All posts by lizhibbard@gmail.com

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Shamus Khan

“…the institutional home of power women”

Audio

SHAMUS KHAN

Associate Professor of Sociology

When Alondra [Nelson] first asked me about joining IRWGS, she said to me, “Well, one big advantage of joining is that you will meet the power women of the university.” The Jean Howards and Alice Kessler-Harrises of the university, chairs of departments, things like that. This is one of the institutional homes of the power women. She said, “We’re a pretty male department. It’s important for you to do this anyway, I think. You should really think about it.”

There was also a sense, I think, when Alondra took over, of a little bit—it’s hard to me to say, but—unease because it seemed as if it was a little rearrangement of the institution. I don’t know if there hadn’t been a lot of new people joining in previous years, but it seems like there’s just a lot of new people there, drawing from a wide range of places, scientists. Not all of them clearly do research on gender, women, and sexuality. Some of us are peripherally—like, it’s a secondary research project, or it’s a different kind of research. There’s stuff on men and masculinity. It’s also from, like I’d said, biology, but also a broader range of disciplines, so not as humanistic in its approach.

It’s an interesting shift because I think that the primary teaching that goes on in that department, in the institute, happens through the history/humanistic people, but the people who are making up the—like, I’ve never taught a course that was cross-listed with IRWGS. I suspect I’m not totally unique in that way. It’s strange, on the one hand, for me to be on the Executive Committee because of my very—what is it that I do for the institute? It’s not totally clear.I think that the bringing in of these new people has brought in new people, but I don’t know how much restructuring there’s been of the overall curriculum and place of the institute. The role that we have to play, I think, is still to be determined in terms of driving the institute forward in the years to come.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, IRWAG to IRWGS, Marcellus Blount

“…to expand the category of gender…”

Audio

MARCELLUS BLOUNT

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

It was very productive for me to see that feminist studies begat queer studies, which enabled me to see African American studies differently. So I began to work in this field that’s now variously populated with really exciting young scholars. At that moment, I have to say, my work was met with some resistance. “Why, Marcellus, are you taking on yet another battle?” I got that. I got that. It just seemed to me that it was so productive to think about gender, to expand the category of gender, to expand the objects that the category of gender allows us to see anew. It was the logical consequence of the kind of work that I wanted to do, even though at times—I began lecturing widely on this moment in African American literature that was defined by the loss of writers at precisely the time in African American studies you began to see these communities of queer writers. The focus of our work is defined by trauma and loss. I did a lot of—that’s actually the moment which maybe began to be a bridge between my activism and my scholarship, thinking about people like Essex Hemphill and Melvin Dixon and Joe Beam, reading the works that began to be produced, like the anthology Brother to Brother by Essex, or Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, and how gay men moved necessarily to the forefront of political struggles for African American men. Theoretically it made sense to think, how does gender shape how we think about men.

I’d been focusing on liberating women from the small spaces that men place them in and it became important to me to think about liberating men from those small spaces in which they place themselves. So, a more expansive notion of masculinity, a more supple notion of masculinity was important not just for women or for gay men, but for heterosexual men as well, a different kind of politics of liberation.

Core Faculty, Intellectual Spaces, Lila Abu-Lughod

“…we need an intellectual space”

Audio

LILA ABU-LUGHOD

Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science
IRWGS Core Faculty
IRWGS Director, 2004-07

Many of the people who still don’t have lines in IRWGS we consider main, main members of our community, like Jean Howard. She doesn’t have an official line there, but that’s one of her big homes. A lot of people were committed but a lot of people drifted off and worked on other institutes, but then we were anchored by the four lines, with half of our teaching obligation and administrative is in IRWGS, and now there are six, six or seven. So that’s pretty stable, and they’re major, senior people. There were no tenure battles. Many departments flounder over supporting or not supporting a junior person. We didn’t have any of that. We don’t have admissions. We’ve resisted from the beginning. We don’t want to have a PhD. We don’t even want an MA. We like it the way it is—it’s a place people go to because they genuinely want to be there, because they care about it, and it doesn’t get caught up in this bureaucratic stuff and fighting over resources. Why not have a space like that? We have enough of it in our own departments, so let’s have a place that’s not like that. I think most people feel that way about IRWGS, that you don’t have any of that going on.

