Mary Ann Hudson titles the poem we publish in this issue: "I don't know what your father told you, but you don't have the whole story." This idea of incompletion and omission dominates the articles and essays in this issue. All our authors are concerned with setting the record straight, filling in the blanks, or listening for the voices of women who have not yet been heard or acknowledged. This work has, of course, always been one of the driving forces of feminism, but it never loses its urgency, and as some of our authors make clear here, in an increasingly globalized and "connected" world, the omissions are often particularly brutal and dangerous. Whether it is women in the past whose stories have been dismissed, misrepresented, or ignored, or women in the present whose lives have been distorted by social convention or sexual inequity, the consequences of forgetting or misacknowledging are grave. As Shahnaz Khan points out, feminism will live up to its own promise only when women around the world understand that all our lives are intertwined, perhaps most of all when we are least aware of it. Some of the writers in this issue, like Mariana Valverde ("A Postcolonial Women's Law? Domestic Violence and the Ontario Liquor Board's ‘Indian List,' 1950-1990"), Ruby Lal ("Historicizing the Harem: The Challenge of a Princess's Memoir"), and Shahnaz Khan ("Locating the Feminist Voice: The Debate on the Zina Ordinance"), reveal neglected stories of women's defiance and resistance that have been buried in official archives. As well, Helen Langa's review essay in this volume, "Recent Feminist Art History: An American Sampler," examines the expansion of traditional histories that came with the contributions of feminist writers; Priti Ramamurthy ("Why Is Buying a ‘Madras' Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis") looks at the global inequalities that are suppressed by the rhetoric of advertising in the West; Norma Fowler and her colleagues ("Graphic Stories: Representing the Status of Female Faculty") experiment with different ways of analyzing statistics on academic women's salaries; and Shirin Neshat, in conversation with Scott MacDonald ("Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Shirin Neshat"), talks about her work as an artist and filmmaker dedicated to representing the lives and experiences of women in Iran.

{ READ MORE as PDF }

Mariana Valverde
A Postcolonial Women's Law? Domestic Violence and the Ontario Liquor Board’s "Indian List," 1950-1990

Corinne Stanley
Luck (Poetry)

Ruby Lal
Historicizing the Harem:
The Challenge of a Princess's Memoir

Marguerite Scott
I'm Too Big (Poetry)

Scott MacDonald
Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Shirin Neshat

Shahnaz Khan
Locating the Feminist Voice:
The Debate on the Zina Ordinance

Mary Ann Hudson
I don't know what your father told you, but you don't have the whole story; You're just tired and think I'm being selfish; I'm just not interested in being your mother anymore, so I guess God still has plans for me yet (Poetry)

Norma Fowler, Katherine Arens, Lucia A. Gilbert, Shelley M. Payne, Linda E. Reichl, and Janet Staiger
Graphic Stories: Representing the Status of Female Faculty

Alicia Ostriker
The Speech of the Creature; Baby Carriages (Poetry)

Helen Langa
Recent Feminist Art History: An American Sampler

Sheryl Luna
Chico's Tacos (Poetry)

Priti Ramamurthy
Why Is Buying a "Madras" Cotton Shirt a Political Act? A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis

News and Views

Cover Art

Shirin Neshat, Turbulent, 1998. Production still.
© Shirin Neshat.
Courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery.