This issue of Feminist Studies opens with Michelle Hartman’s call for a translation practice informed by an “ethics of difference.” The essays collected here all expand, explore, and critique this concept in a range of contexts and discourses. “Sameness” appears as the enemy of feminism, even as some of our authors acknowledge the power of identification in much feminist work and feminist history. Hartman argues that lazy Western translators absorb all Arab women into the category of the “oppressed,” while Roshanak Kheshti critiques other kinds of reifying gestures within the emerging field of Iranian gender and sexuality studies. Asha Nadkarni cautions against what she sees as a quasi-eugenic turn in feminist history in which the uncomfortable racial politics of some early US feminists are elided in an unconscious gesture of “cleansing.” David Valentine looks at the naturalization of the non-transsexual body, arguing that failing to see the decision not to transition as a meaningful act is to refuse to fully acknowledge the politics of gender difference. Continuing the theme of body modification, L. Ayu Saraswati asks over forty Indonesian women why they use skin-whitening products and comes up with some surprising answers about women’s feelings about looking “different.” We offer this issue as an attempt to challenge the tyranny of the same and to encourage further exploration of the effects and affect of difference—to use one of the central terms in Naomi Greyser’s review essay on feminism and affect studies.

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Naomi Greyser
Beyond the “Feeling Woman”:
Feminist Implications of Affect Studies (Review Essay)
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L. Ayu Saraswati
“Malu”: Coloring Shame and Shaming the Color of
Beauty in Transnational Indonesia
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Rebecca Jennison
Painting Life Back into History—
Hung Liu’s “Hard-Won” Feminist Art (Art Essay)
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Asha Nadkarni
Reproducing Feminism in Jasmine and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
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Translating Islam

Michelle Hartman
Gender, Genre, and the (Missing) Gazelle:
Arab Women Writers and the Politics of Translation
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Roshanak Kheshti
Can the Memoirist Speak? Representing Iranian Women,
Gender, and Sexuality in Recent Popular
and Scholarly Publications (Review Essay)
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Mohja Kahf
The Girl from Mecca (Short Story)
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Trans and Bi Experience

David Valentine
Sue E. Generous: Toward a Theory of Non-Transexuality
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Joy Ladin
That Australian Smile (Memoir)
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Elizabeth Swados
Bi Bi (Poem)
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Laura Madeline Wiseman
My Imaginary Cock (Series of poems)
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News and Views: Forum on SlutWalk
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Andrea O’Reilly
Slut Pride: A Tribute to SlutWalk Toronto

Hannah Altman
SlutWalk Philadelphia

Durba Mitra
Critical Perspectives on SlutWalks in India

Kathy Miriam
Feminism, Neoliberalism, and SlutWalk

Cover Art:

Hung Liu
Resident Alien, 1988, digitally manipulated from the original, 2012.