Some Things I Found Out in North America: The Canadian Women's Studies Association and National Women's Studies Association Conferences

In May and June I attended the Canadian Women's Studies Association and the National (=USA) Women's Studies Association conferences. Here are some highlights, with more information below.

Recently a graduate of women's studies, aged in her thirties, bequeathed $US 3.2 million to her alma mater, women's studies at Duke University.

In relation to the corporatisation of public universities in the USA and the continued government funding for state universities, legislators in Ohio are asking 'How long does the university need to be on the public dole?'

Many conferences in Canada are organised under the auspices of The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada and run over a two or three week period at the one location, readily allowing attendance at more than one conference. This event is called 'the learneds' [associations], as in 'Are you going to the learneds this year?'.

Besides hosting the 'largest multi-disciplinary academic gathering in North America, and Canada's biggest scholarly Book Fair at the annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities' ('the learneds'), The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada also:

Wouldn't it be nice if the Australian Academies of Social Sciences and the Humanities were funded to achieve similar contributions to learning?

Across Canada there are five endowed chairs in women's studies, funded by provincial and federal government support and fund-raising. These include the Margaret Lawrence (The Stone Angel) chair shared by women's studies at the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg and the Chaire d'Étude Claire-Bonenfant sur la condition des femmes at Laval Université

Dr Lillian Robinson, the new Principal of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, founded in 1978, has secured a commitment from her dean, hopefully in perpetuity, to pay for a visiting scholar to the centre for one semester each year. The applicant must have an international reputation and be fluent in French and English. Visit the website: www.concordia.ca and look under Colleges, Simone de Beauvoir Institute or contact; Robinson@vax2.concordia.ca:

The NWSA reached a peak of 4000 members in the late 1980s. Membership for 2000-1 is about 1500, including institutional members.

The largest sex worker organisation in the world is in Calcutta, with 5000 members. They recently held a meeting that drew 30,000 participants.

A right-wing organisation called Independent Women's Forum includes in their membership Christine Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism?), the current secretary for Labour in the Bush administration, and Wade Horne, the assistant secretary for Family Support in the Department of Health and Human Services (if his nomination is approved). He has written that welfare must be directed first to married couples as only strengthening the family will eliminate poverty. The Independent Women's Forum has started a campaign, Take Back the Campus, in which they publicise what they call the ten most common feminist myths. These include that one quarter of college students have been raped (when feminists have not said that) and that women earn less than men (true but it's because they 'choose' to interrupt their careers). They claim that feminists make all women victims and dispute the data feminist research has produced. Their tenth myth is that women's studies departments empower women. No, they say, only a small group of like-minded careerists are empowered, an elite that make the old boys' network look lame.

Only one university campus offers students access to the medical abortion contraceptive and very few offer contraceptives of any sort to students.

The Canadian Women's Studies Association Conference

Was held from the 25^th to the 27^th of May at Laval Université in Québec City (although Canadians merely say 'Québec' despite this also being the name of the province). The opening plenary, 'Translating feminisms: theories, practices, politics', discussed texts from a postcolonial perspective. This session was in two parts, the first day being in English and the second in French. The closing plenary session book-ended the conference on the last day. Shahrzad Mojab spoke from an unashamed Marxist perspective to condemn the Iranian revolution and the apologetic writing produced by diasporic Iranian women in women's studies departments in Anglophone nations. Lavina Shankar spoke about 'Irish born, Asian Indian-Trinidadian, Canadian lesbian' writer Shani Mootoo. I presented some preliminary findings from my ARC project on young people and their attitudes to feminism. There were 60 to 80 people at the opening plenary, representing about the number registered for the conference.

Not surprisingly, in a conference subtitled, 'Across, Between, and Within Generations: Re-thinking Women's Studies', there were sessions on 'Women's Studies generations' and 'three generations talk about women's studies'. 'Surfing across the waves: re/generating feminist dialogue' discussed struggles in Het Sex acts, Violence against women, DIY Cyber Porn and icons of oppression. There were also a number of sessions on practical issues for women's studies scholars such as hiring, tenure and promotion; teaching a first year course; writing and publishing a book (offered by graduate students); the future of the Ph.D. in women's studies. There were sessions on:

Sessions at the CWSA appeared to be more inflected by social science and community activist concerns than is the case in AWSA conferences, where cultural and literary studies are more prominent. A number of academics and their graduate students presented joint sessions.

