being interdisciplinary and being feminist

[Chris Beckwith]

Firstly, I second everything Deborah Cameron writes in her message (quoted
below).

Secondly, although it seems logical to discuss everything in the order
ordained by the agenda, it is really difficult to discuss what we want to
"do" without discussing "what" we want to do.  (Does that make sense?)
Surely we want to have a discussion list, and I too hope it is inter-
/multi- disciplinary, but we need (and most of us probably want) a
journal printed on paper; I would like to have both.  Conferences are
another matter entirely.  We could have a conference, and assuming it
travels and occasionally comes close enough that I could drive to it, I
would attend it; but I probably wouldn't be able to otherwise, since I
am already too involved in too many conferences (being an inter- or
multi-disciplinary sort of person).  Others might be even more
hard-pressed to attend, unless they are in gender-studies departments,
because most of us have to attend the major conference(s) in our official
field in order to satisfy the weak minds who run the system, and travel
funds are extremely limited (at least they are at my university).

Also, financing journals and conferences are really different matters,
unless we find some wonderful, rich benefactor who gives us so much money
that we have to have conferences with lavish receptions simply in order to
spend it all.  (It can happen!  A society I founded some years ago has had
just this experience.  Champagne and chocolate cream-puffs!  Though I
would've preferred that they set up a bigger travel fund, more
scholarships, etc., etc., the donor likes lavishness.)
Someone asked the question whether we would have a full-fledged
independent non-profit organization, with dues and so forth,
or something else.  It is no problem to have conferences without a formal
organization and non-profit corporate status, partly or mainly because our
institutions can provide whatever organizational help we may need.
But in my experience it is not possible to have a journal without dues,
which then requires non-profit corporation status, normally.  I'm in favor
of a journal, so...

I don't see any reason why, after six months (a long time, to me), we
can't vote on the constitution and by-laws, which prescribe what kind of
officers we need, etc.  These regulations are basically all determined by
law, both federal and state, so all we have to do is copy some other
society's document, modifying it (within the limits of the law) to suit
our needs.  The organizer(?) who will be applying for the non-profit
status in the organizer's state (each state has slightly differing
versions of the federal template) can just download a copy of the text
onto this list for us to read and comment on, after which we can vote on
it.  That would thus include the officers, their terms of office,
membership dues, and so on.  It is great for us to discuss what we are
going to "do" after six months, but maybe it would be easier if we had
such a document to comment on, like the medieval glossators we are trained
to be.  Of course, it all depends on whether we want to have a journal,
travel fund, scholarships, etc.

I hope this makes sense (I'm seriously jet-lagged at the moment)...

Chris

On Fri, 26 Feb 1999, Deborah Cameron wrote:

> 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.
>