Feminist scholarship has been long concerned with the terms in which the past is presented and, more specifically, with how women’s agency is suppressed or misconstrued. Authors in this issue take up what we call the politics of history and recovery across a range of genres: from historical fiction and literary, film, and art sources to ever-changing electronic archives. The issue opens with the late Diane Middlebrook’s experimental exploration of the life and work of the first-century BCE poet Ovid. Middlebrook’s provocative narrative begins with a fictional account of Ovid’s birth from the perspectives of the midwife and mother, and it proceeds to surmise familial details about influences in the young poet’s life and how they might have influenced his work....

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The Politics of History and Recovery

Diane Middlebrook
20 March, 43 BCE: Ovid Is Born
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Diana Barnes
The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation
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Veronica Alfano
Grandmothers in the Archive:
Three Digital Collections of Women’s Writing
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Jae Turner
Mary E. Hutchinson, Intelligibility,
and the Historical Limits of Agency
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The Social Mobilization of Love

Sharon Doetsch-Kidder
Loving Criticism: A Spiritual Philosophy of Social Change
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Jeannie Ludlow
Love and Goodness: Toward a New Abortion Politics
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Black Women's Sexuality

Rickey Laurentiis
Stung (Poetry)
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Jennifer C. Nash
Theorizing Pleasure:
New Directions in Black Feminist Studies (Review Essay)
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R. Flowers Rivera
Ode To Sue; Braiding Alexis (Poetry)
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Analyzing Activism

Molly Talcott and Dana Collins
Building a Complex and Emancipatory Unity:
Documenting Decolonial Feminist Interventions
within the Occupy Movement (Photo Essay)
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Michelle V. Rowley
“It Could Have Been Me”
Really? Early Morning Meditations on
Trayvon Martin’s Death (Commentary)
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Jamie L. Small
Trafficking in Truth: Media, Sexuality,
and Human Rights Evidence
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Cover Art:

Mary E. Hutchinson
Front cover: Joanna, ca. 1931–1935.
Back cover: Aria Trista, 1931.