Susan Heald (University Manitoba) was the outgoing president of CWSA and Shree Mulay (McGill University) the incoming president. CWSA has almost 200 regular members and is successfully struggling to reduce a large deficit accumulated some years ago. CWSA maintains a national office at Brock University in St Catherines, Ontario, and has a part-time paid executive manager, Liz Kaethler. CWSA won a Trillium Grant of $16,900 to hold a conference for young women in the Niagara area. Susan Heald reported that CHERC (like our ARC) had dropped the granting program 'women in change' but had introduced a 'women's studies' heading. This was located in social work and health studies, indicating the limited areas of women's studies research that would receive funding. A campaign addressed to CHERC to change its policy has so far been unsuccessful.

A book launch on the first evening, supported by publishers (with wine and chips and the donation of books), celebrated all books published by CWSA members over the last year. The books were then raffled, making about $200 for the association. On the second night, we went on a women's walking tour of old Québec. The soft grey light of the long summer evening enchanted the old grey stone buildings lining old Québec's winding narrow streets. Most of the building that celebrated women's history appeared to be nunneries, houses for fallen women run by nuns, hospitals run by nuns, and forts.

The National Women's Studies Association Conference

was held from 13 to 17 June at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, which has a large women's studies program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. There are nine women's studies graduate programs in the United States, a much bigger deal than in Australia as graduate courses must be devised and offered to students. The University campus, located on both sides of the Mississippi River (while it is still 'Li'l Boy River'), is a self-sufficient village, with shops, recreation facilities, a large hospital, and a Radisson Hotel (although I stayed in the quite comfortable student dorms, due to the precipitous decline in the Australian dollar prior to my departure).

The conference was divided into three sections. The first day was devoted to the 'administrator pre-conference' attended by administrators of women's studies programmes, new and experienced. The next two days of the 'actual' conference were dedicated to the theme of '2001.Women's Studies.Com?' or the challenges and benefits of technology. The fourth day was devoted to what was called the 'Embedded Conference', addressing the theme 'The Future of Women's Studies: Is it Feminist?'

The Opening Ceremony featured a dance performance by an Indian performer, Ananya Chatterjea, evoking the notion of 'fire'. The Native American Neeconis Singers, led by a lesbian Native American, evoked 'Water'. Marleen White Rabbit Helgemo, a minister and member of numerous boards for Native American affairs, ranging from the Indian Chamber of Commerce to anti-violence issues, evoked 'land' with a prayer to the east (the beginnings), the south (emotion), the north (I've forgotten) and the west (the elders). The NWSA President, Annette van Dyke, introduced Susan Griffin, author of the influential Woman and Nature, who spoke about 'The future of progress: women, technology and the soul'. There were about 400 to 500 women, and a few men, in the audience. I would guess this represented the number registered for the conference.

The technology theme influenced the kinds of panels offered, with the plenary on Thursday reflecting the NWSA President, Annette van Dyke's interest in ecofeminsm. She teaches a course on feminist spirituality. The session was titled 'Life itself'. AmyLee, 'an Aboriginal American of Iroquois descent', 'last in her lineage of Medicine Women', teaches in Native American studies at Kent State University. She described the NWSA programme document as 'powerful', saying 'I stand in awe of each of you', 'all those representing their own facet of the crystal of truth'. There is 'so much power in this room that we could keep mountains from being moved unless they want to be moved'. She then discussed the matriarchy into which she was born, 'the great law of peace' which is her government and country.

Charlene Spretnak, a writer in spirituality and/with environmentalism, professor in the philosophy and religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, argued for the overlap between the new research area of women's health and spirituality. She applauded the recent claims by medical scientists and others that there are sex differences, right down to our cells, and apparently our hearts. The Heart's Code publishes the finding that about 15 per cent of heart transplant patients took on some of the characteristics of the donor, for example calling their lover by the donor's lover's name. Spretnak suggested that women are more susceptible to auto-immune diseases because they live in a patriarchal society which their bodies cannot handle. Women are more sensitive to pain but, because all the drug trials were done on men until 1992, women in hospital do not receive sufficient doses of pain-killers.

