Lake feminism

[Shannon Carter]

Today's stuff has really got me thinking. I appreciate Michal's point that
gender and language "grew directly and wholly out of the feminist movement,
out of the efforts of academic women to use their tools and a larger effort
to gain some long overdue respect and equal status for women." In fact, it
is one I completly support.

Her next statement, however,is the one I want to focus on: "To come along
now and claim that feminism isn't relevant to this discourse is to deny and
betray that foundation." I certainly hope that's not what I implied in my
last post. I understood my last post to be dripping with the rhetoric of a
very feminist agenda [one of inclusivity, not exclusion]. I was not looking
at the question of whether or not we should define our organization as
feminist [though I should have at the onset, as this is a fundamental
question]. Rather I was looking at question one which asks us to consider
whether we define ourselves as "interdisciplinary" or supporting a "specific
language or gender methodology."

I also did not mean to imply that "gender and language" is not a "legitamate
area of academic endevor." I hardly think I would be interested in an
organization of this sort if I were to believe something like this.

But I do see the roots of your attack on this point. I did not list "gender
and language" in my list of home bases in my rendition of Freidman's
feminist travel metaphor.

"Gender and language" are the areas in which I hope this forum that will
link us (from each of our home bases of study) with linguists, rhetoricians,
sociologists, literary critics, anthropologists, scientists. . . perhaps
even mathematicians, though I can't imagine how). That is the beauty of this
forum. We can learn from each other's home bases, in a peripatetic sort of
way, about the ways in which language affects gender and vice versa.

SIDE NOTE: There is a neat series of clips discussing interdisciplinary
studies and what it means from a variety of viewpoints. (I understand it is
in an issue from PMLA in 1996.)

We can't get caught up in our political agendas. This blind adherence to a
particular stance (even if it is feminism)endangers that which makes
organizations like this so valuable: to bring the passion of critical
inquiry we have learned from our lives in the academic humanities into an
intense interrogation of that which makes up who we (as individuals, as a
country, as a world, as a . . . well, you fill in the blank).

I'm so glad to see so much activity on this list again!

Shannon Carter
Texas Woman's University
(940)898-2338
s-carter at excite.com




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