Sometimes it is really, really hard to face the computer screen and kick out 5-6 articles worth of copyediting and coding, a task that takes at least 30 full hours. That doesn't even touch the time and effort put into readings and editing the submissions before they even come to me to code. Many days, it feels like perhaps attending to my own research is more important, or at least will get me through the academic system faster, which often feels like the same thing.

Yet with just a few clicks we can publish wonderful feminist scholarship that is accessible internationally. After months of reading, editing, and evaluation, mind! - but ultimately, those few clicks to upload are the key difference between what thirdspace can do and a traditional paper journal that needs heaps of money and facilities.

We are, in fact, on the cutting edge of journal publishing at this moment: our adoption of online editing and publishing software is a trend being caught by many traditional paper journals as the technological opportunities of the web are further expanded. Ours is a open-source, entirely free package called Open Jouranl systems, offered by the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs) and supported by a wonderful network of developers and users. Although it was a decently hard and sometimes frustrating learning curve for me to implement all the background technical foundations, it was well worth it. We hope you will agree.

But that reminds me that there are many barriers that lay in front of women, and especially multiply-marginalized women, to access the so-called ‘masculine’ domains of science and technology. The internet is certainly no exception, and even as very user-friendly sites and applications such as Facebook, blogs, and open-source software appear, the domain of the programmers and hackers still remains an often-mysterious place with esoteric language and skills. Not to mention the time it takes to gain these skills, piled on top of what for many women is a second or third shift.

But feminists are cracking the Net in many different ways – not the least of which is the blogosphere, highlighted this issue in Georgia Gaden’s look at the fascinating Carnival of Feminists.

The exciting potential of blogging to express and expand feminist thought is enormous, part of the potential of the web that this journal seeks to grab hold and ride. Blogging and open-access online academic publishing are closely allied. The only real difference is the filters on the content (we are peer-reviewed, both a limitation and a resource for potential authors) and the type (or even possibility) of feedback from a general audience. The rest is organization and look-and-feel, really. (I would argue that we could publish this journal as a blog, in fact, with footnotes and everything, and lose nothing of the strength and impact of the scholarship here).

Ironically enough, I felt especially revived recently by the words of a feminist who was (temporarily, it turns out) quitting the blogging game to concentrate on other areas of her life. I only encountered her blog for the first time the day before she quit, following a link to the seventh Carnival of the Feminists (see Georgia Gaden’s piece in this issue to learn more about carnivals). Her thoughts on why we put ourselves out there for feminist movement are right on the money for me:

I like to come back to words like these when I wonder about my own personal investment. Thankfully, I have at my hand here a wonderful set of submissions for this issue that make it much easier to sit down at the old computer and slog it out. I think you'll agree that these excellent submissions in this issue of thirdspace are well worth your time and mine.

In “Mas(k/t)ectomies: Losing a Breast (and Hair) in Hannah Wilke's Body Art,” Julia Skelly examines the shifting meanings and criticism of Hannah Wilke’s work, through her transformation from femme fatale to female cancer sufferer. Skelly argues that Wilke’s documentations of the loss of hair and breasts through cancer “captures women in new performative acts of femininity, using props, poses, and costumes to reconstruct their gender identity. This reconstruction calls attention to the fact that gender identity is just that: a construction dependant on a series of enactments.”

Karina Smith (“Re/telling History: Sistren's Ida Revolt inna Jonkonnu Stylee as Neo/colonial resistance”) looks at Sistren’s collectively devised production, Ida Revolt inna Jonkonnu Stylee (1985) as a form of “guerilla cultural resistance” in Caribbean performance traditions, deployed to resist devastating economic policies in the 1980s. Through the play’s historical setting and creolized performance form that developed during slavery, “Sistren is using the past to comment, resist and parody new forms of enslavement.”

In her essay, “Nurses’ Engagement with Feminist/Poststructuralist Theory: (Im)Possibility, Fear and Hope,” Sarah Wall discusses the difficulty nurses experience in engaging with the language and assumptions of theory, primarily from a distinct sense that theory is not relevant to their very much hands-on and practice-based profession. In addition, feminist theory “threatens to painfully disrupt an apparently natural and taken-for-granted perspective on social relationships in nurses’ working environments.” Wall argues that nurses need to engage with feminist theory for both survival and change: “giving individual nurses an opportunity to move from what is to what could be.”

We also introduce a new section to our journal in this issue: Dialogues – a non-peer-reviewed section that is selected by invitation only, bringing in discussions from a variety of scholars and activists on feminist theory and feminist culture. For this inaugural session we will offer the first two of these papers: Susan Barbara Boyd on “Contradictions and Challenges in Canadian Family Law,” and Gerry Kilgannon’s “Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT): Giving Senior Women a Voice in British Columbia.”

And do check out Georigia Gaden’s tour through the “Carnival of Feminists” for our Resources section, as well as the two reviews by Natasha Patterson and Jennifer Popple.

We hope that our efforts in redesigning the site and deploying new tools for readers and authors alike will make an even better experience for feminist scholars on both sides of publishing.

As I note above, the main difference I see between the blog and the online journal is the nature of how the content is acquired and vetted, and the potential for direct feedback. Even as we maintain the utility, formality, and authority of the former (with peer review), we seek to expand the possibilities of the latter in our new Comments function for the journal. Registered users can comment upon articles just like we are now accustomed to seeing in a blog (and many online news sites). Please feel free to comment and contribute your thoughts! Signing up as a user is easy if you haven’t done so yet – for more information, see http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/information/readers or hit “Register” above.