I think a lot of people feel we need an intellectual space. Not all departments are intellectual spaces for people. There are many departments that are problematic for people. Either they don’t fit in them or there are nasty histories. One’s department is not actually always the intellectual center for you and you have interests that actually go well with other people’s interests who are not in your discipline. This is an opportunity to follow the themes of your research with people who are interested in the same things.

We think this is all part of gender studies too. It’s enriching what IRWGS does and giving opportunities to IRWGS faculty to have conferences, to have working groups, to develop ideas. I know it comes up there and we know it, because we know how much effort it took to start the thing. Sometimes we think, look, why isn’t Women Creating Change under IRWGS and just skip CSSD [Center for the Study of Social Difference]? But then it would have to be curricular. IRWGS is a curricular unit. It teaches undergraduates. It has a graduate certificate and it does public programming. That’s what it does. The research side had never been part of it. All that research is done now through CSSD.

Early Challenges, Martha Howell

“…what was needed was departmental buy-in”

Video

MARTHA HOWELL

Miriam Champion Professor of History
IRWGS Director, 1989-94

Because I had run women’s studies at Rutgers, first as associate director and then as director when the existing director left, and in fact had been participating in it the whole time I was there, I knew a lot about the problems of a separate women’s studies program and the risks of isolating it too much and of politicizing it so much that it becomes a platform for protest and loses a kind of academic grounding. I was very aware that, at Columbia, that would be death because what we needed was departmental buy-in and administrative buy-in. We needed to be able to train graduate students and not to have faculty members saying, “What are you doing over there?” That required careful planning. I think one of the things that was a good thing to do was to build possibilities for people who do women’s studies with a disciplinary focus and, in fact, we required that. You did women’s studies with a grounding in political science or economics or history. We did a pre-med women’s studies major so that the women’s studies wasn’t dragged out or positioned as an alternative to a discipline but integrated in a discipline. We also thought it would be easier for the women—it was always women—who wanted to major in women’s studies to defend the choice to their parents. There are lots of places where there’s an argument that there is a methodology and a disciplinary project of women’s studies, and that what we should be doing is thinking about women’s studies as a discipline, not as a wedge that transforms disciplines. My opinion was that, at Columbia, we needed to think about it as the latter, and that was partly the politics of the institution decision.

Part of this came from struggles I had seen at Rutgers. The decision at Rutgers was like the decision we made here. Puerto Rican studies was my model of how not to do it because it had been carved out as a special discipline. It had no connection to history, Spanish, and the faculty in those disciplines didn’t take Puerto Rican studies seriously. So the students—and a lot of Rutgers students were Puerto Rican heritage or, in fact, they’d come from Puerto Rico themselves—they would be clustered in that department with no access. They could take undergraduate lecture courses in other disciplines, and I’m sure they got advice from their professors to do that, but they weren’t taken up by the disciplines. I never believed—and this is just me—that there really was a particular methodology of ethnic studies that could be separated from thinking systematically about the history, and using the methods of inquiry that historians use, or thinking about how economic systems work and studying economic sociology and then thinking about the Puerto Rican experience through that and then rethinking the models that come out of economic sociology once you inject that particular experience of this ethnic group in America. That’s an intellectual decision that I made, but the decision I made here was really governed as much by, I just thought it would fail as a program if we isolated it. Most people agreed.

Farah Griffin, Intellectual Spaces, Interdisciplinary Leadership

“How does intellectual history look different?”

Video

FARAH GRIFFIN

William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies

I was having dinner one night with three colleagues who were historians at different institutions. Martha Jones, who had been a graduate student of Eric Foner’s here, Mia Bay, who taught at Rutgers, Barbara Savage, at University of Pennsylvania, and we were lamenting the way that the intellectual labors of Black women went ignored and under-appreciated and under-resourced. One of those laments over a bottle of wine. Then we thought, even the study of Black intellectuals, which was very much central to what IRAAS [Institute for Research in African American Studies] did, was impoverished when it came to Black women intellectuals. We decided, wouldn’t it be great to have some kind of a collaborative project where we figured out what work had already been done, and we also thought about where the voids were, and help to support scholars who were trying to do that work. So we organized a meeting, which was just a kind of information gathering meeting where we invited people who had either written histories of Black women intellectuals, biographies. Who was out there doing the work, and what did they feel like was needed?

