UCSB’s Amanda Phillips attended last spring’s FemTechNet conference at UC San Diego. The two day conference focused on “infrastructures and technocultures,” particularly from a media studies and a science studies perspective. Philips’ report from the conference emphasizes the way feminisms are not themselves always projects to be celebrated, but projects built on historical exclusions too — women of color, trans people, etc. I will quote from her liberally here, but go read her whole post An Astounding Display of Ladybrainz (Pt 1): Feminist Infrastructures and Technocultures
Several weeks ago, my colleague Micha Cárdenas sent a message out to the FemTechNet listserv urging them to explicitly address the historical violences, exclusions, and appropriations of “feminism” writ large by constantly qualifying with terms like anti-racist (or my own preferred term, race-conscious), queer/Trans inclusive, and so on. This is particularly important in interdisciplinary feminist events like FemIT – we all approach feminism from such different angles.
There were fewer queer feminists and feminists of color than I am used to in a gathering, but I kept an open mind about the lack of qualifiers in talks and conversations. The conference organizers did, for example, actively encourage us all to think about accessibility: talk more slowly, read your slides, always use a microphone. The extent to which the presenters successfully accommodated these requests differed. While accessibility only scratches the surface of disability activism in and out of the academy, it is a baseline condition that so few conferences achieve. I appreciated this a lot.
But certain small things – segregating graduate student presentations to the second day, when few senior scholars attended, concentrating the women of color in the very last late-night screening session, the handful of serious queer work in the face of “playful” cooptation of concepts like trans subjectivity and queer time, a comment here or presentation there – reminded me of Micha’s important email, and of the work we do when we add all those qualifiers to our feminisms. So many of my friends and colleagues (and, indeed, members of the FemTechNet listserv) insist that “feminism” works against and is respectful of all oppressions, and that anything less is not feminism. However, leaving these inclusions unspoken covers over feminism’s troubling history.
Covering over history is not an appropriate ally move. I loved FemIT, don’t get me wrong – but as a group, we were not conscious enough of the the intersecting racialized, ageist, heterosexist, and ableist exclusions of feminisms and technocultures in academia. I hope in the next iteration, we can correct some of these oversights.
Lilly, thanks for posting Amanda’s words. And Amanda, thanks for writing.
I appreciate reading reflections about this event, both as a participant myself and as someone who wants to organize events that might be places for serious intersectional collaborations to flourish and avoid covering over feminism’s troubling history (and present!).
So those are my particular concerns. And with them in mind, I wonder if we can talk about some of the kinds of inherent problems we’re already dealing with when we organize a conference within a big university’s system.
At the FemTechNet conference, several very different ideas about the University infrastructure emerged pretty early on. Some participants were interested in using University of California resources for future action and building on the inter-campus networks that the UC system has (as far as I know, that’s still in the works), while others were excited by the prospect of dismantling the hierarchies and inequalities that make the UC possible as we know it.
This is the kind of range of politicized engagements with the University structure that we got at the event, and that range (and the clarity w/ which it was articulated) was very interesting to me.
These different engagements may suggest different scenarios for next time. What I mean is: we can learn some lessons here, and as organizers.
For example, we can work to avoid having people who represent a particular kind of subjectivity all speak in the same time block.
That seems straightforward.
But age and status issues are part of the system we’re working in. We’re graduate students, we become junior and then more senior professors, et cetera. I appreciated the idea (or, ok, the possibilities in the idea) of having an all-grad-student day. Something about this hierarchy that we experience seems appreciably different to me than other kinds of hierarchies and the other sorts of exclusions that Amanda writes about above.
If the premise of our work is to tear the system that the U depends on apart, that’s one thing. But I think many of us, myself included, are wondering if we can use and work within the networks and systems of the extant educational system.
Would that make our lessons-learned, strategies-for-next-time different?