Judith Butler wrote, “Gender is not passively scripted on the body.” Nothing about gender is passive, and nor was the emergence of gender as the theme for the fourth issue of M E N A C E. We didn’t set out to make this issue about gender, but as we were looking over the pieces we’d accepted for this issue, gender leapt out and bit us on the neck. 

The pieces in this issue overwhelmingly speak to the experience of minority genders. Avril Shakira Villa’s essay “Gore, Grace, and the Women” meticulously dissects the various strands at work in the experience of girlhood as a girl of color, specifically a Filipina—and becomes a manifesto for our work here at M E N A C E. The relationships between girls and between femmes appear again and again, in Stephanie Burt’s “CLOVE CIGARETTES,” Gavriella Gilbert’s “estrie,” Heather Kamins’ “Queen of the Dead Girls,” and Erin Hoskins’s “Devotion Theory.” Here, gender itself can be the horror—as in Teesta Roychoudhury’s suffocating yet form-breaking “Abhuman” and Calista Hennie’s gut-punch poem “Host.” But it can also be an epiphany. A secondary theme of this issue is transformation; it undulates with changing shapes, forms, and names. Consider Julian Jaffe’s murky “SHAPESHIFTER,” mk zariel’s trans nature poem “rewilding,” and Ares J. Benoit’s speculative poem “The mottled blue-skinned forest girl.” Consider the ambiguously gendered and dynamic body of Sara Guedhi’s “regularity and angularity,” the werewolf drag queens in Kelli Trapnell’s “Slay,” and the arc of “A Live-Oak Growing,” Birch Wiley’s trans horror story. Gender and the categories associated with it can be things that are imposed upon us, but these can also be things we “retake or refuse.” And in this issue, when characters are targeted for their gender or gender nonconformity, they also—as in Isaiah Acevedo’s “Vendor/Fruit/Eduardo” and Esther Alter’s “Federal Facility for Transgender Individuals, Allston, Massachusetts”—fight back. We have always thought of M E N A C E as the home for the “literary weird” and especially the speculative because of its power to imagine possibilities outside of the disciplining and oppressing structures in which we live. In this sense, might we also think of speculative in the sense of imagining new or newly empowered genders? We hope so.

Of course, the horrors persist. This issue of M E N A C E, like issues past, also contains pieces that engage with our ongoing apocalypse. Abhinav’s “Eternity” and Darren Demaree’s “All All #63” both gesture towards the horrors of war and genocide. A woman cowers and possibly despairs in Viviana De Cecco’s “Fear.” The threat of ICE hangs in the air in c. rivera’s “The Hanged One.” And Rowen Trombo’s “Flood” seems in almost direct conversation with the flooded post-apocalyptic world we enter in Gordon Brown’s story, “The End of Everything Blues.” But the horrors are also more intimate, as in B. Garden’s dark superhero story “Higher” and in Emma Burger’s cancer poem “descendant.” Faced with all of this, it’s hard not to be seduced by the abyss—as is the speaker of Stephanie Valente’s gorgeous hybrid, “Get In, Lover.” 

But ultimately, we hope you agree with us that this issue does not give into despair. Transformation can be death, including the death of a world, but it can also be resurrection, as in Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece’s “The Witness in the Night.” And for those wondering “what to do, now, with their hands,” we suggest acts of devotion. Hold the ones you love close, care for your community, care for your planet. We choose to share the sentiment in Tabs’ poem “Nematoda” that, in the end, doing so will not be “a waste at all.”