow us to ...
The tongue is a drum
Jan 01, 1996; ... the tongue is a drum a drum a drum the tongue is a drum and drumming has been outlawed no drumming allowed except on Sundays in a few public parks between the hours of 2 and 4 P.M. the tongue is a drum a drum a drum and drumming has been forbidden especially if you're non-white especially if ...
Senses related to the nose
Jan 01, 1996; ... mango stringy saffron color whose bruises reek from indifference star-apple pulpy mauve meat whose pain etch invisibility nease-berry fleshy tasty almond whose cry wail violation papaya golden streaked sweet whose laughter signal triumph pungent fruits from different lands peculiar to unfamiliar ...
Making savages of us all: White women, Pueblo Indians, and the controversy over Indian dances in the 1920s
Jan 01, 1996; ... In I920, as part of an extensive effort to gather information about the rumored immorality of Pueblo dances, an inspector from the U.S. government took sworn affidavits and written statements from about a dozen Hopi Indians and seven white observers. In one of the statements, witness Evelyn ...
Constructions of rape: Two American musicals
Jan 01, 1996; ... I know that you prefer abduction but the proper term is rape. It's short and businesslike. Rape. - El Gallo, The Fantasticks, act I, scene iii How is it that in spite (or perhaps because) of their erasure, rape and sexual violence have been so ingrained and so rationalized ...
Abuela dives the wall
Jan 01, 1996; ... Once I climbed a mountain so I could point to it each morning as I drove to work. I was a young woman in a Subaru trying hard. Climbing was steady exercise, a matter of deciding not to quit though I was alone, and lonely and tired. Now I've come to dive ...
A chat with a changing woman
Jan 01, 1996; ... The Chisera is simply the Genius ...no more or less than just the gifted woman, too much occupied with the use of her gift to look well after herself. -- Mary Hunter Austin, "The Arrow Maker" A chesira is at the spring this morning like an elk returned to browse the ...
A wha' dem a go on wid? (Student resistance in a doctoral seminar on black feminist thought)
Jan 01, 1996; ... A wha' dem a go on wid? Black man student in a mi class Kom in a mi office, tell me 'bout 'im 'av gun FI SHOOT ME] A wha' dem a go on wid? White man student in a mi class Seh me is one demanding professor Mo' demandin' dan di white man dem 'Im seh, come like me haffi prove me can do di ...
Bisexual women and the "threat" to lesbian space: Or what if all the lesbians leave?
Jan 01, 1996; ... Coming out as a lesbian in the 1970s, I entered a world of absolutes. I learned to invert the values of dominant society so that lesbians were valorized and heterosexuals were denigrated, and by extrapolation, lesbians were trustworthy and heterosexuals were not. Through my association with ...
Doubling
Jan 01, 1996; ... Often, there's nothing better, the warm soapy water, the smells of creams and lotions, massages my scalp, my senses. her thigh presses into my shoulder, heavy physicality which keeps me from floating away with the water. Later, she styles with her combs and brushes, mousses and blow ...
Fidelia Monzon
Jan 01, 1996; ... 4-8-72 born. Also, there is this number--050040872 in the rollbook It is supposed to mean Fidelia Monzon she says "call me Fidel All my friends do" --but I am your teacher In Regular Math I have never had a regular student. For just a fraction of one moment I thought they ...
Haunting the borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek"
Jan 01, 1996; ... Aiiii aiiii aiiiii She is crying for her dead child the lover gone, the lover not yet come: Her grito splinters the night -- Gloria Anzaldua, "My Black Angelos," Borderlands/La Frontera(1) "If I were asked what it is I write about," Sandra Cisneros ...
Identity politics, political identities: Thoughts toward a multicultural politics
Jan 01, 1996; ... This essay addresses a particular aspect of contemporary debates about identity, identity politics, and multiculturalism: specifically, the implications of these discussions for political action in general and coalition politics in particular. How do we move beyond a liberal-democratic ...
