being interdisciplinary and being feminist

[Deborah Cameron]

1. On inter (or multi-) disciplinarity, I favour it. Important and
interesting work on language and gender has come from people working in
many disciplines: if we had had an influential language and gender studies
organisation defined as a linguists' organisation from the field's
beginnings, would we consider as canonical the work of (off the top of my
head) Candace West, Candy Goodwin, Joel Sherzer, Mary Crawford?  All these
scholars have written things I consider canonical for teaching and thinking
purposes, but (with apologies to them if I am wrong) I think all have or
had allegiances to somewhere other than the linguistics department.  I
suppose I feel that while linguistics is not inherently interdisciplinary
(it does contain a lot of people doing different things, but they often
don't interact very much), language and gender studies *is* inherently
interdisciplinary, because neither gender nor the aspects of language that
are interesting in relation to it are the sole preserve of linguistic
science.  There is no predicting who might say something important!
	That said, I agree you have to draw boundaries for purposes of e.g.
conference paper selection and journal editing. But how big a problem is
this really? At this point in history, I feel fairly confident that when I
get a manuscript to review for a journal, say, I can tell whether or not it
is 'language and gender studies'.  It's a question of what discussions and
debates it locates itself in rather than what department the author got a
Ph.D from. Where the issue is selection (as opposed to just inclusion, i.e.
who we permit or encourage to be in an organisation) I think the key
question is whether the community trusts the selectors to pick out good
interesting stuff.
	So all in all I would rather any organisation emerging from this
discussion defined itself as about language and gender studies than as an
organisation of linguists who study gender.


2.  On whether GALA should be a feminist organisation.  What exactly is
riding on this?  Are we going to have political aims in our constitution,
beyond the non-discrimination statement I take it any respectable academic
organisation would wish to include in 1999 (will article one be 'GALA will
seek to overthrow patriarchy')?  Are we going to refuse to consider
nonfeminist pieces submitted to a hypothetical journal?  Are we going to
ask potential members to state on the back of the subscription check that
they endorse the following n ideological principles?  I doubt it, in all
cases.  I know I've chosen absurd examples, which you may blame on my
nation's predilection for under- and over-statement, but I am honestly
having trouble understanding what it would mean in practice to define
ourselves as a feminist organisation.
	Maybe the question being circled around here is not so much about the
organisation's ideological stance as it is about the relationship of
feminist politics to gender scholarship, and whether any assumptions at all
should be made about that.  Here's one answer: the two things are not
coextensive but they have to be in some sort of dialogue.  A journal
submission about women and language from someone who'd spent 40 years on a
research station in Antarctica and did not know that this wave of feminism
had happened would almost certainly be of no intellectual value. (Who on
earth would wish to publish Jespersen's chapter The Woman if someone wrote
it now--and not just because it's politically incorrect.) On the other hand
I can imagine wanting to publish an article by a neo-Darwinian arguing that
the linguistic behaviours we have been relating to gender all these years
are actually sex-related behaviours whose ultimate explanation lies in the
mechanisms of natural selection. Our hypothetical scholar would not be
feminist as conventionally understood, s/he might even be antifeminist, but
s/he would be in dialogue (taking issue) with orthodox feminism.  This kind
of dialogue shouldn't be avoided, but welcomed where it is engaged in
seriously on both sides; serious challenges help us sharpen up our
arguments, whether we are nonfeminists being challenged by feminists or the
reverse, or indeed feminists being challenged by other feminists, which is
where most of this field's vital energy has been over the past few years,
IMHO.
	Although I find this discussion of GALA's philosophy interesting (as you
may gather from this verbose message), I wonder if we might more usefully
focus on what we want to *do*.  We are trying to form a kind of community
of practice, and it seems to me there are limits on how far all the rules
and ramifications can be settled in advance.  Arguably, an organisational
ethos emerges out of engagement in collective activities more than the
other way round.

Hope this message does not violate too many GALA-L rules (or Gricean
maxims); if it does, sorry.