newsletter fall 2001

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director's letter

A good bit of my current research involves sifting through women’s print ephemera from the last seventy years or so, in order to determine as best I can the kinds of collaborative labor that went into their making. Even the most individualistic punk fanzines, founded on a do-it-yourself ethic that often seems to exclude the possibility of group effort, tend to include all sorts of “found” materials –- clippings, drawings, stickers -- that point toward an ideal of communal or collective authorship. At the other end of the distribution scale, trade books and glossy magazines manage to be at once obviously and invisibly the products of many hands and minds. Part of what I’ve been trying to accomplish with this research is to make that sort of labor as visible as I’m able to.

In recent years, as such, something that has struck me as particularly silly and contemptable has been the genre of the Martha Stewart-style “editor’s note,” written at the last minute by someone who clearly has had very little to do with the making of the text, but who drops in quickly, late in the process, in order to imprint it with his or her signature. Stewart’s nostalgic, widely parodied musings on the household rituals of her youth are contained in the “Remembering” column that caps each month’s edition of Martha Stewart Living magazine. These are probably the best-known contemporary examples of the long tradition of the “editor’s note,” which to my mind serves chiefly in order to obscure the skill-intensive and low-prestige work – often performed by women staffers – entailed in the making and distribution, not to mention the writing, of any published text. And Stewart’s example is hardly the most egregious I can think of: at least we know that Martha works hard! With her homemade ketchup, her handmade shadow-portraits, and her twenty-hour days, she’s a leading post-punk proponent of doing it oneself, even if we can be reasonably certain that she’s not the one who is busy each month sowing flowers in the gardens of her several gracious homes.

More often, the “editor’s note” brings to my mind Kay Thompson’s fashion-editor character from the 1957 film Funny Face, who sweeps through the offices of Quality magazine wielding an enormous pair of scissors, scattering staffers in all directions, uttering strange, oracular imperatives (“think pink!”) that because of her position are treated with a seriousness utterly unrelated to their content. Still, Quality magazine is a huge success in the fictional world of Funny Face, mostly because said staffers manage to gather together in her wake in order to accomplish some real thinking, to get some brain-work done. So, keeping all of this in mind, I hope you will understand that it is with some trepidation that I offer you this, the first of two “director’s letters” that I have been asked to contribute to the CFR newsletter during my year as acting director of the Center!

I introduce myself to you in this roundabout way largely in order to highlight the enormity of the task performed each semester by Nikki Senecal, the Center’s Assistant Director, for whom the production of this newsletter is just one from among a daunting range of tasks that she performs with great sensitivity, imagination, and feminist wit. I have watched with interest the transformation of the newsletter over time, and have admired its increasingly dynamic mix of detailed local information and broad-based scholarly debate. Under Senecal’s editorship, the newsletter has maintained its long tradition of keeping CFR members informed about activities sponsored by the Center itself. Over the last two years, however, Senecal has also turned the newsletter into a flexible, informal venue where local gender studies scholars and culture-workers can take their ideas out in public for the first time, in the context of interviews, travel reports, research diaries, editorials, and the like. Thanks to Senecal, feminist researchers at USC have found a periodic meeting place, when we are more commonly accustomed to being scattered across the campuses in a whole range of schools, departments, and programs.

With the remainder of this letter, I will try to follow Senecal’s example in a couple of ways: first, by mixing local, institutional concerns with broader scholarly speculation, and second, by shifting slightly away from CFR tradition while maintaining continuity with its past. In this present issue, as such, I will depart from certain key emphases of the “director’s letters” of the last two years, in that I will not spend the bulk of my time defending “feminism” or “feminist research” against their many detractors. That task has been performed with courage and clarity in these pages by my predecessors, who have made elegant, eloquent arguments about the continuing utility (indeed, the real necessity) of these intertwined scholarly and political projects, arguments with which I concur in all their most important aspects. However, when feminist scholarship gets pitted against its various opponents – and these range from media commentators on the right to broader national trends towards academic-institutional downsizing – what tends to receive less focussed attention is the long history of productive internal conflict, diversity, and self-critique that has been so crucial to the development of feminist scholarly and political work in the United States and elsewhere. In order briefly to underscore this, I want to touch on a small cluster of key issues that have arisen in the recent history of U.S. feminist scholarship.

You never really know about these things, but I don’t actually think I had Stewart’s “Remembering” column on the brain several years ago when I wrote an essay called “Remembering Women’s Studies,” an essay in which I was concerned, most of all, to demonstrate how certain embedded ways of thinking about the historical development of feminist literary theory had made it appear, quite erroneously, that African-American women intellectuals were relative newcomers to U.S.-based debates about gender and representation, only entering the conversation belatedly, during the early 1980s, in order to address the unexamined, monolithic whiteness of the figure of “woman” which had purportedly been so central to second-wave feminism. In that context I was writing about very local, discipline-bound preoccupations of historians of literary theory, but what I hoped to show more broadly was that for many prior decades, women intellectuals of color had been working to complicate U.S. debates about gender, representation, and social justice in ways that white women were frequently aware of but seldom acknowledged explicitly, for reasons variously enforced or voluntary. I felt that neither side of the seductive black/white polarity had been treated quite adequately, and tried to disclose in each one complexities that tended at times to be overlooked. I was able to make this argument, I’m happy to say, because over the course of the last decade, far more careful attention had been paid by scholars than before to the “intersectional” histories of varieties of feminist thought, and as a result the historical record had been considerably complicated. We now have available to us documents from and accounts of an overlapping and energetic range of feminisms – easily eclipsing the white, heterosexual, middle-class norm so often assigned to the late 1960s -- that stretches well back to the banner years of the Second Wave, and beyond.

What remains challenging, however, is figuring out how to make room for this same kind of overlap and internal variation within an academic context in which fields like “post-colonial studies,” “feminist studies,” “queer studies,” “critical race theory,” “American studies,” and others, tend to be institutionally divided from each other. I think that these sorts of divisions serve many valuable purposes; as I noted before, for example, I think it matters a great deal that specific space be reserved in the university for feminist scholarship, and I feel the same way about other, contiguous areas of inquiry. At the same time, however, it is rare indeed to find a scholar in any one of the aforementioned fields whose work does not contain within itself profound engagement among many, if not all, of them. Add to this the fact that scholars working in these areas tend to face large administrative burdens and teaching and advising demands, and it becomes clear that we will need to be extraordinarily creative as we attempt to devise methods with which to encourage interaction, exchange, mutual interrogation, and self-reflexivity. My primary commitment during my year at CFR is to foster this sort of dialogue.

In the preceding paragraph, I did not say anything that hasn’t been said before, and often, by a broad range of committed intellectuals and culture-workers, in many, diverse contexts. I do think it matters, however, that these things be said here, in a venue most commonly devoted to the defense of feminist scholarship as a project deserving of its own, particular space. Spaces of overlap, I believe, are every bit as important as dedicated home turf. I probably won’t be turning to Martha Stewart’s example in order to hone my “homekeeping” skills (as she puts it); I have neither the time, the talent, nor the budget to match Martha’s enviable hostessing achievements, and at any rate Gloria Orenstein’s more fluid, flexible, and open-ended model of the “salon” as a meeting-place for ever-shifting collectives is much more appealing to me. But I invite you in nonetheless, in order to contribute your ideas and to communicate your wants and needs to me, and I will work hard while I’m here to make you feel welcome.

--Alice Gambrell