"Like a Natural Woman": Nature, technology, and birthing bodies in Murphy Brown
Jan 01, 1996; ... Introduction Childbirth educator Sheila Kitzinger argues that in attempting to understand specific cultures we should look to their birthing practices: "in any society, the way a woman gives birth and the kind of care given to her point as sharply as an arrowhead to the key values in the ...
Montana homestead
Jan 01, 1996; ... About a half a mile from the shack, Mama had a "crying rock." --Alma Jakobson, Memories: 1884-1990 When she could not endure, she left, left bread unkneaded and cow lowing, left the floor unwashed, the baby napping, closed the door. And entered the foreign ...
Motherlode
Jan 01, 1996; ... The baby wails her waking, and so I leave my work, abandon my life to birth her yet again. She smiles/I vanish into that half-toothed grin. What's left? These days I am no more mine than these thick breasts, no more my own than this deep ...
Reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth as a collaborative text
Jan 01, 1996; ... Important and complex issues of unequal power over representation of women's experience arise in studying and teaching those nineteenth-century African American women's life-history texts that were produced in collaboration with white political allies. Even Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life ...
Sky, rain, rainbow
Jan 01, 1996; ... He hated my hair one meter of the auburn stuff that took a decade of my life to grow Princess rope He didn't want to know why I grew my hair He never asked for my secrets: "A foot shorter would be better. It's out of style you know." He smirked at my snake bracelets. I love my snakes ...
Studying the ground
Jan 01, 1996; ... I thought of you today, as I walked step by slow step along a road a thousand miles from that heap of ashes. My head bent to face the earth, I searched the random scatter of stone for the dark glint that might mean obsidian, found only blackened leaves, ...
The cost of shoes in the city
Jan 01, 1996; ... It's funny the way we cut off pieces of ourselves, Cinderella's stepsisters all over, lopping off a heel here, there a big toe. I guess I'm one of those women who never met a shoe she didn't like, even though they all feel the same, and they collect in my closet, row upon row, stacks and stacks ...
The runaway
Jan 01, 1996; ... It was out of the romantic pulp magazines you used to dream over in the drugstore, too poor to buy--the way your horse suddenly bolted like an arrow, like a cannonball, aiming for the edge of the world and beyond, ready to carry you out among the ...
To my daughters
Jan 01, 1996; ... Daughters, enter entirely into this world. Think of me, sixteen, naked in a chicken coop turned sauna, the only light the wood stove, red as a heart, heat throbbing up the chimney. Think of the hot bite of ...
Wall working
Jan 01, 1996; ... One collects stories as stones, stacking them on and against one another, fitting protuberance to niche, building a wall that holds in the personal, defines the boundaries, sets itself against the sun, and waits for winter frost to heave the stone whose chinks have been worked loose by ...
Domestic violence and the theoretical discourse of freedom
Jan 01, 1996; ... A woman in Philadelphia is beaten by her husband and admitted to a hospital. This is the second time in a year that this woman (I'll call her Susan) has had to seek medical attention for her injuries. Her sister Sarah wants her to press charges. At first, Susan considers it: she is frightened ...
The depression
Jan 01, 1996; ... When you heard it was called the Depression, you laughed, once, grimly. "Depression? I was depressed, all right," you said. Not even a laugh--a grim contemptuous little snort. There had never been any boom, where you lived--never any ...
The teakettle
Jan 01, 1996; ... You fought over everything, when you left him, when you left with your son, my father, and headed out West and never came back--you snatched up the teakettle and my grandfather grabbed it right back, it was a life-and-death struggle over a ...
"And, fellas, they're American girls]": On the road with the Sharon Rogers All-Girl Band
Jan 01, 1996; ... They laughed together, cried together, crashed and almost died together, Listen to the rhythm, talk about your rhythm, Sharon Rogers Band](1) Before I ask you to join me "on the road with the Sharon Rogers Band," let me provide a quick note of explanation as to ...
Class, gender, and the contours of nationalism in the culture of Philippine radical theater
Jan 01, 1996; ... "No, Papa] Pa, do you think it's easy for me to say this and talk to you this way? I'm scared but I've got to say it. I've learned far more from my dealings with Juan than from observing our life here at home ... Dad, I've just come from Juan in Santa Ana. Their house was so small, with ...