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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2006NWSA conferenceby Urszula Wislanka The National Women's Studies Association held their annual conference June 15-18 in Oakland, Cal., titled "Locating Women's Studies: formations of power and resistance." While there is no way to give a full account of three plenaries, over 300 workshops, panels, poster sessions and other events with several thousand participants, the title points to some key features. Academic feminism wants to be rooted in today's reality and problems. I attended several workshops where the presenters focused on uniting what academia generally separates: theoretical work from activism. In "Shading the ground on which we walk," for example, four young Black women graduate students explained how they unite academic pursuits with their activism. One of them summed up their experiences saying, "We have to keep remembering what makes us human." The Conference showed a wide recognition that feminism cannot be perceived as women against men. In order to have any future, feminism has to be humanism, addressing liberation for both men and women. 'WAVES CRITIQUED' Re-thinking feminism was definitely on the agenda. A panel organized by the NWSA President, "New directions in feminist theory," included Astrid Henry, author of Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism. She was especially critical, saying that Third Wave is over. She contended: We have established that there is no Woman that speaks for all women. It is now clear that it is not enough to criticize the "second wave," and now we have to return to our roots in sociopolitical movements that shape both theory and activism. We may not need another "wave" of feminism, but we do need to continue the movement.Third-wave feminism wanted to bring race and class to the front and center of feminist discourse, mistakenly believing Second-wave had not. In a workshop, "What happened to socialist feminist women's studies programs?" Elizabeth Kennedy, a founder of women's studies at SUNY, Buffalo, objected to characterizing Second-wave as mere liberalism, pointing out that race and class have always been important to socialist feminists. If acknowledging problems, such as racism in society and within the movement-as both waves have done-is not enough to come up with a solution, what is? Searching for unique identities often treats sex, gender, race and class as static concepts and is inadequate. Challenging Second-wave, Third-wave feminists rejected all universals, claiming they only subsume diverse voices under a unifying concept. Now static formulations of race and class, sex and gender, are being questioned. Young women, tired of de-constructing everything, are challenging the post-modernism of the Third-wave. Several spoke from the floor saying post-modernism is paralyzing, leaves no principle to guide your actions or your participation in the movement. NEED FOR MARX One proposed solution is to focus on intersections or "interdisciplinarity" to break women's studies out of a small field (constantly threatened and under attack). But to me, the question of the relation between feminism, race and class is not an "intersection." The dimensions of race and class are not absent from feminism and don't need to be brought in from outside. The way real people experience gender, race and class deepens our theory, our understanding of what is human. Given the discussion at NWSA of the need to expand feminism to humanism, for feminism to engage with social movements, and the critique of post-modernism and binary thought, it was striking that Marxism was not discussed much at NWSA, and the problem of overcoming capitalism was only acknowledged in individual conversations in the hallways (though a plenary on "Empire, Global Political Conflicts and Resistance" did include a condemnation of imperialism). To move beyond binaries, which can lose sight of the humanistic whole, and fully engage with what actual women and men are doing in freedom movements worldwide, means, at the very least, not rejecting Marx outright, but rather exploring his philosophy of total liberation. For Marxist-Humanism, the essence of the idea of freedom is self-movement that doesn't stop at any particular binary opposition. As Marx put it in his Doctoral Thesis, "the practice of philosophy...measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." |
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