Starhawk, 'a feminist and peace activist', is presently focusing on the 'antiglobalization movement, training for and taking part in the anti-WTO action in Seattle, the anti-IMF/World Bank April actions in Washington, D.C., and the recent actions in Québec City'. She started by asking everyone to check the labels of their neighbour's shirt or dress and call out the answers: 'China', 'Mexico', 'Maine', 'Cambodia'. She said 'most likely those hands [which made the clothing] belonged to young women' working 12 to 16 hours a day in the Philippines or South China, where the bathrooms are locked except for short breaks. She discussed the ferocious repression of protestors at anti-globalisation rallies, including belongings taken by police who also pre-emptively arrested 600 people before they did anything, and holding people in handcuffs on buses for 16 hours at Washington DC, as well as the use of tear gas at Québec City'. She claimed that we need to teach young women to be activists, rather than just researchers and academics, allow them to find out what is sacred to them and where they can get the courage and support to defend their sacred things.

The plenary on Friday June 15 was titled 'Technofeminisms' with speakers N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English at the University of California-Los Angeles, on 'Disturbing metaphoric networks: the body in cyberspace'; Susan Hawthorne, publisher at Spinifex Press among many other things, on 'Technoglobal appropriation: feminist engagements' and Sat Bir Kaur Khalsa, whose community work included rape crisis, health and other issues with a present focus on the intersection of disability issues and feminism. Her title was 'Using a wheelchair: eruptions, disruptions, and contradictions within feminism spaces". I missed this session so cannot provide a summary of the presentation.

The plenary on Saturday June 16 was part of the Embedded Conference. It was titled 'The future of feminism: is it feminist?'. Robyn Wiegman, about to be the Margaret Taylor Smith director of women's studies at Duke University, suggested that in the post Cold War climate universities are now marked by two changes. There is a growth in interdisciplinarity and the production of knowledge in a consumerist mode. Instead of the production of a national citizen, universities create a globalised subject who can touch down in any location and operate there. She argued that, rather than criticising the relocation of women's studies in cultural studies, we should see that cultural studies was open to the interdisciplinarity of women's studies and it was a safe place for dreams that did not need to be implemented while the outside society lost its left-wing activism.

Johnella Butler, Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, suggested that academic feminists would not be asking questions about agency and activism if they were attending to the materials in African-American, Women of Color, Native American Studies, Chicana women's studies, Queer feminist studies. However, there is a lack of cross-referencing between these studies, leaving feminists like her (African American) as a vulnerable wedge in the soggy ground of white women's studies. She noted there were organisations on a number of campuses seeking to reconnect women in universities with the community.

Sally Kitch, Professor of women's studies at Ohio State University, argued that women's studies often focuses on the immediate threat and fails to see the larger threat. She instanced the curriculum wars in which traditionalists attacked a 'pigment privileged curriculum' and new scholars argued for diversity. This was a camouflage for conservative groups to undermine the funding support for public education, to control the student body (remove affirmative action programs), and to shift decision making from academics to management. They made the tax-paying public suspicious of our political motives and represented all faculty as radical. When we ask questions about the 'impossibility of women's studies' because of women's diversity, as Wendy Brown asks, this focuses attention away from the need for a strategy that maintains the common purpose of feminism. Kitch gave as the example the debate produced by the Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas issue. The media performed a 'race change operation' on Anita Hill in which she became constructed as a white woman: upper class, university educated and connected with feminism. Thomas became a working class black hero for men, the tenant farmer to judicial bench success story. Kitch discussed the debate among women's studies academics concerning the desirability of graduate programs, referring to an article she had authored with Judith Allen (previously at Griffith University).

This day included discipline review panels, exploring the intersections of women's studies and history, sociology, geography and economics. There were also 'future of the field workshops' for which participants were required to register and read an article set by the facilitator prior to the workshop. Topics included a discussion of Wendy Brown's 'The impossibility of women's studies', the gender studies/women's studies tension, women's studies and public intellectuals, and teaching women's studies in an international context (a workshop that I convened). Other issues included Third Wave in the classroom (one session discussing the incorporation of Hip-Hop), inclusivity (covering issues of racism and sexism), feminism and the environment, issues of disabilities and feminism, the relationship between academic and activist work, and masculinities.

