Not Drowning But Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts Conference

University of Alberta
October 12-14, 2006

As a way of creating the conditions for the kind of dialogue we want the conference to foster, we have chosen to organize the conference program around a series of five plenary or 'keynote' panels, four of which will feature two speakers, with one panel featuring three. Our aim is to increase the number and range of voices heard, and to promote dialogue among the participants and between the participants and the audience. The plenary speakers have been asked to exchange notes or drafts of their papers in advance of the conference, and all have agreed with enthusiasm. At the conclusion of the conference, six non-plenary participants will offer observations about the discussions that took place over the preceding three days together with suggestions about ways forward.



M. Jacqui Alexander - Teaching for Justice

Certain forms of corporate restructuring that we have witnessed in the last two decades have crept into the academy in ways that are disturbing. The academy has now become a corporate entity that participates in its own version of downsizing, in tying fiscal conservatism to corporate conservatism and in rewriting knowledges that comport with the imperatives of empire. What is the academy's role in an era of globalization? This presentation will juxtapose political organizing among women workers in the global factories with the urgency of teaching for justice in the academic factory, thus challenging us to develop radical pedagogies that engage the knowledges of women who redefine "survival" to mean collective self determination.

[Top]

Len Findlay - Western Feminism and the Multicultural University: Lessons for Libertarians Now

In this paper I will reflect on the current state of Canadian universities as generators of, and homes for, emancipatory intellectual work. I will first read with and against the grain of that powerful but problematic singularity, "Western feminism," as one of the most valuable forces for change in Canadian academe and Canadian society. I will then offer a map of coalitions and conflicts that have arisen or are emerging as a result of the diversification of the student and faculty "bodies" in a publicly funded system in an officially multicultural country like Canada. I will conclude by shifting the scene to notions of the liberal arts, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom--notions which, I will argue, remain extremely important and potentially useful, but only in so far as they are thoroughly, and problematically, refeminized. This set of reflections may, I think, help situate the remarkable career and contributions of Dr. Patricia Clements, and some of the resistances she has faced and overcome.

[Top]


Noreen Golfman - Swimming to Utopia: Feminist Academics at Work

In keeping with the spirit, not to mention the organizing metaphor, of the conference, I wish to speak to the benefits of synchronized swimming in the academy, especially in view of the dominant practice of freestyle racing. I will speak of lessons learned -- and still being gleaned - from my own experience over 25 years working in universities as an administrator, instructor, and community activist. Particular challenges persist for academic women in the spheres of collective bargaining and community or activist engagement, but virtually no area of institutional life makes swimming easy. In particular, I wish to share with the conference a recent case study in feminist problem-solving within the academy, a dramatic instance where a colleague's entire professional future depended on feminist intervention. Perhaps that example might best be described as diving in shallow water.

[Top]


Isobel Grundy - Pre-Professional Women

This paper will look at the relation of women to the professions and to other exclusive institutions of culture during the so-called long eighteenth century. These institutions emerged from Court culture on one hand and from medieval guilds on the other, and became more rigidly controlled by gender than the bodies from which they originated, since the Court and the guilds, though inherently male-dominated and far from ungendered, did not take gender as a primary, defining characteristic, and often had conventions permitting the participation of occasional, exceptional women. I intend to show the degree to which gender functioned as a given, without explicit acknowledgement, in definitions and descriptions of institutions of culture, and how the function of gender in this context was, from a very early period, in various ways contested. I shall touch only very briefly on what might be seen as precursors to the nineteenth-century battles for inclusion. More relevant will be the way that public perception of Quakers and of midwives reflected a hardening assumption that official religion and medicine were and must be gendered male. This paper will consider frictions and areas of contestation around the generally-accepted gendering of professional and cultural institutions as exclusively male.

