www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2005Academic feminism fails to develop theoryI attended two academic feminist conferences in April--the Mid-Atlantic Women’s Studies Association (WSA) conference at Montgomery College in Maryland, and the Scholar and the Feminist conference at Barnard College in New York City. They evinced some disarray in both the academy and in the women’s movement--and a disjuncture between both and the development of ideas about social transformation. NEED TO REINVENT FEMINISM? The WSA conference appeared ahistorical, as if young teachers and students have to reinvent feminism, only this time without any mass movement as ballast for generating and testing ideas. The other was, on one level, entirely historical: it was the 30th anniversary of annual Scholar and Feminist conferences, and its sessions repeated themes from earlier conferences. But whereas many of the earlier conferences had been in the forefront of debates within the women’s movement, this time the papers largely repeated themes without attempting to investigate theory which can advance feminist thought. Papers at WSA ranged from career concerns to bourgeois politics to spiritualism to social activism in the U.S. and around the world, often with unrelated papers on the same plenary or panel. One panel combined a paper on the brutal subjugation of Dalit women in India with one on abortion rights in South Dakota. This disparate aspect of the conference made discussion in the sessions difficult. A panel of five students from William Paterson University in New Jersey on "feminist student activism" was heartbreaking, because all but one were engaged in purely individual activity. One worked in a residence hall; she duplicated information on famous feminists and distributed it on International Women’s Day. Another did volunteer work teaching girls about their personhood and bodies. Why aren’t these things being taught in the public schools? I spoke on "Marx’s Humanism and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism: Developing a Liberatory Philosophy." It appeared to be the only paper on revolutionary theory. The panel, "women building peace," included a paper on women in the Bosnian war and one on women’s image in Chinese society today. I related the former to Dunayevskaya’s analysis of the international women’s movement as part of our age’s new movements from practice to theory, and the latter to her analysis of China as being state-capitalist rather than socialist. The Barnard conference was a more sophisticated one, but it, too, de-emphasized the need for theory, as if it were sufficient that the 29 previous conferences "produced new knowledge and fought for diversity and difference," as the film that opened the conference asserted. A session on "race, class and sex" took its title from a conference 20 years ago and discussed those issues, including lesbian and transgender aspects. Siobhan Brooks, an African American, discussed her unionization campaign for exotic dancers. Surina Khan advocated looking for feminist leadership among the women most affected by right-wing attacks. Amber Hollibaugh had some good advice about how to proceed: "Equality should be the floor, but liberation should be the ceiling." Regarding theory, she said, "When we don’t know the answer before we know the question, then our work will go further." Leslie Feinberg, a transgendered lesbian author and editor of the Workers World Party newspaper, made some good points, but ended by calling for the women’s movement to go into anti-war work, specifically, to attend upcoming Workers World front group events. Workers World’s Stalinist politics would mean that serious investigation of women’s liberation has to wait until after a revolution led by that party. This is exactly the kind of thinking that the modern Women’s Liberation Movement arose to oppose. SPLIT BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE I took the floor to criticize the split between theory and practice even at the conference. Everyone was discussing coalition building as if the only question were the best strategy to increase the size of the women’s movement, without regard to the basis on which it should grow. What visions of the future can animate people? That is the most important question for academics to work on, I suggested. An afternoon session on "women and resistance" included Indian and Korean feminists, a woman working on rights of the disabled internationally, a young African-American activist, an African-American academic who chronicled high points of Black feminism, and-another Workers World advocate! Apparently, Barnard thinks that diversity requires one leftist on each panel, but that one always speaks for Workers World. I tremble for the future of feminism if Stalinism is substituted for working out revolutionary theory. --Anne Jaclard |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
