Women's Crossroads

Just back from a trip to northern California for the National Women's Studies Association conference. The NWSA is the only national organization dedicated to Women's Studies professors and Women's Center directors, and for me it was exhilarating to be in such hardy feminist company for a few days. Being an "out" feminist is often a lonely post, and women's studies is hardly the most admired academic discipline, so to feel the power of numbers and solidarity was definitely invigorating.

The conference opened with the keynote from Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's beautiful young daughter, author of the anthology To Be Real, the very first of the "Third Wave" anthologies of the 1990's, and Black, White and Jewish, a memoir of growing up bi-racial, bi-coastal, and bi-cultural in the 1980's. Rebecca is a practicing Buddhist (she named her son Tenzin, after the Dalai Lama), and in good Buddhist fashion she did not give many answers, but she did pose some interesting questions.

She posited that the feminist movement has been "plagued by divisiveness," and is now "stalled." Part of the blame, she said, is the movement's "unhealthy success model," wherein "women who are successful politically are broken personally." It is crucial to the movement that:

• feminism be inclusive
• men be brought in as visible strategists
• leadership be dispersed and democratic
• activists maintain healthy family ties

Each of these points names a familiar problem of the feminist movement over the years. The NWSA itself has long been criticized by women of color for not being inclusive enough. The question of how to bring men in effectively as allies remains unsolved. There is a tendency in the feminist movement, as in many other movements, to gravitate around a celebrity "star," and give up individual agency in the spell of her orbit. And Rebecca Walker, as a "movement child" who criticized her own parents pretty harshly in her memoir for their neglect of family in favor of political engagement, came out strongly on the final point: that "children cannot survive on political theory."

Walker's advice for how to address these issues was unsatisfying for many in the audience. She was criticized for focusing too much on the biological family; several women stood up to argue that the biological family needs to be redefined, that ties of affiliation (the family we choose, rather the one we were born into) are at least as important as biological ties.

Walker stood her ground. "We have become too invested in not talking about the power of the biological family," she said. "The deconstructed family can be over-idealized."

As she went on, Walker injected a note of urgency to her speech, which was largely delivered verbatim, without reliance on notes. "I'm very concerned about the survival of humanity, and about the survival of what makes us human--compassion," she said. "The feminist movement is behind the times now, we need a true visionary plan of action to make us relevant again. And it's important to focus on the children or we're going to lose them, as we are losing them now."

Drawing on the work of her mentor bell hooks, whom she invoked several times, Walker argued for a position of "radical openness" to new ideas, and a focus on results. "We must assume responsibility for communicating our agenda, and own our power to create language that will have the impact we want," she said. She suggested that feminists focus on "communicating with people outside our rarified environment," in strong, accessible language that will help us "reach the Baptists in Arkansas--that's who we need to reach."

At the other end of the conference, and in an entirely different register, was the talk given by M. Jacqui Alexander, the dynamic Black Caribbean feminist now teaching at the University of Toronto. Alexander's talk, delivered in an incantatory style that had the audience roaring with appreciation, focused on the specifics of our political moment, and how feminists need to respond.

"U.S. feminists have been neglectful in taking on the state," Alexander asserted. "Do we want a free-market feminism, or a liberatory feminism? The real question is, since we know that there is no theory that is not autobiography, are we prepared to live differently?"

This question echoed Walker's focus on "living feminism," but where Rebecca talked about giving time to her child, Alexander's talk was dedicated to the bigger picture.

"Who should be the subjects of feminism? The most marginalized--that is to say, the lives of most of the people in the world," Alexander insisted. "We don't have to rescue Third World women, or use them as case studies--we need solidarity, and it doesn't happen behind our desks."

Alexander picked up on the remarks of an earlier speaker, Native American activist Andrea Smith, who described American higher education as "the academic industrial complex." "Are we going to continue to disappear into detention centers in Women's Studies?" Alexander demanded. "And what about the militarized zones inside ourselves? Who is denied entry there?

"The academic industrial complex requires a profound silence that it defines as collegiality," she said to loud applause. "The question is, what are the costs? We chase citizenship and entry at institutions that want to deny us entry," she continued, alluding quietly to her own unsuccessful battle for tenure at The New School in New York. "We can be disappeared instantaneously on our own campuses. The constant potential for disappearance should not make us disappear others, and we should not disappear ourselves.

"The question we need to ask ourselves is, what kind of patriot are you going to be?"

Alexander concluded by calling for what she called a "poetics of landscape," in which feminists "tell the stories of our lives, in order to create habitable spaces where the analytic, the political and the divine can all mingle. We need to allow ourselves to be moved sufficiently to act," she said. "We need to lay siege to Empire--to shame it, to mock it, and ultimately to transform it with the fiery power of our own stories. "

Taken together, Walker and Alexander re-validated the longstanding feminist mantra that "the personal is political." We cannot "do politics" in the world without starting at home--home defined both as our own families and communities, and our nation in the global community.

At the very last plenary session of the conference, Julia Sudbury, a young Black transnational feminist whose personal trajectory has taken her from Nigeria, to London, the U.S., Canada and back again to Mills College in Oakland CA, gave a rousing talk about the dangers of Empire, at home and abroad. Discussing the "transnational military prison industrial complex," she decried "penal warehousing" as a means of dealing with unemployed youth, with $60 billion a year spent on prisons in the U.S. alone.

"We need to remind ourselves that all social justice issues are feminist issues," she said. "Our task as Women's Studies teachers is to engage students as agents of resistance, here, where they are. We need to challenge them to understand their position in Empire, and translate their anger into action."

Interestingly, Sudbury ended on the same note as Alexander did: invoking the spiritual as part and parcel of the political. "Bringing the sacred into political vision is a transgressive act today," she said. "We can't abandon the language of the sacred to the state-sanctioned religions. We need to come out spiritually as radical political people, to our students and to others. We don't have to leave ourselves at the classroom door."

All I can say to that is--Amen!