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Basia A. Nowak
Constant Conversations: Agitators in the League of Women in
Poland during the Stalinist Period

Wang Zheng
"State Feminism"? Gender and Socialist State
Formation in Maoist China

Minnie Bruce Pratt
Making Whirligigs; Ordering Paperclips;
Scrubbing Floors; The Dissolution of Old Ideas Keeps Pace
(Poetry)

Jeanne Scheper
Visualize Academic Labor in the 1990s:
Inventing an Activist Archive in Santa Barbara

Carolyn Pajor
White Trash: Manifesting the Bisexual
(Autobiographical Essay)

Vivyan C. Adair
Class Absences: Cutting Class in Feminist Studies

Callie Danae Hirsch (Art Essay)

Paola Corso
Make Room for a New Feller Hand;
Eyewitness; Identified; Girl Talk (Poetry)

Bonnie J. Morris
Valuing Woman-Only Spaces (Commentary)

Anita Helle
Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and the
Politics of Memory

Frances S. Hasso
Problems and Promise in Middle East and North Africa
Gender Research

Cover Art

Callie Danae Hirsch, Vibrant Desire, 2000.
48 x 36 inches. Oil on canvas.
© Callie Danae Hirsch

Beginning this issue is a cluster of essays that explore the politics of class in relation to women's work, state formation, and feminism. Other essays, commentary, art, and creative offerings address feminist conceptualizations of collective and individual subjectivity. Whether focusing on the erasures of social class in feminist scholarship or the inattention to gender in state socialisms or the disappearance of bisexuals under the sign of lesbianism or the silences framing discussions of transnational subjectivities, our authors speak especially to what has been left out of canonical feminist narratives and the ways these absences limit our research and, ultimately, our strategies for changing the world.

Leading off a group of articles exploring women's work, social class, and socialism, Basia A. Nowak and Wang Zheng focus on "women's work" in building socialist states in immediate post-World War II Poland and China respectively. Noting that the influence of women in socialist state formation has been either dismissed by scholars as insignificant or characterized solely as a "top-down" phenomenon directed by the patriarchal state, Wang and Nowak analyze women's labor within state-sanctioned and -sponsored national women's organizations. They argue that women's activism within this framework cannot be understood as simply flowing from the Communist Party's agenda. In her Feminist Studies Graduate Student Award-winning article, "Constant Conversations: Agitators in the League of Women in Poland during the Stalinist Period," Nowak concentrates her attention on the League of Women, Poland's "official, centralized, mass women's organization during communism." Central to Nowak's article are the "female agitators" who were critical players in the Party's propaganda efforts as well as key agents in promoting specific benefits for women. As Nowak's title suggests, female agitators used talking as a means both of informing women about socialist ideology and of facilitating their participation in building a socialist state. The "constant conversations" that described the form of these agitators' work to "inform and educate" other women invoked particularly "feminine" modes of persuasion. The gendered image of women as "talkers" both aided and undercut the league's efforts, as female activists had to balance the effectiveness of one-on-one and women's-only group conversations with the negative stereotypes that characterized female talk as idle chatter or trivial gossip. Nowak's insightful analysis suggests the need for greater attention to these early years of socialist state building and women's position as critical actors in such efforts.

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