As with last year, the final plenary, on the Sunday, dealt with transnational feminisms, and was titled 'Transnational feminisms and global technologies'. Kamala Kempadoo, Acting Director of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, but usually at University of Colorado, spoke on 'Recuperations and revisionings: transnational feminism in action'. She identified four strands of transnational feminism, the work of Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander, the work of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, the work of Amrita Basu, and the new journal Meridians on feminism, race and transnational feminism, focusing on women in movement, for example migration, diaspora and coalition. These approaches share a commitment to linking global, national and international feminisms, and an anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist approach, even though Kempadoo noted that 'socialism sounds like an anachronism today'. With Basu, who points out that the largest number of women still work at the grass-roots level, she concurred that struggles for women's civil and political rights are more likely to succeed than struggles for women's economic and social rights. This is a reflection of US dominance in international affairs which supports civil justice but not struggles for economic justice in the face of the inequalities created by global capitalism. Kempadoo's own research concerns the international sex industry (Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean). As an instance of the contradictions that arise from multiple oppressions and hierarchies, she noted that European female tourists in Jamaica purchase the sexual favours of Jamaican men.

Cindi Katz, Professor of Geography in Environmental Psychology and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, spoke on 'Topographies, counter topographies, and the development of internationalist feminisms'. She used the term 'vagabond capitalism' to describe global capitalism as an irresponsible destroyer of the world. She urged a focus on topographies, the fleshy, messy indeterminate stuff of everyday life which intimately knows the place from which it comes. She criticised situationalist knowledge like standpoint theory which claims knowledge at a particular point but actually fails to deal with the specific geographies of place. Riffat Hassan, born in a Saiyyad Muslim family living in Lahore, is a pioneer of feminist theology in the context of Islam and chair of the religious studies program at the University of Louisville. She spoke on 'Muslim women's empowerment: social transformation through education', claiming that the main Islamic women's voices we hear are at two extremes. One group is the fundamentalists who applaud the Islamisation of societies with laws to put women in their place and re-institute Islamic punishments, usually inflicted on women. This is based on a belief, as with Christian religion, that women are guilty, subordinate to men and created for men's pleasure. Muslims understand modernity as modernisation (highways, education, health care) is a good thing, and westernisation (from colonialism, the influx of mass western culture leading to the break-up of families and the emancipation of Muslim women) is a bad thing. A Muslim man educated in the west comes back modernised; a Muslim woman westernised. However, Women in Black at the UN Beijing meeting and other conservative women's groups argue that they have all the rights they need and that the United Nations is a secular institution that should not be interfering in Islamic states' affairs. At the other extreme, are anti-religious extremists, funded by western donor groups, who argue against Islam. Hassan claims that more than ninety per cent of people are between these two groups but have no voice either inside or outside Pakistan. As Islam is the largest religion in the world and the fastest growing religion, with the largest immigrant population group in Britain being Pakistanis, the issue will not go away. In 1999 Hassan founded the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan, linked to Amnesty International. With the recent election of a new government in Pakistan, the first ever human rights convention was held in Pakistan. Amnesty International, for the first time in a recent report, cited the feudal system, the police and not just the government as abusers of human rights. Hassan is hopeful of change in Pakistan, although she notes that in no country where Islamic laws have been introduced have they been taken off the books.

All the plenary sessions included at least one non-European background speaker, often African-American but sometimes Native American or South Asian. Even so, the NWSA still suffers from the walk-out of African American scholars in 1988, despite a Women of Color caucus which ran a strand through the conference. Outside of the caucus sessions, however, one would see a scattering of African-American, Chicana, even Native American women but usually only one or two in a room of European faces, ranging from 20 odd in a concurrent session to 300 to 400 in the plenary sessions. There was only one session on Latin American studies, even though there is a whole gender stream in the Latin American Studies conference. This issue exercised a group of eleven women who came to the 'International Task Force' meeting. The International Task Force attempts to internationalise the women's studies curriculum in the USA. Even the South-eastern Women's Studies regional conference had international keynote speakers like Nawal el Saadawi but there were none at the national conference.

There were about 180 concurrent sessions (with three speakers in each, although some were workshop sessions with a facilitator). Again it was my impression that there was a smaller percentage of sessions offered in the cultural studies/literature area than at AWSA Conferences. Thus in the index of keywords for conference presentations, 'social' (as in social activism, social conditions) is listed nine times, three being social movements. Activism/activists was listed fifteen times, community (e.g. community building) nine times and political/politics six times. 'Cultural' is listed four times, one being 'cultural politics'; literature is listed four times (along with life stories, biography and autobiography at once each). Queer studies/theory is listed five times; sexuality six times. Global was listed eleven times (e.g. global feminism, globalization); goddess was listed once.