We organized a meeting that was held at Rutgers, and then, eventually, after that meeting, we saw there was some interest and we applied for an NEH grant. A lot of work. We didn’t get it. Not a lot of the criticism, but some of the criticism was that we didn’t have enough representation of conservative intellectual women. That it wasn’t balanced. We were determined that we were going to do this project, and we’d do it on a shoestring if we had to. It wouldn’t be as big, it wouldn’t be as ambitious.

By that time, the Center for the Study of Social Difference had come up, and we presented the project to them and they funded it. What was great about their funding it is they gave us a set amount of money. IRAAS gave us money. Then we could take that to raise other money, to go to other institutions. Martha at University of Michigan, Barbara at University of Pennsylvania, Mia at Rutgers, and say, “This is the money that these Columbia centers and institutes have already given us. Can you ante up some?” All those institutions contributed to this working group, interdisciplinary, intergenerational institutions from public to private. We had people who were representative of small colleges, large universities, Black colleges, who formed this collective and really worked together as a working group on our projects and on our papers, holding several conferences.

Then we were able to use the resources that we got from the center to hold a big, international conference at the end. Because what we always wanted to do was put the work out there, but really put a call out there to say, here’s a place where you can do this kind of work. If you’re working on Black women intellectuals, you’re not working alone. We’re trying to figure this out. What does it look like? How does intellectual history look different? Who do we count as an intellectual? It’s not necessarily someone with a PhD from Oxford. Some of these women never had PhDs, but they had ideas that were important.

It was the kind of project that I just really love being a part of, because in terms of content, I learned so much. It supported my own work. It supported the work of people whose work I wanted to read. But institutionally, it did something, because we had these younger scholars who were going through the tenure process, and they were able to be mentored by senior scholars in the group, who were reading closely their work and writing letters for them. It brought the idea of intellectual history, of Black women’s intellectual history to all these campuses, graduate students. It did both work on the ground and work at the level of ideas. Institutional transformation on the ground and—

I think that’s what something like the center and IRWGS is best at doing. That what it does collectively is also transformative for a field, intellectually, but also institutionally. IRWGS has supplied leadership for the university. Jean [Howard]’s work with IRWGS, and then she’s the Vice Provost of Diversity or the chair of the English department. Alondra [Nelson] is now Dean of Social Science. That these are people who come from this small unit, and they are also the hardest working people I know.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Jean Howard

“It was called the Office for Diversity Initiatives…”

Video

JEAN HOWARD

George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities
IRWGS Director, 1997-99

While I was in the Huntington, writing away on my book, Martha [Howell] and Alice [Kessler-Harris] and Lila [Abu-Lughod] and a group of people at the institute, Susan Sturm in the Law School, decided to lobby Lee [Bollinger] to set up some kind of position in the provost’s office where somebody would be responsible for improving the statistics on women and minorities on this faculty. And he needed this position—they said, you’ve got to have somebody dedicated to it. If it’s everybody’s responsibility, nothing’s going to happen. They persuaded him, and because I had done the pipeline report, they thought I could do it. So when I came back, weirdly, I came right back into this newly-created position, which was the most terrifying event of my life because I had never run such a thing. What was it to be a vice provost?

I knew from the beginning—I was going to run this with the help of other faculty, because I would need their legitimacy very badly, and I’d be their labor power since we didn’t have any office. So I got this office with a conference room, thank God. Best resource I ever had was a conference room. It was called the Office for Diversity Initiatives.