[Top]


Patricia Demers - Laying the Mosaic Floor: The Tessera of Hilda Neatby, Jill Ker Conway and Patricia Clements

Professor of History Hilda Neatby, the only female member of the Massey Commission, Professor of History Jill Ker Conway, the first woman President of Smith College, and Professor of English Patricia Clements, the first female Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, comprise a remarkably accomplished trio. Emerging from rural backgrounds--Neatby and Clements from small Saskatchewan towns and Conway from an isolated sheep station in the Australian outback--they stepped with panache and conviction onto a national stage. The paper explores the feasibility of intellectual filiation among these forceeful, ambitious and single-minded academic women. Shaped as much by their generation as by their experience of university politics, this trio's understanding of feminism, though idiosyncratic, underscores actions as a central principle. How do we measure success: by structural changes, facilities planned and built, honorary degrees conferred, commemorative stamps issued, and portraits commissioned, or by numbers of acolytes, re-printings, and festschrifts? By examining their writing and the varied histories of reception of their work, the paper entertains the possibility of seeing them as co-workers, if not team members, creating and installing a necessary basis from which to build twenty-first century institutions.

[Top]


Jane Marcus - A Stocking Full of Guineas: Virginia Woolf's Pacifist Weapon

This paper will present a feminist/cultural studies approach to Three Guineas, a radical book by a major European thinker. Here we have Virginia Woolf's last words as a public intellectual, a late pronouncement in a series of works that define her as an important European theorist of feminism, pacifism and socialism. It is part of a series beginning with "A Society" (often called a "short story," but actually an early polemical piece), A Room of One's Own, the speech "Professions for Women," the Introduction to Margaret Llewelyn Davies' Life as We Have Known It, and The Years. Woolf's Marxist economic analysis of women's oppression is very different from the writings of other feminists of the period in that the focus is on a struggle of the middle-class Englishwoman for emancipation from the economic dominance of her fathers and brothers. In Three Guineas, Woolf took that staple of family life, the scrapbook, and used it for recording public events, producing a universal protest from that particular European fascism. Her image in the United States changed utterly. She was no longer the Victorian lady of Bloomsbury but a hard-hitting femnist who had a great deal to say about public issues. As a result, Three Guineas came to play an important role in the foundational debates of Second Wave Feminism in the United States, Britain, Europe and abroad.

[Top]


Christine Overall - What I Learned in Deanland, or The Adventures of a (Female) Associate Dean

This presentation explores some aspects of women's situation vis-a-vis academic leadership. I shall first discuss the liabilities and the benefits of being an administrator. Some of these liabilities and benefits may be common to both women and men, while others are quite specific to women, or are subtly or not so subtly gendered. I will then offer some partial hypotheses as to why women are not advancing further, and in greater numbers. As a philosopher I am interested in what I think are the rationalizations used, both before and after the fact, to try to justify the failure to promote more women. In the third section of my presentation I shall describe what I believe women who wish to advance into academic administration need, both in terms of personal characteristics and support systems. Finally, I shall make the case that taking up a time-limited sojourn in academic administration, as one component of an academic career, is a good idea. I shall conclude by suggesting several reasons why it is extremely important for more women to take up the challenge of academic leadership.

[Top]


Donna Pennee - The Liberal Arts Under Illiberal Administrations: Disciplining Reports, Policies, Programs, and Plans

This paper will examine, from an equity point of view, the rhetoric and material protocols and effects of selected reports, policies, programs, and plans that have been generated by federal, provincial, and university administrations in Canada in the last half century. The purpose of this examination will be to analyze the implications of these obvious effects for the disciplining of PSE demographics and the engineering of the demography of the disciplines. When government policy and programs are so thorougWy acculturated to models of market competitiveness, and university strategic plans acculturated then to follow the money, study of and in the liberal arts becomes new quantified or measured. Though the object of study in the liberal arts has certainly always been bartered, bought, and sold, it has usually also functioned as valuable precisely because it is not "quantifiable," is "other to" or "other than" the market. Without getting nostalgic for liberal arts that perhaps never were, can we nevertheless propose that the liberal arts can be means to different ends? This paper proposes to grabble with such questions.

