newsletter fall 2001

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Susan McCabe: Everyone is very pleased that you are directing the Center for Feminist Research. Could you talk about what attracted you to the position?

Alice Gambrell: Last spring, I was asked to take over as acting director for the 2001-02 year, after Hilary Schor received her Guggenheim. I was very excited by the prospect. In the last ten years I haven't been as involved as I would have liked with Gender Studies; it's pretty much part of the job description for feminist faculty that we are constantly being pulled in many different directions at once. Besides my "home" duties in the English department, for example, I've taught cross-listed courses for Gender Studies and for American Studies; I've taught as well in TO, and increasingly (as you know) all of us in LAS have been doing a lot of work teaching courses in the GE program. What particularly interested me about CFR was that it has such a fluid relationship to existing departments, programs, and schools; it's a place where we can make cross-departmental connections without being burdened by the practical concerns that can arise, for example, when we try to teach courses or develop minors that straddle programs or schools. Hilary did a great job over the last two years solidifying CFR's relationship with the Law School, the Health Sciences Campus, and a whole range of other far-flung formations. One thing that I hope we can accomplish this year is to figure out some more creative ways of doing more work in tandem with American Studies where so many faculty are doing really wonderful work on gender.

SM: How does your own research dovetail with the interests of the Center?

AG: A lot of my research has actually been about this whole issue of women intellectuals and their tendency -- enforced or voluntary -- to be involved in many things at once: multi-tasking, double-shifting, or whatever you want to call it. Even though my scholarship has dealt with anthropologists, visual artists, literary writers, psychoanalysts, and others, I don't really think of my own work as "interdisciplinary," as your work on cinema and literature very definately is. Intead, I've been concerned with the broader question of why so often women intellectuals have found themselves working in the spaces of overlap between traditional disciplines, rather than staking out territory within this or that existing discipline. For many of the women I've worked on, this was a matter of necessity -- due to lack of full-time faculty appointments, or other more subtle or overt forms of marginalization. Still, a tremendous amount of pathbreaking work has been a product of interdisciplinary multi-tasking: for example, Zora Neale Hurston's experimental ethnographies from the 1930s. I think one of our biggest challenges at CFR is figuring out how to continue to appeal to an audience that is (almost by definition) overburdened or stretched thin. Every time I book an event, I feel a keen responsibility to make it into something that will be worth the valuable time of some gender studies scholar out there who has a thousand other things to do! For example, I've been thinking that if we start serving cheesecake at all our events we might be able to sustain a very high level of audience loyalty.

SM: I don't think you need to serve cheesecake... But seriously I understand your concern about overburdened feminist scholars. This is one of the great features of CFR -- it makes a place for precisely what you are referring to as "working in the spaces of overlap." The first luncheon (by the way quite well-attended) addressed some of these spaces in terms of diversity. Do you envision CFR as an in-between space where feminists can readdress some issues of diversity in hiring and promotion?

AG: Barbara Solomon's talk about faculty diversity was so important. I'm very grateful that it was so well-attended, because I don't think there's any issue more central to the qualityof intellectual life around here. The percentages of women faculty at USC from underepresented minorities are abysmally low, but I think that what many of us took away from Solomon's talk was a sense that substantive, positive change can occur in this and in related areas. The size of that audience sent a strong message that concern about faculty diversity is widely and keenly felt here; we went through three room changes trying to accomodate everyone who wanted to attend the talk! Barbara made it very clear that her office will provide support and guidance to departments in their efforts to diversify the ranks. But she made it just as clear that departments and programs will have to demonstrate a high degree of initiative in all of this. So I was particularly happy that the audience participated so energetically in the Q&A that followed her talk .This confirmed my sense of how much we can benefit from sharing strategies and stories about what kinds of hiring and retention efforts have worked in the past or might work in the future.

AG: Because of the feedback we received before and after Barbara's talk, we will be devoting further evennnts to the topic of faculty diversity . We've also got a couple of lunch series underway. The first is our traditional "faculty research" series, which has had or will have USC faculty speakers, from History, English, Law, American Studies, and Anthropology, along with a handful of outside speakers like LA fiction-writer Francesca Lia Block. CFR's assistant director Nikki Senecal has also put together a new series titled "Gender and Race After 9.11," which is just getting underway; Nikki has booked speakers on a number of topics including U.S. immigration law and women's resistance movements in Afghanistan, and preliminary response has been very strong. And of course Susan you are in charge of our spring converence, where we will be inviting speakers, artists, and performers from a number of disciplines to talk about feminism and the "new ethnography." I'm also very excited by Tara McPherson's efforts to transform CFR's bare-bones website; this project is just getting underway, but Tara has lots of great ideas about how to make the site more useable and dynamic, to CFR a much stronger online presence.

SM: Yes. All of these activities sound tremendously exciting. And I love how you are making diversity so central to our feminist practices...On that note I wondered if you could describe your sense of how feminism has evolved for you personally and in the academy in the last fifteen years or so. I know this is a large question, but I'm curious to hear your general perspective of this very complicated trajectory.

AG: I don't know that I'd say feminism has "evolved" so much as it has cycled back again and again to key questions and concerns that get differently inflected each time around, as new circumstances unfold. I'm at the early stages of a project on U.S. women working in the publishing trades between the 1940s and 1960s -- secretaries, copy editors, editors, and so on -- and recently have had to read a fair number of "women's pages" published in community newspapers around mid-century. It's amazing how contemporary some of this stuff seems: female consumption gets looked at in all sorts of complicated ways, as do questions about women in the workplace, women in familial or erotic relationships, women vis-a-vis categories of class and race, women's political activism. As academics we're under constant pressure to break new ground. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but by now we've got a long, varied history of feminist thought -- much of it grass-roots, much of it out of print -- that still needs to be parsed very carefully. I've been delighted to see a lot of work coming out recently (memoirs, anthologies, reprints, etc.) that attempts to bring some of this older material back into the discussion. One of the most important results of this is that the scholarly record now reflects much more clearly the cultural diversity of U.S. feminism throughout the twentieth century. And I've been indebted to a number of scholars -- including some of my own colleagues at USC -- who've always insisted on paying close attention to the relatively recent past.

SM: One more question. I know you have been deeply interested in cyberspace as a confluence or meeting-place of multiple disciplines. And since we happen to be conducting this interview by e-mail, I am curious to know how you see the new technologies in relation to your work and to your experience of gender studies.

AG: It's funny: two years ago a couple of graduate students -- Alex Vittes and Rachel Levin -- gave a presentation on gender and digital technology in one of my seminars, and at that point I didn't even know what a "cookie" was! I loved gadgets and playing with them, I liked making things with computers, and like everyone else I was endlessly fascinated by the explosion of the internet, but my interest was recreational and I hadn't yet thought about connecting it to my own scholarship. Because my research at the time was taking me into the fabulous field of office technology -- the history of typewriters, Dictaphones, and so on -- I had a ready-made excuse to pursue the topic, and I took advantage of it. At this point I still have a lot to learn, both in terms of skill-building and in terms of doing a lot more reading in the history and theory of the medium. Fortunately this gives me a lot a pleasure, and I've found it invaluable in the classroom. I've been incorporating material on gender and digital technology into my ARLT course on "girlhood," and I try to give it space in my graduate classes whenever I am able; I'm also working up a course that deals with gender and "writing machines." And I've been grateful to colleagues -- Tara McPherson, Marcia Kinder, Bob Dilligan -- whose longtime expertise has been so inspiring to many of us "humanities" types.