I set up this committee of faculty advisors to help me decide what we would do. We immediately said, well, one thing we’re not going to do is do a diversity action plan, because that will take a year or two years, and I have a drawer full of diversity action plans from every other university, and they all look the same. The idea is not to have the plan, it’s to do something. So we dispensed with the two years of doing a diversity action plan, and we just started to do action. Do initiatives, do things. We knew the first thing we had to do was get target of opportunity money so that we could start hiring and make the faculty believe that there were actually going to be more women in the sciences and more diverse people in the disciplines. We hired, or helped to hire, twenty-three or twenty-four in the three-year period. It was a fabulous run of exquisite hiring, all done with the faculty completely involved and completely vetting everybody. Nobody was ever forced to take anybody, it was always choice. That was the big thing.

But this committee was so visionary, it also knew that we needed a work/life office. We didn’t have one at Columbia. You can’t hire women in the sciences if you don’t have any provision better than we did for childcare, and all kinds of things. So we set up a work/life office, we set up a HERC, which is a consortium with a lot of area schools so you put all your jobs online so that if you have somebody coming in who has a spouse and needs employment and you can’t do it at Columbia, you have this huge bank of jobs. We set all that up, got that running. We set up affinity groups so that Black faculty coming into this place would, in the first month, be greeted by Black faculty from all over the university, so that they would feel that they were people that they could turn to. We set up these dinners where we train search committees about how you do proactive diversity searches. It was so great because faculty led them and faculty presented the data and presented the research that we had done on implicit bias, and all kinds of things.

We read, as a committee, all this research to figure out what we thought was good research that would convince the rest of the faculty that what we were saying was true, so it was all either data-driven or research-driven. All of this we did in the three years.

Early Challenges, IRWAG to IRWGS, Sarah Chinn

“…was it happening curricularly on the graduate level? Not really.”

Audio

SARAH CHINN

Professor of English, Hunter College

Intellectually there wasn’t push back. No one said no, you can’t do this, or this isn’t an appropriate field. The students were very aware of lesbian and gay studies, queer theory, as a thing. Well, for example, when we brought Eve Sedgwick or Judith Butler, it was standing room only. There was just no room in the room. But was it happening curricularly on the graduate level? Not really. Anne McClintock was there, and she was starting to do works on the sex industry. I took a class with her on narratives of the sex industry. So there was that, and she was super queer friendly. There were definitely faculty there who were very open to queer work, and did gender and sexuality in their work. So a lot of the Early Modernists, the work that was being done on cross dressing and that kind of stuff. But there was not a sense of a political commitment to lesbian and gay studies in the same way. Do you know what I mean? And there were no courses, to my memory, that were focused on that. No, we felt like we were doing this thing, but there was no negative response. People were like, “Oh, okay, great. Go ahead, go for it. We have a little bit of money we can give you, but that’s about it.”

IRWAG was very supportive, very supportive from the very beginning. I don’t know if we could have done what we did really without them, because they had a space we could use, and they gave us like forty dollars a month for refreshments and stuff like that, and that’s not nothing. Also as someone who’d come out of women’s studies and been really involved in the Yale Women’s Center, to me the place you go is where the feminist work is being done. That’s where you go, and it’s true here at Hunter as well. The really important gender and sexuality work I think is happening in women’s and gender studies. That’s where it’s happening, and that’s where it’s happening on the ground with the students. That’s where the nurturing of students doing sexuality studies is happening, in a concentrated way.

Early Challenges, IRWAG to IRWGS, Mario DiGangi

"It was the first time that we had a graduate student conference dealing with lesbian and gay studies issues."

Audio

MARIO DIGANGI

Professor of English, Lehman College

 

All I remember was someone had the bright idea of, you know, we’ve been doing these local events now for several years and we’ve been bringing in these great speakers, and why don’t we do a conference? At the time there was the annual lesbian and gay studies conference, and I think right around then that conference started at Yale, and I think maybe around that year it was at Rutgers, so there was kind of an annual, big, national lesbian and gay studies conference that was being held in the Northeast around that time, but we thought, let’s just do a conference for graduate students.

