Janet Jakobsen, "Introduction: Feminism is Dead (Long Live Feminism)"
(page 3 of 4)

The Scholar and The Feminist XXX

To honor this history at the conference, to celebrate its achievement while remaining honest about the struggle that is social change, was a difficult challenge. We opened the conference with the film by commissioned for the occasion, "Past, Present and Future Feminisms." No single conference, even with a wonderful program like that for S & F XXX could do justice to the complex history of which "The Scholar and The Feminist" is a part. But, with the film we have been able to visualize a real sense of what has happened at the conference over the years and who some of the people are who have made the conference happen. We hired the very talented Rebecca Haimowitz, a film student at Columbia and asked her to talk to a group of people who had been involved in the conference and who lived in New York. (We interviewed only people who lived in New York because we couldn't afford anything more than metrocards for Rebecca). To get a few more young voices, we also interviewed some more recent Barnard alums who had been involved in the life of the Center. We wanted to address not only the history of the conference, but the history of feminism of which the conference has been a part and to which the conference has contributed, and so we asked our participants three questions that follow along with our conference theme of "Past Controversies, Present Challenges and Future Feminisms:"

1. What is the most controversial issue, activity or event in which you've been involved?
2. What is the most important issue facing feminism today?
3. What should we do about that issue? How do we move forward? What do we do?

We invite you to watch the film and see their answers, and in so doing experience (possibly again) some of the excitement with which we opened the day.

We had such a positive response to the film that Rebecca has reformatted it for us here as "Feminism: Controversies, Challenges, Actions." In a separate section, you can also see early architects of "The Scholar and The Feminist," like Susan Reimer Sacks, Nancy K. Miller, Hester Eisenstein, Jane Gould, and Elizabeth Minnich reflect on how the conference came to be and why it has now lasted for three decades. The film is also available to the public on DVD. If you are interested in a copy, please contact the Center by email at bcrw@barnard.edu or phone at 212.854.2067.

Following the theme of looking at the past to assess the present and move into the future, the panels at the conference revisited the themes of several landmark conferences, including "The Future of Difference" (1979), "Class, Race, and Sex," (1980), "Women in Resistance" (1984), "Women as Change Makers: Building and Using Political Power" (1992), "Creating Feminist Work" (1978), "Women in Culture and Politics" (1985), and "Power and Representation in a Media-Saturated Age" (2004). By returning to the fundamental debates of ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and by bringing together both younger and more experienced feminists, we were able to retrace the path of feminism's most pressing concerns and productive strategies, and consider how those concerns and strategies are articulated today.

"Building and Using Political Power: Women Making Change," moderated by Leslie Calman, debated an issue that has been much on people's minds since the 2004 elections: values. Are values always conservative? What is the role of religion vis-à-vis feminism? Do feminists need to promote their own values? Are we better off emphasizing the split between the Republican Party's claims to values and the interests and well-being of most people?

"The Future of Difference: Sex, Race, and Class" also took on the big questions. The panelists discussed the need for vision that could bring us together across differences, one that could address the unresolved issues in feminism. Once again there was lively debate about how we might come together across differences, about what kinds of multi-issue organization were already happening and about what form organizing should take in the future.

The afternoon panel moderated by Temma Kaplan on transnational resistance looked at the wide range of feminist struggles, from the anti-colonial struggle as part of a first wave of feminism in India to women's various movements for disability rights to the effort to replace an economy organized around drugs to one dedicated to young women's empowerment in San Francisco. Each of the panelists challenged us to account honestly for where feminism has been and to ask where and how we might best pursue the future. For example, Heisoo Shin provocatively suggested that the thing that feminists in the U.S. could most do for women around the world was not to direct their work abroad, but rather to work to change the U.S. government. She argued that feminists need to advocate an end to a wide range of policies sponsored by the U.S. that are harming women in many countries every day.

Finally, "Women's Culture," asked what role art plays in feminist struggle and in women's lives. The panelists spoke of the ways in which art can be a connecting point to larger worlds of possibility, a necessary place without which we might very well go mad. Staceyann Chin described the importance of connecting to feminism through the work of artists like Toni Morrison. Dorothy Allison took up this point as well: "[R]eally, what I know about artists is that we all have stories. We all have something vital, necessary - it will kill us, if we don't find a way to express it." And Elaine Kim spoke of the importance of art to cultural possibilities for entire communities of people. If art is crucial to feminism - if it is as Meena Alexander said, "the music of survival," - feminism and other social movements are also crucial for the possibility of art. Allison recounted the importance of early feminist writing groups "where we would read our bad poetry to each other, and every new bad poem was wonderful," while Elaine Kim talked about how the movement for Asian American studies in the academy was crucial to the development of whole bodies of Asian American literature.