newsletter spring 2002

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Both issues of the 2001-02 CFR newsletter are now available online—accessible through a link on our newly redesigned website. At CFR we also envision as a long-term project an electronic archive of back issues of the newsletter, so that documents from one portion of the recent history of feminist activity at USC will be far more readily available to you than they have been in the past. Part of the challenge of this project will be to persuade our audiences that the electronic newsletter can serve as a convenient, accessible resource for USC’s various feminist communities. While we will continue with our usual fanfare to release the print newsletter at the end of each semester, the electronic version will, from now on, be available to you whenever you need it.

Now that the new site is up, we are attempting to develop further strategies for making both the newsletter and the main site into rich, dynamic, and flexible venues for the storage and (more important) the exchange of information. We are currently considering many different options: an open bulletin board for online postings and cross-talk among participants; a weblog for the instant recording of information by Gender Studies staff, students, and faculty; at some more distant point in the future (pending equipment requests) we hope to develop an archive of audiocasts of our public events. In the Fall 2001 issue of the newsletter I mentioned some of the challenges faced by those of us who are presently attempting to draw connections among the far-flung, diverse, and interdisciplinary range of scholars and culture-workers who comprise the feminist community at USC. At CFR we are regarding the new website as an important place for addressing those challenges. Constraints of budget, space, and time will make this a lengthy and open-ended effort. Equally important to us, however, will be our efforts to convince you that this is a site worth visiting not just occasionally, but regularly.

I invite you to take a look at the new site. Animator Katalin Nivelt’s witty, elegant design draws together an international range of visual and verbal traditions–from popular animation, to work by contemporary Pacific Rim painters and digital artists, to recent grassroots and academic feminist debates about the construction of gender and race within and against the milieu of contemporary consumer culture. Nivelt’s design gestures in clear ways towards pop-cultural materials that form the basis for the research and pedagogy of so many of our affiliated faculty, and it does so in a way that is simultaneously serious and fun. The site’s navigational elements, for example, consist of a series of animated faces: some identifiably female, some androgynous; some conventionally charming, many of them spikier and more idiosyncratic than that. At first the faces appear to be sleeping, but they ‘wake up’ at the touch of a cursor. These, however, are no passive sleeping beauties awakened by a prince’s kiss; instead they’re deadpan and quirky, and the cursor to which they respond is, in all likelihood, being wielded by a feminist observer.

Tara McPherson oversaw the project during lively meetings in the Fall of 2001, bringing her long-term expertise to bear upon our present efforts and also upon our plans for the future. Nikki Senecal (CFR’s program coordinator, who for the last two years has hand-coded our site), Jacqueline Samols (a CFR Steering Committee member and degree candidate in Communications), and Gender Studies Chair Nancy Lutkehaus also contributed enormously to the process. Finally, the unflappable Kati Nivelt, whose technical and design prowess are now on display, managed to sift through an avalanche of suggestions (for example, “it needs to be simple, but it also needs to be complicated!”) that would have overwhelmed just about anyone else. We hope that you enjoy the site and that you will find it useable, worth returning to, and worth discussing. We also hope that you will link it to your own.

--Alice Gambrell