In 1996, the Ole Mississippi Homecoming Queen described her feelings in the campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian, upon receiving her crown: "After weeks of anticipation, the crowning day is here . . . I can’t believe 47,000 eyes will be watching me." In this issue we investigate the politics of location. Exposed to public scrutiny, categorized, and judged, women have long borne the burden of maintaining cultural and social norms. Sometimes those norms are patriarchal and racial, as Karen W. Tice explains in her article on campus beauty pageants, but the feminist movement has also generated its own forms of exclusion, as Michelle VanNatta shows in her analysis of constructions of the battered woman. As Mary E. Curran’s review essay explains, our bodies gain their meanings from their contexts, and while, as Karen Zivi describes in the case of HIV-positive mothers, very different contexts can produce surprisingly similar paradigms, the articles in this issue also demonstrate the wide variety of "ideals" against which women’s bodies and their identities are measured. Socioeconomic, racial, and sexual stratifications all shape the ways in which our cultures watch women and warn us off when we seem to defy the hierarchies in which we are often obliged to find our being. But in spite of this, we continue to challenge the terms of our own visibility, and all the articles and the creative pieces in this issue bear witness to women’s resistance as well as to their exposure. As Simone de Beauvoir declared, there is nothing self-evident about being a woman, and women can make themselves visible in the most unexpected and uncomfortable ways, as Jehanne-Marie Gavarini’s art demonstrates.

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Karen W. Tice
Queens of Academe: Campus Pageantry and Student Life

Eloise Klein Healy
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Lived (Poem)

Sonia Kruks
Beauvoir’s Time/Our Time:
The Renaissance in Simone de Beauvoir Studies

Stephanie Dickinson
Man of War (Fiction)

Stephanie Ellis
The Art of Jehanne-Marie Gavarini

Karen Zivi
Contesting Motherhood in the Age of AIDS:
Maternal Ideology in the Debate over Mandatory
HIV Testing

De Anna Stephens Vaughn
Factories; The Hysteresis of Light (Poems)

Mary E. Curran
Geographic Theorizations of Sexuality: A Review of Recent Works

Eloise Klein Healy
Trouble Ahead (Poem)

Shouhua Qi
The Evidence (Fiction)

Michelle VanNatta
Constructing the Battered Woman

Eloise Klein Healy
For the Girl Child (Poem)

News and Views

Cover Art

Jehanne-Marie Gavarini, Passé Simple, 1995.
Detail of installation, Passé Simple.
©Jehanne-Marie Gavarini