The Scholar and The Feminist Online
This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, our first double issue, carries forward the conversation from the conference. The best way we could approach the project was to provide as many different angles of vision on the conference as possible. The new medium of the webjournal has proven particularly helpful because it has allowed us to use multiple media – words, photos, and video – to convey the past controversies, present challenges, and future possibilities that the conference addressed.
By perusing the journal, you can read the full transcripts from this year’s anniversary conference and watch video clips of each of the speakers so that you can get a sense of the power and the passion with which they spoke. You can also read the entire set of programs from thirty years of the conference and then link to an archive of sample papers actually presented at the conference. If video is more your style, you can access the central questions of the conference by watching our film by Rebecca Haimowitz. To extend the visual record of the conference we have also provided a photo archive of the conference in slide show format. You can look through photographs of the conference taken between 1974 and 1981. These photos give a palpable sense of the excitement, diversity and ardor that the conference has engendered. Finally, one of the most important effects of the conference over its first decade was the publication of breakthrough texts like The Future of Difference (1980) and Sex, Race, and Class: The Dynamics of Control (1980). The Future of Difference remains in print some 25 years later – a testament to the impact of the book – but Sex, Race, and Class, an equally important breakthrough text, is no longer easily available. Here, we are able to provide the entire book online. This book, based on the seventh and eighth conferences, shows how quickly and actively the conference took up the most cutting edge issues of the day, as sex, race, and class became the watchwords of both feminist theory and practice through the 1980s and beyond.
Each of the panels took on the major questions about feminism’s past, its present and its possible futures. While all agreed that these are exceptionally conservative times, it’s clear that feminism is alive and well. The current moment might even represent a critical juncture. As Staceyann Chin asked, both playfully and seriously, “And now [feminism is] kind of 30 or 40 years old, it’s kind of grown up. The boobs are sagging a little bit. What are we going to do with it now?”
And this question – what are we going to do with it now? – is the one that we all face. If the feminism that the press continues to seek – the single-issue, single-minded and homogeneous movement that supposedly once existed – cannot be found, perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps the death of this feminism, the one that lived and died in the imagination of the mainstream press, opens room for other types of feminism, other activities, new movements. The 30th anniversary conference, which looked both backward and forward, is part of a multifaceted feminism that attends to the past while looking to the future – a future that might shift our understanding of the past. Minnie Bruce Pratt suggested, for example, that we shift away from the metaphors of waves and generations, which imply homogeneous cohorts that follow one another in a direct fashion, do not do justice to the complexity of feminism. Such an imagination seems to virtually guarantee conflict as generations gap and waves crash into one another. In other words, the imagination of a single, linear movement produces a sense of feminism in constant crisis. Instead, Pratt uses the metaphor of streams of action to describe feminism, multiple movements happening simultaneously that can flow into one another or diverge at various points, which move toward an open future of feminist possibility.
The proclamation, “the king is dead, long live the king,” announced that regardless of the death of an individual monarch, the monarchy continued uninterrupted. Perhaps the same is true of feminism: regardless of the death of any individual form of feminism, the project of creating a more just and equitable world is hardly at an end. Many more feminisms than those we record here may come and go before this project is complete. So, in the end maybe feminism is dead. Long live feminism.
