Miriam, Samhita, Jess, and I are headed to Hotlanta tomorrow for the National Women's Studies Association's annual conference. We look forward to meeting readers there for the first time and reuniting with old friends. (And pretty please, if any community posters are there and get to see Angela Davis' keynote tonight, please write about it. We were all dying to see it but couldn't get out in time.)
Anyways, we're doing a panel on bringing off line and on line feminisms more, well, in line. I thought I'd throw an excerpt of the abstract up here and see if anyone had any thoughts/questions for us as we head into our lil' talk:
There is no question that the internet is one of the most vital sites of feminism activism today, but too often the women's studies classroom feels separate from, at best, and alienated from, at worst, this valuable resource. Some academics may not be familiar with the terrain of feminist blogs and intimidated by learning the language and customs associated with them. Some may have had a taste and decided that contemporary feminism needs more, not less, grounding in theory and history.Many bloggers, for their part, have turned to the internet as a medium in direct opposition to what feels like an academic discipline that increasingly falls into the same traps of inaccessible language and unnecessary bureaucracy as its patriarchal counterparts in the university system.
So how do we bridge the divide? It is our conviction that the feminism's very survival depends on the interplay between the academics that train young women and men to be critical thinkers about gender and power, and the bloggers that continue to engage them in grassroots movements and continued analysis of this half-changed world. And of course, many of us are both in the same body--professors and bloggers, academics and activists, theorists and artists. How do we bridge the sometimes largest gap of all--that within ourselves?
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I'm so glad that you're talking about this at the conference. I co-edit the feminist blog at Princeton (Equal Writes - www.equalwrites.org), and I blog separately for another site, mostly about feminism, and I definitely try to bring the online feminist discourse into my gender studies classes - with mixed success. Some of my professors are really fantastic - they read the blog and think it's great - but others don't seem to see the significance of what's happening since the discourse is taking place in more informal language and it's much more topical. I'm actually in the middle of trying to make a class on contemporary feminism - NOT contemporary feminist theory - happen for next semester (the awesome Melissa Harris-Lacewell might teach it - fingers crossed!), but it's been difficult even to envision the reading list, since most academics, even though the ones who appreciate the online conversation don't feel that it has the "academic rigor" necessary for the classroom. We've suggested Jessica and Courtney's books for the reading list, but even they may not be jargon-y or theoretical enough to make the cut - even though I feel that any class on contemporary feminism has to include the Feministing writers :)
So please keep us posted on what happens at the conference! This is something I definitely struggle with at my school, and within my own writing. How DO we bridge that divide? It's definitely something we should be talking about, and something that I wish academics would take more seriously.
- Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
I'm attending this conference and am so excited for your talk!
I will be at the Angela Davis Keynote tonight and can't wait to see her in person! Also, I am really glad you all made a point to connect with Charis Bookstore here in Atlanta to come by and talk about "Yes Means Yes."
Charis is such a central part of the feminist community here and they just celebrated 35 years of being a locally owned, independent, feminist bookstore. They had Alice Walker, Gloria Steinam, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and many others to bring in the celebration...and now, a week later, my favorite bloggers will be there! Yay!
For starters, it requires open minds all the way around. Blogging has a bit of a dodgy connotation to it, largely as a result of the mainstream media, which hypocritically defines it as a bunch of amateurs spouting tripe while grabbing ideas from it. The media feels understandably threatened and lashes back, which is something academics need to avoid themselves when they take into account the world of the blogsophere.
Disciplines quickly calcify and after a time, the comfort of inertia leads to a kind of willful desire for no one to rock the boat. But if higher education wants to stay current, it is really going to have to modify its stance and its function. For one, it will have to realize that ideas and concepts need to be written to be read by a lay audience and that doing so doesn't mean that intellectual value is somehow sacrificed in the process. Many academics simply don't know how to write, nor how to live in a world of practical application.
Ultimately, what it takes is confronting the elephant in the room and always calling out the metaphorical emperor who has no clothes on.