Editor's Note

I was trying to find an apt phrase for this moment of passing the torch. “Pay it forward,” I thought, means to hand something on to the next generation. But, as it turns out, paying it forward is not quite so familial. Rather, it reaches beyond the domestic to the civic: it means asking the person for whom you are doing a good deed to do the same for someone else sometime. So perhaps I mean this: one day those who are, with this first issue of Volume 13, newly charged with editing Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) will have the same good fortune as I, to deliver it into trustworthy hands.

After 6 years of editing this journal, I think it's time for new ideas, new ways of working, new hands on the wheel. And so I am going to kick myself upstairs. There I will dust off an old title newly retrieved for the occasion. “Editor-in-Chief” sounds a bit pretentious but here is intended to connote the consultative and oversight role I will be assigning myself. The power to accept and reject; the responsibility to review, communicate and edit; the opportunity to initiate projects; in short, the everyday work of editing a journal—these will belong to the four new Co-Editors who have accepted my invitation: Katie Gentile, Martha Hadley, Stephen Hartman, and Eyal Rozmarin.

All have published in SGS, and I have worked with them in many other ways too. You will recognize Martha Hadley, Ph.D., from her role as Executive Editor since 2006. She and I have consulted on countless projects, and she has also chaired and overseen the Symonds Prize, a responsibility that will continue to be hers. The others, all Contributing Editors, have diversely advanced the journal's work: they have provided original essays, written discussions, and initiated symposia or overseen them or crafted introductions to them. They have reviewed submissions and put their minds to the nitty-gritty of the editing process. They are ready now to take on the whole thing.

Let me introduce the new Co-Editors by portray