Share Feminism/s, how?

REFLEXIVITY IN WOMEN’S STUDIES: SOLIDARITY IN RESISTANCE, FLEXIBILITY IN BUILDING



Tuesday 20 Nov – Share Feminism/s, how? with whom? with what care?
•    rereading Zandt as lens on all the other books
•    how to do learning analysis
What does Zandt have to teach us about the issues raised in the other books that we might have missed if we hadn’t read her work?

=== LEARNING ANALYSIS for Feminist Re Conceptualizations ===

Thursday 1 Dec – Intersectionality as Boundary Object, meaning different things to different feminisms?
•    finishing up and rereading Berger as lens on all the other books; read stuff you missed or reread the stuff that has become a touchstone for you; be able to say why and how.
How do different feminisms use intersectionality to share their urgent projects and their hopes for feminism?

lumping and splitting 
connection to boundary objects? 

Perry model of intellectual development   
in addition to its importance as a developmental schema for the adult learning processes of discrete individuals, what about these intellectual, psychological, psychic features as elements dynamically shifting back and forth, for example, when
• individuals and groups are under great stress 
• are confronted by new elements in shifting contexts
• enter into a new arena of knowledge or practice
• are forced into positions by polarization 
• are "converted" to new and strong epistemologies 
• are using shorthand versions of complexities for clarity
• are responding to urgent conditions requiring strong action

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MAKE A POINT OF THIS! CONNECTS TO HEWITT! 
Reading,  Conversation, and Reception with
Florence Howe on Monday December 5 at 3:00 in Taliaferro 1126.

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Our field comes to life, passions in workshop mode!

Tuesday 15 Nov – WORKSHOP #2 – Dynamics in Our Field of Women’s Studies
Today we will share our work poster session style: divide in two groups, and all move around talking to each other about work during the class time. 



•    Workshop 2: Dynamics in Our Field

For our second workshop you will create either a paper or poster (which determined by lot) in order to explore how feminists remember, participate in, and analyze the dynamics in our field of women’s studies. 

What is its history? What ways of analyzing power are best? How do particular disciplines locate the central concerns of women’s studies? How do feminist scholars share the work they do? 

You will explore two class texts carefully, and chose EITHER • to analyze Hewitt’s book through the analysis (eyes, lens) of Berger’s The Intersectional Approach OR • to analyze Berger’s book through the analysis (eyes, lens) of Hewitt’s No Permanent Waves 

• Berger’s collection demonstrates paradigm shifts in our field. NOTICE that it explores how to think THROUGH feminisms ABOUT feminisms. 

• Hewitt’s book demonstrates that history doesn’t stand still. NOTICE and ask, why do we keep remaking our feminist pasts? 

No matter which of these approaches you take, also NOTICE that you will need to do some additional research. You will need to use the web to follow-up or look in greater detail at the kinds of feminisms displayed here, other ways of thinking about histories of feminism, and ways all of these are promoted in popular and scholarly media. Always make a point of connecting projects to class readings and lectures.

Thursday 17 Nov – WORKSHOP #2 – Talking about it all 
•    LOGBOOK 3 DUE along with either paper and handout or digital picture of poster, after presentations
Today we will have a conversation about what we learned, noticed, thought about, and draw from the last class presentations. 

Tuesday 22 Nov – NO CLASS: THANKSGIVING WEEK
Thursday 24 Nov – NO CLASS: HAPPY THANKSGIVING 

Waving at each other: seeing through others' eyes, the next workshop

We can look at feminist histories through the eyes of different ways of understanding intersectionality; and we can look at how and why intersectionalities might differ through the eyes of feminist histories, generations, political agendas, and assumptions about what is better than what else.... 

Tuesday 8 Nov – Agendas, Activisms, Relocations
•    Hewitt: Part III: pick 3 of 5
Look through all of these enough to compare them all somewhat, then become an expert on the ones you choose. How do these projects each in their own specific way contribute to the epistemological project of the whole book? How can you tell?

=Brainstorming all the differences we can grasp. What contexts do they respond to? What constituencies are addressed? What political goals are assumed? How do they compare with your care-abouts?

=reports on what we all did last week!! (Katie gave talk at 4S: talksite here.

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Thursday 10 Nov – Comparing epistemological projects
•    Berger: Part IV: choose 2 of the 5 and everyone should read the epilogue
How might each of these chapters work to help us envision the future of intersectionality and to see what is at stake? 

=What questions and concerns are coming up as you prepare for next week's workshop? 

=What is at stake for you in different intersectional approaches, in different ways of conceptualizing waves? 

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Which chapters did you choose? Why? How can you let the authors alter your historical imagination? Can you let them turn it in-side out? Change how you think rather than justify how you think? What does that mean for feminists and feminisms?

I picked Ednie Garrison's framing of "Third Wave" as one of my readings (originally in Feminist Studies 2000). In some ways it justified my assumptions about the histories involved, but in other ways it altered them, opened up areas I hadn't thought about in those terms before.

For example, I already did not consider these feminisms strictly age related, but I didn't anticipate how Garrison would reframe them -- not generational but differentially oppositional, an analysis inspired by Chela Sandoval and attentive to culture and technology as historical agencies:

394: "The refusal to claim ownership of feminism allow these third wavers to maintain a sense of their own and other feminist-identified individuals' tactical subjectivity. When we understand that feminism is not about fitting into a mold but about expanding our ability to be revolutionary from within the worlds and communities and scenes we move around and through, then collective action becomes possible across the differences that affect people differently."

Notice this language: "the differences that affect people differently." 

Another one I picked was originally in Meridians 2008, so almost a decade later, Whitney Peoples' discussion of hip hop feminisms and the solidarity of black feminists across generations. She takes as her definition of "third wave" a specific history that defines it pivotally as a collective critique by women of color. (See her ftnote 3.) What alternate histories of the term exist at the same time? How can that be the case? How much does it matter and to whom? Is the "true origin" important? What does it mean to claim the origin of such a term?

And what does critique entail? If you critique something do you throw it out? Peoples' takes up this issue as she explores how hip-hop critique could divide black feminists but doesn't have to, and how it needn't be thrown out even if interrogated....


424: "Just as other black American feminists have chosen to engage other modes of cultural production that are inimical to the development of black women's subjectivity, hip-hop feminists refuse to turn away from difficult and volatile engagements with hip-hop. Bell hooks, for example, argues that the mainstream American film industry has long produced images of women, people of color, that have negated the humanity and subjectivity of black women. Hooks, however, does not advocate the black women abandon film. On the contrary she, like Pough in the case of hip-hop, says that they value of mainstream cinema lies not in the images it produces but in the critique of those images. [she quotes hooks on "the pleasure of interrogation."]...The hip-hop feminist agenda is one that takes its cue from hooks and others by using the critique to fashion an individual, social, and political agenda of inquiry and action for the contemporary moment.... It's the legacy of unmasking the specificity of women's experiences at the intersections of race and sex that continue to make black American feminism an indispensable mode of analysis and activism for many women today. Hip-hop feminists draw on the strength of that legacy while simultaneously drawing on the strength of movements of the contemporary moment such as hip-hop."

click for Black Youth project website

Note how hip-hop then becomes an agency of intersectionality here, and actually allows for a continuity of political analysis across age-generations of black feminists.

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