Welcome to the thirdspace special issue on Representation and Transgressive Sexualities. This is our sixth issue - our first fully dedicated to a special theme and our second to feature some of our new editors at the helm! This issue has been put together by Kim Snowden, Natalia Gerodetti and Sharon Larson - we worked together to select and work with the great papers that make up this issue on the theme of transgressive sexualities in representation. As always, we would not be able to produce anything at all without our fabulous co-editor and resident web goddess, Jenéa Tallentire. She now has coding help in the form of our newest editor - Elley Prior. Elley comes to us with a background in advertising and web publishing. She is currently working on an MA in Canadian and Women's Studies at Carleton University where she is focusing on women, technology, and communication and the use of blogs by Canadian women in the active construction and re-construction of their social and cultural worlds. We are looking forward to working with Elley and we are excited about the experience and scholarship that she brings to thirdspace. We'd also like to take a moment to say goodbye and thanks to Bianca Rus, a member of our co-editing team who has now moved on to other projects.

This issue of thirdspace is dedicated to emerging feminist work in the area of sexuality and representation. This issue is precisely what we hoped in founding the journal - an excellent range of quality work from emerging feminist scholars. The call for papers that went out for this issue asked for work that dealt with monstrous women, femmes fatales, future landscapes of sexualities, and issues around deviant, transgressive and subversive sexualities. Specifically, we were interested in work that focused on how these issues of sexuality were conceived, produced, constructed and created in all forms of representation. We had an incredible response - many of the papers we received are representative of new feminist scholarship that crosses disciplines and pushes the boundaries of academics in new and exciting ways.

The seven articles in this issue contribute in many ways to the representations of sexualities and gender and develop ideas about the political potential of transgression and transgressive sexualities in both contemporary and historical contexts. They approach the themes of the special issue from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and while they are each scholarly pieces of work in their own right they also, taken together, give an idea of the variety and complexity in which the theme of sexualities, transgression and representation is being approached in contemporary research. We are also pleased that although all the articles are in English, the contributing authors to this journal come from various continents, making another source of inspiring interest to our readers.

Michelle Durden's article looks at the context of burlesque theatre in performances, performers, and audiences to argue that the forms of sexuality represented are much more diverse, complicated, and fluid than has previously been suggested. Durden's look at burlesque theatre shows that it was "not just a leg show" but also entailed spaces for male sexual transgressions. The author also addresses the vexing question in the history of male sexual dissidence as to whether or not subcultures of men with sexual and emotional ties existed in the nineteenth century in the United States. In focusing on male drag in burlesque shows, often imported from London of the period, the author makes a convincing case for the existence of a group of writers, performers, and audience members who shared a campy amusement in references to sexual desire and play between men. At the same time as signs and representations of sexual dissidence were recognizable in burlesque theatre the general public was not necessarily aware, or wanted to be aware, of different sexual cultures. Durden examines how representations and interpretations are dependent not only on one another but also, particularly in the case of sexual dissidence, on deeply encrypted and sometimes highly complicated cultural signs and narratives.

Patricia MacCormack's article on perversion takes a different look at the configuration of socio-sexual limits than Durden's. Departing from a traditional understanding of the term, MacCormack proposes to use perversion as a political strategy to renegotiate how we think the body and subjectivity. She uses Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "becoming minoritarian" to think through how occupying a non-dominant position does not necessarily align one with being pervert; rather perversion could be used as a means by which those in othered positions, and indeed all subjects, can volitionally explore the position of the other. In this way, MacCormack calls upon Braidotti and Weiss to modify Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical ideas into a sexual-political project, through which "becoming" becomes a feminist transformation.

The theoretical work of Rosi Braidotti is also taken up in Kim Toffoletti's paper about images of musician and performer Marilyn Manson. Toffoletti argues that in a particular series of Manson images, he is represented as "posthuman" - a figure that destabilizes how we perceive gender, race, sexuality, and the body. The coherence that we seek in an image, specifically of a human, is completely disrupted through a process of reproduction, artifice, imitation, and simulacra. It is precisely Manson's inauthenticity, his hybridity and "posthuman" self-representation, Toffoletti suggests, that challenge the viewer to think about difference in another way and to question the codes and constructs of subjectivity and culture that make us uncomfortable with Manson's imagery.

Bianca Nielsen's paper on the film Ginger Snaps deals with subjectivity in another way. She argues that Ginger Snaps should be considered beyond the teen-oriented horror flick that it was marketed as and, instead, deserves a close reading in the context of issues of female sexuality and cultural and medical discourses of women's bodies, sexuality, and menstruation. Nielsen argues that Ginger Snaps is consciously re-articulating the conventions of horror films and, using Barbara Creed's theory of the monstrous feminine and other feminist psychoanalytic approaches, Nielsen suggests that the film demands feminist scrutiny.

Michelle Sauer's paper considers medieval English anchoritism as a site for the "lesbian void," a term she applies in examining the intimate relationship between the anchoress, "a woman devoted to God and self-confined to solitude," and her servant "maiden." Sauer claims that the exclusion of men from the anchoress's cell, a symbolic representation of her own body, created a privileged space where she and her maiden could privately engage in sexual acts that were otherwise publicly regulated. Although the functions and structure of the anchorhold were generally regulated by the heteronormative and phallocentric laws of medieval society, Sauer maintains that it is precisely the gaps in the phallocentric paradigm that allowed the anchorhold to potentially become a site for female sexual expression and exploration.

The cult television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been a popular subject of feminist scrutiny and scholarship. Here, Yael Sherman looks at BtVS in the context of Bakhtin's notion of the carnival and posits that the liminal space created by the carnival is a transformative one, one that requires a contradictory and incomplete body at its centre. Using Gloria Anzaldua's allegory of the Borderlands and Donna Haraway's myth of the cyborg, Sherman traces the "carnival spirit" in BtVS and examines how these figurations of the grotesque can be read in BtVS as a means to challenge conventional notions of race, gender and sexuality.

These issues are also central in Monika Hogan's paper about Leslie Feinberg's novel, Stone Butch Blues. Hogan argues that Feinberg's novel has long been considered to be a groundbreaking and provocative work with a transgendered protagonist at its centre. However, Hogan suggests that Stone Butch Blues has rarely been discussed for its literary merit and she explores Feinberg's novel within the context of women's literary traditions, specifically how Feinberg incorporates and resists these traditions in her work. Hogan focuses on the ways in which Feinberg reconstructs the literary genre of the captivity narrative and, in the process, creates a literary space for "ethical contact," an exploration of embodied captivity, and a discourse that shifts and disrupts contemporary debates around transgender issues.

In a final historical note, one of our editors, Natalia Gerodetti, has prepared a tribute to Anna Rüling, held to be the first lesbian activist on record in the modern fight for GLBT rights.

What all these articles highlight very clearly is that transgressions are never static, stable, or finished. Rather, the emphasis is on the continuous processes that these acts, representations, and performances imply. While these have certain material effects, be they temporary or more permanent ones, much of the emphasis is on movement, on the doing, creating, resisting, or any other "ing" in the verb and investigation.

We hope you will agree that this issue has some of the best work yet seen in thirdspace, and we look forward to this continued high level of excellence from our contributors. This issue we are also experimenting with a .PDF version of the journal for ease of printing and to determine pagination of articles. For now, we also continue to offer our web-print version of each piece. We are also giving chora a new look in the near future, so bear with us as we renovate that side of the site. As always, let us know what you think about these changes or any other suggestions at info [at] thirdspace.ca.