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Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

The term "postmodernism" first emerged in the 1950s in journals of literary criticism where it designated certain forms of experimental "meta-fiction." The process by which the term was extended to other disciplines is discussed, & an inventory of ideas associated with postmodernism is presented. It is contended that modernism was an attempt to find order within the fragmented & chaotic nature of the modern, capitalistic experience; whereas postmodernism is best conceived as a cultural effort to embrace that part of the modern experience that modernism tried to suppress -- ie, the decentered, the contingent, the unstable, & the fragmentary. Examples of postmodernism drawn from popular culture are presented, & several seminal books in the postmodern canon are briefly discussed. W. Howard

A review article on a book edited by Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989 [see listing in IRPS No. 67]). This collection of essays by US philosophers & social scientists examines the relationship between postmodernism & feminism. The volume attempts to determine the extent to which the postmodern critique of reason, history, & the subject is in conflict, or accord, with the feminist tradition. In one essay, Nancy Fraser & Linda Nicholson criticize postmodernists for elaborating antifoundational metaphilosophical perspectives, while covering up their own reliance on the very intellectual traditions they seek to undermine. Others explore the history of feminism, liberatory politics, & the politics of difference & sexual identity. The book is praised as a valuable contribution to feminist thought, but criticized for glossing over the sociohistorical & theoretical dimensions of postmodernism. 10 References. W. Howard