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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004Woman as ReasonNWSA shows revitalized women's movementby Terry Moon What came out loud and clear at the almost 1,000 women strong 25th Annual National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference held in Milwaukee, Wis., last month, was an overwhelming disgust with President George W. Bush. It came through at the plenaries, at many of the 248 workshops, and in discussions in the halls and at our literature table. The conference as a whole reflected a revitalized women’s movement, recommitted to bridging the gap between academia and women’s freedom struggles worldwide. The death of Gloria Anzaldúa, the first openly lesbian Chicana writer and activist in the contemporary Women’s Liberation Movement, from complications of diabetes, gave a sense of urgency to the conference. Anzaldúa was known for THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK: RADICAL WRITINGS BY WOMEN OF COLOR (1981), which she co-edited with Cherrie Moraga; and BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA: THE NEW MESTIZA (1987). Her shocking death brought home that the needed transformation of reality cannot be put off. FIRST PLENARY SETS THE TONE The first plenary showed the necessity to engage with women outside the academy. Barbara Smith, lesbian Black feminist writer and activist, spoke of how women of color played a vanguard role throughout the history of the women’s movement. Ellen Bravo, founder of "9to5," stressed the need for feminists to stand in solidarity with working women’s struggles. Lisa Jervis, founder of BITCH MAGAZINE, demolished the distinction between the so-called 2nd and 3rd waves of feminism. Gerda Lerner, historian and author of the groundbreaking work BLACK WOMEN IN WHITE AMERICA (1972), brought down the house as she weaved together a passion for women’s history and contempt for Bush. Grounding her critique in how women’s studies came to be, she showed how "women’s studies as the radical part of humanities is under threat from budget cuts and the Right Wing." She critiqued post-modernism--to great applause--while highlighting "difficulties within our own Women’s Studies programs." Her survey showed that studies of images of women, therefore women as objects, greatly outnumbered studies of women as agents. She characterized this as the "making of women into objects of inquiry rather than central actors." Another subject of concern was women as torturers at Abu Ghraib. While Cynthia Enloe, author of BANANAS, BEACHES AND BASES, raised this at the plenary on "Women and Globalism," it was Ann Russo, from DePaul University, who seriously thought it through. In a workshop on "Representation and Resistance," she compared the Abu Ghraib images to lynching postcards showing grinning white women, which made her rethink feminism’s relation to racism and colonialism. The various feminist responses: "women in the military are being scapegoated"; the "few bad apples" concept; "women just trying to fit into male-dominated space"; and "women are just victims in the military"; all isolate women. When put in a total context, we can see that Abu Ghraib is "the American way." She concluded with the needed connections: the invisibility of Iraqi women who are tortured and raped to U.S. women raped in the military; how the torture of Iraqis is linked to prison abuse and police brutality in the U.S. The diverse elements present at NWSA were illuminated by our own workshops. At "Women and the Anti-War Left," I discussed the war on the multi-religious people of Bosnia, women’s militancy that fought the mass rapes, and the inaction of the Left which I contrasted to News and Letters Committees' activism and Raya Dunayevskaya’s concern with the question of "What happens after revolution?" and Marx’s concept of "revolution in permanence." Sonia Bergonzi followed with a discussion of the failures of today’s Left to support freedom for women in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the discussion, women talked of what it would mean to project a liberatory vision of the future, how to keep that from being limiting, and asked what Marx meant by "revolution in permanence." IDEAS OF MARXISM DISCUSSED At our workshop on "Women as Revolutionary Reason," Olga Domanski contrasted Simone de Beauvoir’s and Raya Dunayevskaya’s views of Rosa Luxemburg. De Beauvoir saw Luxemburg, when she saw her at all, as simply an exception. Dunayevskaya saw her in the context of individualism and masses in motion: "the individuality of each woman liberationist is a microcosm of the whole, and yet...the movement is not a sum of so many individuals but MASSES IN MOTION" (ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, p. 83). This concept was illuminated further when Erica Rae took up women in the Paris Commune of 1871, and Susan Van Gelder discussed the 1929 Igbo Women’s War. Because at this conference Marxism was not a concept to be avoided but is what many women wanted to talk about, our literature table became a discussion area. Interest in Marxism coupled with a keen interest in women theoreticians, was shown in how we sold all we had brought of Raya Dunayevskaya’s ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION. Another example was a Kenyan woman who had gone to Nicaragua as a witness for peace and wanted to hear "some words of hope." She joined us at the literature table to discuss how the world could be different after capitalism and what it would mean if what we need was produced for use, not for value. She told of a Nicaraguan textile company that shredded out-of-style jeans, rather than give them to the poor or sell them cheaply, and then would produce more, something that she thought was evil. When you put together the March for Women’s Lives in April (see "Women make history in massive rally," May 2004 N&L) and NWSA, it’s clear that something new is happening in today’s Women’s Liberation Movement. Though NWSA is not without contradictions, it reveals the academic arm of the Women’s Liberation Movement more determined than ever to be one with women outside the academy who want to transform existing reality. |
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