Introduction

Dear Readers,

Frontiers has moved into the twenty-first century. We are in Facebook, and we invite you to visit us there and become our Facebook friends. You can participate in our Facebook discussion board, post a message, or read our announcements. You’ll learn that we have two upcoming special issues: “Women’s Clubs at Home and in the World,” with guest editors Karen Blair and Gayle Gullett, and “Gender and the City,” guest-edited by Maureen A. Flanagan and Maryann Valiulis. If you’re not ready to try Facebook but you want up-to-date news on all Frontiers events, then please go to our website, http://www.asu.edu/clas/asuhistory/frontiers/index.html .

We are proud of our special issues and equally pleased with our general issues, such as this one. A general issue, by definition, is filled with pieces that aren’t necessarily related by theme. But we, coeditors Gayle Gullett and Susan Gray, have developed a tradition of finding a common thread that ties together, even if loosely, the diverse collection of scholarly articles and creative works that makes a general issue. For this issue, that common thread is the fluidity and complexity of identities: those that subjects create, those we assign to others, and those that are some mixture of both.

The first three articles of this issue share an interest in the relationship between place and identity; moreover, all three are interested in places in the Middle East and North Africa. The first two essays share yet another focus; they study the complex connections among identity, travel, and texts. Diya M. Abdo examines a “migrating” text—the autobiography of Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid, which she wrote in Arabic in 1993 and translated into English for an American edition in 1998. Abdo contends that both the text and the perceptions of the author’s identity were transformed by the text’s translation. Patricia O’Neill demonstrates how Amelia Edwards, a late nineteenth-century British writer and Egyptologist, used her travel writing, most famously about Egypt, to reconstruct her identity and her culture’s understanding of another country. Sabrina Joseph examines how Egyptian films in the latter part of the twentieth century created representations of women that reflected and shaped the country’s conflicted understandings of modernity. Although Joseph does not highlight agency as do the first two authors, she shares with them an interest in how books or films are shaped by their creators’ beliefs about how they will be received by certain audiences. Women may construct new identities for themselves as writers and travelers or be represented in new ways as modern women, yet those identities and representations are never completely new or innocent of strategic designs.

This issue contains two other scholarly articles, both concerned with political and politicized identities. Kendra B. Stewart and Sara L. Zeigler argue that women refugees and asylum-seekers who want to enter the United States are greatly disadvantaged compared to men because American policy is written and interpreted in ways that systematically disadvantage women. Carisa Showden turns a critical eye toward two new types of feminism, “new feminisms” and “third-wave feminism,” contending that interrogating them will reveal much about recent contests over the meaning of feminism. Both articles draw much of their power from their reconstruction of the standpoints of those they study. As a result, whether readers reconsider American asylum policy through the experiences of women refugees, or feminist thought through the arguments of those angered by older feminist positions, they will emerge with enriched understandings of how groups create or understand their identities, or contest identities imposed upon them.

This general issue is particularly rich with creative works of different kinds, boasting photography, poetry, and a short story. All ask questions about identity; the answers are tied to our senses and emotions. Photographer Laura Heyman, in her work “The Photographer’s Wife,” presents photos that she took while pretending to be a husband photographer and for which she poses, pretending to be his wife. Her visual images push us to question who and what we see and why. In Rhonda Poynter’s...