[Top]


Donna Pennee - The Liberal Arts Under Illiberal Administrations: Disciplining Reports, Policies, Programs, and Plans

This paper will examine, from an equity point of view, the rhetoric and material protocols and effects of selected reports, policies, programs, and plans that have been generated by federal, provincial, and university administrations in Canada in the last half century. The purpose of this examination will be to analyze the implications of these obvious effects for the disciplining of PSE demographics and the engineering of the demography of the disciplines. When government policy and programs are so thorougWy acculturated to models of market competitiveness, and university strategic plans acculturated then to follow the money, study of and in the liberal arts becomes new quantified or measured. Though the object of study in the liberal arts has certainly always been bartered, bought, and sold, it has usually also functioned as valuable precisely because it is not "quantifiable," is "other to" or "other than" the market. Without getting nostalgic for liberal arts that perhaps never were, can we nevertheless propose that the liberal arts can be means to different ends? This paper proposes to grabble with such questions.

[Top]


Jane Ash Poitras - Feminism Menism Menopause Womenpause

I started life on shaky ground. My mother was too sick with tuberculosis to care for me, then died when I was six. I was left in a house with people who could no longer care for me, and put me out on the street with only a dirty little dress in a paper bag.

After some time wandering around Riverdale, I was spotted by an elderly German widow who scooped me up and took me home with her. She told no one about me for three weeks, until her adult son noticed she was acting rather suspiciously. Finally, she walked over to the closet, brought me out and said, "look what I found.!"

Of course his first response was, "take it back." But where? So they phoned Social Services and a social worker showed up. Lo and behold, I could stay with her until, maybe, someone would claim me. With my luck, this never happened.

So I was raised in a home with no male figure, just her, a menopausal widow who did not know a thing about Indians except that there were a few she had seen on 97th Street, and she definitely did not want anyone to know that I was one of those poor cases. Yes, I was a welfare case. Fortunately I outgrew that one.

I know I was asked to talk about feminism. Well, I remember when I was young, like a kicked dog I was quite scared of men. If a man ever walked into the house I would run and hide. The only men that I became comfortable with were the priests in that so-called Holy Catholic Church. Today I don't know if that would be so kosher.

She would take me every day to church, morning, evening and night. That was her whole life. At one point I even considered becoming a nun. Talk about feminism there!

I was too great a sinner to become a nun, and today some say I am a feminist instead.

The men I got involved with in early adulthood were mean and stingy. Of course, being naïve, I would feel sorry for the poor things and surrender my pay cheque to them. Often all I got was abuse in return.

I soon realized that if you're going to have power you have to keep your own money, and if you get married, don't give away your name.

So for quite a while I cruised through life, working and going to university. Although I had casual male friends, I didn't trust any of them. And when my girlfriends ended up in all kinds of messes because of their relationships with men my fears were vindicated.

Now I'm the only woman in a house full of men-two grown sons, their father, and my artist assistant. Even the dog and my favourite cat are male.

Has that changed my views?

I'll let you know when I make my presentation.

Link to bearclaw gallery

[Top]


Marjorie Stone - Sex Trafficking in the 19th and 21st Centuries: Feminism, Social Justice, and the Liberal Arts

Among the 2.5 million people trafficked into forced labour gobally, recent ILO estimates identify more half (1.4 million) "in forced commercial sexual exploitation." Despite the measures thus far taken by NGOs such as the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women, the UN, the European Union, the US "Trafficking in Persons" initiative, and by other governments, including Canada's, sex trafficking is not declining, but growing in scope, sophistication, and invisibility (Gramenga). It is also increasingly networked with other forms of trafficking, include the trade in human organs, and with mainstream commerce such as sex tourism (Ryan & Hall). Trafficked women and girls are "not waving but drowning," in many cases-though surviving, against great odds in others-and the state they find themselves in at the beginning of the 21st century provides an important measure for the successes and failures of third wave feminism.

While the paper I propose will draw on Teresa Ebert to critique some of these failures in passing, I will principally focus on arguing for the value of the liberal arts to the pressing social justice issue of trafficking. First, I will treat some historical parallels between what Victor Malarek terms the "new global sex trade" and the so called "white slave trade" exposed by Josephine Butler, W. T. Stead and members of the Salvation Army in the 1880s and1890s (documented by Jordan & Sharp). These parallels have passed unmentioned in recent Canadian studies of sex trafficking (McDonald & Timoskina, Magaly San Martin), given that these generally come from disciplines such as sociology and political science (not history or literature), and given the "presentism" that views economic globalization as a recent development. Secondly, I will consider how the response to sex trafficking has been inflected by race, ethnicity, and national ideologies, both in the 19th century and our own time, and further complicated by issues of definition, intelligibility, visibility, identity and agency. Finally, I will illustrate some of these problems by reframing Marian Earle in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) as a "trafficked," not a "fallen" woman, and argue that the representation of Marian was probably shaped by accounts of mid-Victorian trafficked girls-not simply by "sensational" French novels, as Margaret Reynolds suggests. I will conclude by pointing to the similar need, in the 21st century, to reframe trafficked women and girls not as "illegal aliens" on the one hand, or "sex workers" on the other, but as individuals subjected to a new form of de facto slavery.