I remember that we just came up with a bunch of questions that we wanted to address in this conference and we sent out a call for papers––we got a mailing list. We made this really cool poster and we sent to English and gender studies departments and stuff all around the Northeast, and we thought it has to be local-ish because we just can’t afford. So we sent them to colleges and stuff all over the Northeast. I don’t remember the questions we asked but they were probably just things like, how as graduate students do we negotiate the challenges of doing work in an emerging field? What are the personal and professional possibilities, but also risks that we take? I went on the market in 1994, and I remember having discussions with all of these people––my friends––about to what degree do you come out as a job candidate. What do you write on your CV? Do you occlude things? Do you euphemize things? We were really talking about it, which is kind of shocking to think. In the end, I don’t think any of us did [occlude anything]. We were like, well, this is silly––I wrote a dissertation on homoeroticism, I’ve got to say that! What am I going to say? But I think other things like involvement in activist groups and other things that were less academic but were gay, I think we had serious discussions about to what degree do you occlude those kinds of things, because people––if you’re applying to a job in the Midwest or the South, people might be freaked out if you say you’re a member of ACT UP or you did community organizing for ACT UP. Whatever it is. Those were also the kinds of questions that we wanted to ask. How you negotiate your personal identity? So it was that kind of––very pragmatic. Just how do we survive and thrive as graduate students, as teachers and researchers who are working in a new scholarly area that also comes with certain risks? Being that it’s a possibly controversial subject.

We had this great one-day conference, and I think it was really, really meaningful for a lot of us, again, because we wanted to hear our graduate student peers at other institutions. It was the first time, I think, that we had really just this graduate student conference dealing with lesbian and gay studies issues. I don’t think that really had happened before.

Early Challenges, Interdisciplinary Leadership, Marcellus Blount

“…a shared institutional history”

Audio

MARCELLUS BLOUNT

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Being involved in feminist issues at Columbia shaped my work in the way that’s probably the most profound, in a sense that my training had been very masculinist. Through sharing work with Susan [Winnett], or the mentorship with Carolyn [Heilbrun], and then getting involved in the work that Jean Howard and Martha Howell were beginning to do, and others certainly, I thought: why, in African American literary studies, aren’t we attending more to questions of how women might be writing differently, in terms of the construction of a racial subject? That was very important to me and it came from my association with people at Columbia. It wasn’t a part of my training as a scholar. I donated a lot of time to the politics of the institutionalization of feminist concerns at Columbia, but it helped to shape me as a scholar, so it was time that was really well spent.

The vision of feminism was far more heterogeneous than it had been at other institutions where these programs had developed earlier on. In that sense intellectually, theoretically there was a space for me, but also in terms of identity politics it made sense that African American Studies and women’s studies had a shared history, a shared institutional history. Just as some of these people had been very helpful to me in lobbying for African American studies, I felt that I wanted to be helpful to them.

Historical Context, Joan Ferrante

“Setting the picture of the women who were originally involved…”

Audio

JOAN FERRANTE

Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature

Let me start setting the picture, first, of the women who were originally involved. In the early days—that is, in the ’60s—the only place women normally could teach at Columbia—and I’m not including Barnard, which was a separate operation altogether—was at General Studies. There were quite a few women on the faculty at General Studies, and because the graduate school didn’t have the same sense that the college [Columbia College] had, that our precious young men must be protected from women at all costs, they were encouraged to teach in the graduate school as well. So we taught in General Studies and in the graduate school.

That was the setting. There we were. Now, we got paid less, as we discovered later, than the men, and so forth. The men taught in the Core Curriculum. They got—I believe it was a year off after teaching three years in the Core Curriculum. We got no time off, so we had to do our research on top of the teaching, with no help at all, which meant it was much harder to get tenure for the women and so forth. That’s the sort of background.

Our department had four tenured women when affirmative action began, and all of us had come through General Studies originally, and then taught in the graduate school. By twenty years later, we had six tenured women in the department. Some of the older ones had retired and some new ones had come in, but there was a net gain of two in twenty years. Princeton, meanwhile, in those same twenty years, had gone from two to nineteen, and other places were making some sort of advances. Nobody was doing too much, but Columbia was particularly recalcitrant. It absolutely did not want to give an inch. It kept saying, “We have to worry about quality.” The truth of it is that a lot of the people, particularly in the humanities, which is what I know most about—although the sciences were never very good with women at any level—they tended to be a little old-fashioned in their approach to things. Women were not only presenting a different face to the faculty, but they were also doing different kinds of things, and that was a problem.