NWSA's evolution

About 1,600 people, mostly women, participated in the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in Atlanta, with over 360 workshops, papers and poster presentations. This year's theme was "Difficult Dialogues," with keynote speaker Angela Davis.

NWSA, never a static organization, continues to evolve. Remarkable about this year is that the organization's decades-long struggle to become a genuinely multi-racial organization seems to have made significant progress. NWSA's president is now Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who has done more than anyone to build and bring into being Black feminist scholarship and Black women's history and archives. Further, the conference brought together Black, Brown, and white U.S. women with women from Haiti to South Africa, and from Morocco to Poland. Many workshops were an exciting mix of women from all over the world with differing opinions and experiences (see article below).

Given this remarkable turnaround for an organization that started off very white and almost self-destructed over the issue of racism, it was disappointing to see, despite its remarkable membership, that the slide away from explicit discussion of revolutionary theory and philosophy continues. (See "Need to dig into revolutionary theory," Aug.-Sept. 2007 N&L, and "Theory/Class Debates at NWSA," June-July 2008 N&L.)

DISCUSSIONS OF PHILOSOPHY MISSING

This was foreshadowed in Davis' keynote speech which touched on many different topics of concern--such as racism, classism, homophobia, the production of knowledge for the movement, and the difficulty of moving freedom forward. Yet it came off more as a congratulatory talk about how far the women's movement and NWSA in particular have come. And while it had plenty of points that women would reference throughout the conference, they were nothing new, for example, how often the category of "woman" does not include all women and hides women's specificity rather than revealing it.

What surprised me about Davis' talk was how devoid it was of theory and philosophy. While she mentioned she was a Marxist, and had studied German philosophy in 1969 including Hegel's "master and slave relation," those references had more the feel of name-dropping rather than anything substantive.

CATEGORIES AND THE MOVEMENT

Her anti-dialectical approach was evident when she spoke of "categories," a concept very important in theoretical work. She said that categories always fall short of the movement and that's one reason we have to change our language. Her point was that if we look at the category of freedom, we have to go very far to say we've shifted freedom's terrain.

But counterposing the creation of a category to the movement short-changes both. While the movement from below brings into the world and makes concrete the Idea that freedom also has to mean women's freedom, philosophy, by creating categories of what comes from the movement, connects the present with the past and the future so that the Idea can have a lasting impact. It is not only the self-emancipatory movement but the self-determination of the Idea that is needed to create a new human foundation for society.

As always, we did meet many women who were working towards the liberation of society. For example, participants in a workshop on AIDS prevention programs concluded that to end the AIDS epidemic it would take a whole new society, not just promoting the use of condoms. Yet explicit discussions of philosophy, and Marxism in particular, were missing.

Several sessions took up that the faltering economy means that women's studies' very existence is threatened. Unfortunately, most were during the day on Thursday, the day with the fewest participants, and didn't penetrate the self-congratulatory atmosphere that appeared to pervade much of the conference. And it seemed fantastic in a world where the ever more obvious failings of capitalism are prompting many, even including some in the bourgeoisie, to take another look at Marx, that Marx's name was not mentioned in any of the 360 presentation titles except ours.

Despite the ever present problems, many important things happened at NWSA, including the book launch and the conversation with the editors of a new anthology, Still Brave: Legendary Black Women on Race and Gender and I am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audré Lorde. It let us know how far we have come, while so much of the conference showed us how far we still have to go.

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