[Top]


Asha Varadharajan - Thinking the Universal Singular: Femininity in the Next World Order

In her characteristically blunt and wry fashion, Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience." Without, for the moment, taking the predicament of Abu Ghraib into consideration, I want to suggest that Ehrenreich's formulation rather neatly encapsulates my training and predilections within the discourse of feminist theory, even as it delineates the persistence of the struggle among anti-essentialist, strategically essentialist, universalist, and embodied feminisms. My studies with Luce Irigaray, Kaja Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis, and my subsequent engagement with the writings of Gayatri Spivak, more or less ensured that my theoretical interventions in feminism would shift the emphasis from explicitly woman-centred or recognizably feminist claims to those that contended with multiple axes of social and cultural determination inflected with the "feminine" as a discursive entity (en)gendered in predictable but compelling ways. My writing, in this regard, has sought to heed Irigaray's exhortation to jam the patriarchal machinery rather than to insist, defensively, upon an elsewhere in which the feminine might comfortably reside. I am not, of course, unique in this approach, but it is worth defining nonetheless.

The feminine, more than ever, is equally ground and symptom, framework and example, history and trope. The difference, perhaps, is that my interrogation of the feminine cannot be conducted outside of the framework of a transnational politics and of a renewed commitment to the reconfiguration of the human(e). The current world order, and this is implicit in Ehrenreich's comment, poses with genuine urgency the demise of the illusions of (Western?) feminism and of the feminine as unquestionable moral high ground without rendering the alternative either visible or viable. In other words, the rhetoric of difference produces a polarization between worlds, genders, and sexualities that we cannot afford while the rhetoric of opposition to exploitation and victimhood makes it impossible to account for nuance, unpredictability, complicity, and, indeed, horror. How, then, might the feminine "[represent] the place of a singularity which harbours the seed of the universal" (Irigaray 2000)?

In resigning itself to ask the "where do we go from here" question, my paper will offer domains, practices, and representations in which the contours of commitment to the feminine become disarticulated and reoriented. One such avenue of inquiry might be two films, one fictional and the other ethnographic, which explore cinema as the site of embodiment and intervention in a manifestly in-different world in the throes of a global economy. If the global economy has made it imperative to reconstitute feminist cultural politics as a transnational endeavour, contemporary cinema must be read in the light of its renewed attempts to account for and to translate (for want of a better word) "otherness." The culture industry, for the most part, mimics the traffic in labouring and desiring bodies endemic to the survival of transnational capitalism but Srinivas Krishna's Lulu (a prescient and unfortunately nearly forgotten film) and Nilita Vachani's When Mother Comes Home for Christmas (rarely studied outside of the purview of documentary cinema), are exceptions to the rule. Krishna explores the seemingly impenetrable surface of the Vietnamese mail order bride against the backdrop of a thriving organ trafficking enterprise while Vachani traces the movement of female domestic labour from Sri Lanka to Greece in order to uncover and displace the economy of affect that drives the distinction between home and work in the liberal state and the bourgeois household in the First World. Not only do these films rethink the contours of migrant sensibility in a new world order, but also, in their rigorous interrogation of the cinematic gaze and the sources of cinematic pleasure, cast serious doubt on the ethics of a Third Cinema founded on the semiotic play of representations. Krishna and Vachani ask, in profound terms, whether respect and dignity for the objectified, exploited, and dispossessed is possible within the global economy's conditions of representability. I will leave the consequences of such disarticulation and reorientation for the discourse of feminism as the surprise element of my presentation.

[Top]