Identity, Difference and New Feminisms: Introduction: Winning and Short-Listed Entries for the 2005 Feminist and Women's Studies Association, U.K. Annual Essay Competition

Feminist scholarship continues to have a high currency within and beyond the academy, and for this reason, there remains an unprecedented demand for spaces in which this scholarship can be shared, questioned, and evaluated. The organizers of this year's Feminist and Women's Studies Association's (FWSA) 20th Annual Conference, Feminism and Popular Culture, for example, received almost two hundred abstracts in response to their recent call for papers. Similarly, the New Femininities conference, sponsored by the Economical and Social Research Council, and coordinated by staff at the London School of Economics, filled its delegate quota within a matter of days. This special issue of the Journal of International Women's Studies showcasing new feminist scholarship from across the UK and Ireland provides another such space. The essays that feature here are the winning and short-listed entries for the 2005 FWSA annual essay competition--a competition designed specifically to encourage and give voice to a new generation of academics whose work is anchored in feminist theory and practice. The short-listed essays, which explore issues of gender through reference to areas including international politics, the media, literary fiction, and new technologies, both reflect the interdisciplinary character of the FWSA and testify to the high standard of feminist scholarship that is being produced across these various disciplines. This is nowhere more apparent than in the winning essay, Corinne Fowler's examination of gender and journalistic praxis in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. As in previous years, this special issue goes to print amidst ongoing concerns about the current state of feminism and women's studies, both within and beyond the academy. Article after article suggests that young women are disillusioned by, or simply apathetic about, the concerns and objectives that structure feminist theory and practice. This disillusionment, if it exists, is not evident here. Rather, these essays demonstrate the enthusiasm and rigour with which new scholars continue to engage with the principles, politics, and problematics of feminist thought; furthermore, they gesture towards the ways in which the discursive parameters of feminism might be extended to take account of the impact of new technologies upon the role and representation of gender within contemporary cultures. The Essays While the essays reproduced here accurately reflect the diverse face of feminism in the early years of the twenty-first century, they are nonetheless striated by some common concerns--concerns that swirl around the convergence of gender with issues of race, religion, sexuality, new technologies and, most overwhelmingly, representation. The winning entry, Corinne Fowler's 'Journalists in Feminist Clothing: Men and Women Reporting Afghan Women during Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001', productively reconsiders the contemporary cultural significance of the burqua alongside its representation in the Western media. Taking into account the complex and dynamic interaction between global politics and gender politics, Fowler examines the ways in which the burqua has come to function within certain sections of the media as an unambiguous symbol of female oppression. While foregrounding the centrality of the burqua to the rhetoric of liberation that has been used to justify the presence of U.S. and U.K. forces in Afghanistan, Fowler usefully complicates conventional readings of this controversial garment and the women who wear it. Like Fowler's work, Alexandra Murphy's essay, 'The Missing Rhetoric of Gender in Responses to Abu Ghraib', is inspired by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and, more specifically, how this conflict and its various consequences have been mediated to Western audiences. …