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Sandya Hewamanne
Pornographic Voice: Critical Feminist Practices among Sri Lankan Female Garment Workers

Debra B. Bergoffen
From Genocide to Justice: Women's Bodies as a Legal Writing Pad

Evelyn Torton Beck
Kahlo's World Split Open (Art Essay)

Christina Greene
What's Sex Got to Do with It: Gender and the New Black Freedom Movement (Review Essay)

Mariana Valverde
A New Entity in the History of Sexuality: The Repectable Same-sex Couple (Commentary)

Nadine Naber
Arab American Femininities: Beyond Arab Virgin/American(ized) Whore

Callie Danae Hirsch (Art Essay)

Cathleen Calbert
The Seafarer

Maria Mazziotti Gillian
(Poetry)

Beth Partin
Afraid to Say

Liz Robbins (Poetry)

Mary Ann Wehler (Poetry)

Barbara Widermann (Poetry)

Cover Art

Frida Kahlo, What the Water Gave Me, 1938.
38 x 30 inches. Oil on canvas.

This issue of Feminist Studies focuses on sexuality, both in its heightened visibility and its effacement, in local and global contexts. In our first article, Debra B. Bergoffen uses the February 22, 2001, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia judgment in Prosecutor v. Kunarac et al. to illustrate the transformative potential of the court's naming rape as a crime against humanity. Her essay, "From Genocide to Justice: Women's Bodies as a Legal Writing Pad," uses the explicit context of globalization to examine the relationship between the particular and the universal. Relying on Maurice Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of speech, violence, and dialogue, Bergoffen posits that "the court's speech [gives] us a new representation of humanity and shows us how this new representation challenges us to reconsider the meaning of the sexed body." As the court seems to understand it, women"s rape in intrastate conflicts is a crime against humanity not because it represents men"s patriarchal failures. Rather, it is a crime against humanity because it violates "the body's materiality" and it "attempt[s] to destroy [the body's] capacity to engage the world on its own terms." Although the body involved is more often than not sexed female, naming rape a crime against humanity and not a crime against women renders the particular sex of the raped body largely irrelevant. In this type of analysis, the operative identity is neither female nor male, but rather human, which can be either female or male. Bergoffen's commentary raises provocative issues, particularly for those women's rights advocates without whose efforts the court"s linguistic practice would have been all but impossible.

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