An innovation for NWSA conferences was the 'research café'. This was led by a facilitator who introduced the topic and, ideally, kept discussion on the issue. I attended two 'research cafes', one offered by Emi Koyama, Portland State University, on 'Third Wave Theorizing the Third Wave'. Koyama wanted to retrieve the notion of third wave from its white middle class promoters, such as the writers of Manifesta. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards make claims that applied only to middle class white women, for example that women now take abortion for granted or assume they can go to college. The original meaning of Third Wave was 'outside of second wave' and asserts that 'feminism starts with the assumption that power imbalance among women is as great as between women and men'. This includes, but is not limited, to intergenerational power imbalance.

The other workshop I attended was called 'Therapy for aliens: how John Gray saves the world by rescuing the individual', offered by Sue Weber, a graduate student of the University of Minnesota. Sue Weber calls books like the Mars and Venus series 'heterohelp' as they target women to adjust to their heterosexual relationships. She noted that John Gray advises women to go on 'orgasm diets' rather than put too much pressure on their husbands for sex.

There was also a three day women's film festival, many distributed by Women Make Movies. The documentaries could be divided into three categories: retrieval herstories of famous women (like Tillie Olsen) or less famous forbears (for example women travellers in Canada); heroic tales of 'Third World' women resisting poverty and lack of opportunities to better themselves or their families; the diversity of western women's responses as they deal with contemporary issues such as having sex change operations, carrying firearms or negotiating body image. Ten creative writers also read from their work and discussed its links with ferminist teaching. I attended a play presentation by Carolyn Gage, a lesbian feminist interpretation of 'The Second Coming of Joan of Arc'. It was well researched (as she said, the only thing she invented was that Joan of Arc's mother travelled to Rome on a pilgrimage as a child), compelling, insightful, witty and sad. It would be a great teaching experience if anyone could afford to bring the playwright and performer, Carolyn Gage, to Australia. Her performances in schools and universities provoke considerable discussion (Cgage@javanet.com http://www.javanet.com/~cgage).

There was a book fair, of course, and the 'Women's Smartmart', 'a new and exciting concept' at which women's arts and crafts were on sale and which sought to provide a space for women's activist groups to interact with women's studies scholars. Besides batik, t-shirts and jewellery, one could also purchase a massage. The community organisations represented included Minnesota Women's International league for Peace and Freedom, Minnesota Women's Press (a local women's newspaper with 16 years of service), Minnesota Business and Professional Women, Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women. The SmartMart had a CD-Rom project, 'What can you do with a women's studies degree' which interviewed graduate school educators around the USA to find out.

A lunch time address was given by Eleanor Smeal, three times president of NOW during the battle to have the ERA passed, and now President of Feminist Majority Foundation: 'The foremost source on feminist issues', with 170,000 hits each day and about 20 per cent from outside the USA: http://www.feminist.org. They have a 'feminist alert' list - one can sign up through this website. Campaigns include National Clinic Access Project to monitor attacks on women's health clinics and bring anti-abortion extremists to justice; Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid which has stopped the US and UN from officially recognising the Taliban in Afghanistan until women's human rights have been restored; Choices campaign to educate young women in leadership and political activism. Their slogan is 'feminists are the majority' claimed because a Newsweek/Gallop Poll in 1986 found that 56% of women self-identified as feminist; among young women it was two-thirds. Smeal said, 'We are not waves, second, third, and so on but a seamless movement until human rights are every person's guarantee'. We 'must unite in a global movement', remembering that in some places like Iran 'to be a feminist can cost you your life and has'. She also suggested that if you want to survive as a women's group buy a building. People have to deal with you'. She would like to start a Women's University, noting Chatham describes itself as a feminist college.

34 Travel grants were awarded to graduate students to attend the conference. Other awards include three from the Women of Color Caucus, one an African American Award (the winning entry published in a journal) and two Women of Color awards. Awards in lesbian studies, Jewish women's studies, the Pat Parker poetry award, and the Audre Lord Memorial Prose Prize were also celebrated at the NWSA.

Chilla Bulbeck, Adelaide University
(On study leave at Women's Studies, University of Western Australia, 2001)
chilla.bulbeck@adelaide.edu.au