Pictured Kate Millet and Judith Halberstam. Photos by Tracy Baim
Past, present and future feminists packed into a crowded auditorium Saturday at the University of Chicago.
Kate Millett, Judith Halberstam and Dorothy Allison were among the speakers at 'Back to the Future: Generations of Feminism,' sponsored by U of C's Center for Gender Studies.
Halberstam spoke of forgetfulness as an opportunity to create wholly new insights. Kate Millet spoke of forgetfulness and disconnection as the current state of feminism.
Halberstam, the author of Female Masculinity, Flexible Politics: Feminism and Transgender Activism, is a professor of literature, currently teaching classes in cultural studies, gender studies, film theory and queer studies at the University of California San Diego. She spoke from a paper she called 'Transgender Feminism and the Evolution of the Clownfish,' using the memory-challenged character in Finding Nemo voiced by Ellen DeGeneres to make a point about forgetfulness being useful in a generation of feminists who might otherwise continue old, unconsidered paradigms.
She said that feminism has been brought forward from the 1970s in a mother-daughter, teacher-student way and that the power-over paradigm is embedded in feminist teaching. While 'mothers' in feminism are frustrated that 'daughters' are not willing to continue their line of inquiry, 'daughters' struggle to make older women see the regulatory systems in the paradigms that they have tried to pass on to them both in the message and the method. She spoke of the key concept of the conference, generationality, as early feminism being treated like an embarrassing mother that has to be pushed aside. She said that feminist theory can't stand separate from the state of feminism but is part of it and itself requires investigation.
Halberstam compared butches to 'bois' as an example of generationality. 'Bois are into fun and sex, and butches are 'adult.' If you're a butch, you're a grown up, a man of the house,' say the young feminists.
Millet, who's Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation Sexual Politics articulated key concepts of the first wave of the women's movement, feminist literary criticism and cultural politics of the 1970s, spoke of the lack of connection between today's feminists and the past, and today's feminists in this country and women in other parts of the world.
Millet was born 1934 in St Paul, Minn.; was educated at Oxford; became a sculptor; published Sexual Politics in 1970; The Prostitution Papers in 1973; Flying, her autobiography, in 1974; and Sita, about her love affair with another woman, in 1977. In 1979 she was expelled from Iran where she had been working for women's rights. In 1990 she published The Loony Bin Trip, about her mental breakdown, and in 1994 published The Politics Of Cruelty, An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment.
At Saturday's conference, she took the opportunity to educate about the gender wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and then to make her point about forgetfulness and disconnection.
She spoke of war as male against female in Afghanistan, Taliban against woman, guns against burkas.
'Here [Afghanistan] was sexual politics,' Millet said. 'Women in the U.S., secure in our privileges, forgetting how recently our own lives were similarly circumscribed or tangential, couldn't quite believe it at first. You mean, they couldn't go outside at all? They must stay home always? They couldn't go to school, earn a living? Starve if they have no man to feed them? Cannot appear in public without a male relative? Have no independent existence at all? A life so full of nonentity we can hardly conceive of it.
'Then for a brief while we were coming awake to this fact with all its repercussions. Some of us were identifying with the women of this place and it had to be stopped and we were women of the U.S. of A. who should identify with women throughout the world—but do not—and with these women most of all. What keeps us apart? Everything. Beginning with the burka, that strange garment rendering her invisible at least as a personality, as a unique being.
'Then it became demystified. We met them. They came to speak around the U.S. to packed halls, in English ... beautiful, intelligent women speaking of the horrors of their lives, the deaths prepared for them. Then we fell back to the ignorance of each other. The fact that we no longer hear, even distantly. We who have identified with them wonder why, and remember when feminism was in force in U.S. life and wonder why we are silent now.'
Other speakers at the morning panel were Aihwa Ong, professor of anthropology at Berkeley. She works on gender, labor, capital, and liberalism in Southeast Asia, China, and the U.S. She criticized the 'naval gazing' of U.S. feminists who worry about 'self' but forget about the life-threatening dangers faced by women in other countries.
Like Halberstam, Nancy K. Miller, one of the best-known and most influential feminist literary critics, spoke about memory and the need to make feminism more current to today's youth.
The question and answer session was a bit heated, with Halberstam continuing to stress the need to change how feminism is passed down to new generations, and others pointing out the need to still learn lessons from the past. Throughout, speakers returned to the uneasy balance between looking to the past and looking to a future where feminism will change and be changed by feminists and issues which have yet to arise.
humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/cgs/conferences.htm
