This issue contains a number of highly original and timely studies and reflections that could be presented simply as "feminist studies," but for editorial purposes we have chosen to divide the issue into two halves. The first set of articles examines the ways in which relations of capital, class, gender, sex, and race play out differently depending on the unpredictable particularities of the local. The second half consists of two articles, an art essay, and a review essay that address how issues of "identity" play out in the public sphere.

The first two articles in the set that we have titled "Nation and Race, Sex and Work" analyze the workings of class-specific narratives of gender in colonial settings in the Americas. Eileen J. Findlay shows that, in the waning years of Spanish colonial rule in Puerto Rico, local nationalist writers' concern to articulate a "respectable" national identity led them to support a campaign against prostitution and also against the sexual and cultural practices of a segment of urban Puerto Rico. This study joins the growing literature on nationalism and sexuality and shows that the political project to create a Puerto Rican "citizenship" was, like so many other projects around the world, implicitly masculinized through the opposition of good (male) citizens to the "loose" women who purportedly threatened the physical and moral health of the emerging nation. Earlier in the nineteenth century, sexual/moral fears of a different sort fueled the project supported both by the British imperial authorities and by local notables to "import" white working-class women into British Columbia, as Adele Perry documents in her study. Perry's article contributes to the international literature on race, sex, and colonialism by focusing on a site in which most white men-miners and loggers mostly-were living either with aboriginal women or in single-sex households and communities. Although such arrangements persisted into the twentieth century, they were increasingly criticized as the all-white, workingclass family became the norm.

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Eileen J. Findlay
Decency and Democracy: The Politics of Prostitution in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1890-1900

Adele Perry
"Fair Ones of a Purer Caste": White Women and Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia

Leela Fernandes
Beyond Public Spaces and Private Spheres: Gender, Family, and Working-Class Politics in India

Susan A. Manchester
I Need to Listen to What She Says (Poetry)

Leslie Salzinger
From High Heels to Swathed Bodies: Gendered Meanings under Production in Mexico's Export-Processing Industry

Mary Hope Whitehead Lee
Huitzilopochtli (Poetry)

Leila J. Rupp
Sexuality and Politics in the Early Twentieth Century:
The Case of the International Women's Movement

M.V. Lee Badgett
A Queer Marketplace: Books on Lesbian and Gay Consumers, Workers, and Investors (Review Essay)

Esther Hyneman
Confessions of a Realist (Art Essay)

Susan Yadlon
Skinny Women and Good Mothers:
The Rhetoric of Risk, Control, and Culpability
in the Production of Knowledge about Breast Cancer