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Interdisciplinary Leadership, Shamus Khan

“…the logic of response would have been very different”

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SHAMUS KHAN

Associate Professor of Sociology

I absolutely think that the filing of a complaint has meant that the structure of response to gender-based misconduct and sexual assault on campus, overall, has been one of legal compliance to the law rather than systems of justice. Broader systems of justice. So, conceptualizing victim’s justice, for example, which may be less punitive to people who’ve been accused. It may have a very different form. I don’t know that the students were wrong to file the complaint because I don’t know that they would’ve gotten as much attention or institutional response had they not filed the complaint. I also think that it’s important to recall that we’re being led by the president of this university, who is a lawyer. I think in many ways, his response may have been this anyway because a legal framework is the framework that he’s most likely to fall back upon.

My assessment, in thinking that it’s correct that we’re pretty bound, now, to a legal interpretation of Title IX and gender-based misconduct, is that it’s not necessarily the case that the reason for that is the filing of the complaint, although I certainly think it contributed to it. I think alternate things that could have happened would be, for example, imagine if instead of now being run by lawyers—I think the university hired nine lawyers to be investigative and response units to these things—they hired a team of community organizers, psychologists, social workers to respond. I think that then, the logic of response would have been very different. It would have been less about adherence to the law and making sure that our response is consistent with both the requirements of Title IX and the vision articulated within the “Dear Colleague” letter of the Department of Education, the Office of Civil Rights. Instead, could have included all kinds of understandings tied to psychological services for victims and for perpetrators, tied to community-based models of justice.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Lila Abu-Lughod

“This is a political history…”

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LILA ABU-LUGHOD

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

I think our motivation for getting this oral history project is to document how we did our work because this needed to be done here. We’re all in it for a much more political reason and we want that documented…the story we want to tell is the story of how we built this gender institute and kept it a good place and what kind of difference we were trying to make at Columbia. That’s the story we wanted to tell that should be documented because that might all get lost. It’s all, “I remember that Jean [Howard] said this and they did that.”

We want to tell the story of this political history of people who are committed to a certain project and work together to make that happen. It’s also intellectual, but it’s not personal. It is gratifying. These are people I really love and respect, and, of course, because it’s so collegial and such a rare collegial space here, I love that. I cherish that. It is personally meaningful that I go into the room and everybody who walks in, I feel happy to see them. You don’t feel that way everywhere you go. Everybody has goodwill and good faith towards it. That’s rare but partly, I think, because we’re not competing for any resources and there’s a political project as there is a problem—when we have all white men running this institution that we all live in and we know the women’s salaries are lower and we know the women never get to be on Riverside Drive [indicating preferred faculty housing], they get housing elsewhere. You see the inequalities so we’ve got to do something about that, as well as intellectual work of really building a scholarly field and working in it.

Early Challenges, Joan Ferrante

“We did have women but they didn’t stay.”

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JOAN FERRANTE

Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature

Nina Auerbach, Carolyn Burke, Barbara Christian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kate Ellis, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Sandra Gilbert, Gail Green, Alice Jardine, Myra Jehlen, Constance Jordan, Alice Kaplan, Kate Millet, Nancy Milford, Nancy Miller, Lillian Robinson, Naomi Schor, Catharine Stimpson, Susan Suleiman, and Louise Yelin. Many of whom have had stellar careers. They were all here, and could have stayed. Imagine if even a few of them had stayed, the difference it would have made, actually, even in the prestige of the English and French departments, which didn’t have many people of that stature, at least not very many.

Susan Winnett, whose departure caused Carol [Carolyn Heilbrun] to leave, she did something like sixty MA essays in one year, because students so much wanted to work with her, and she worked very hard at it, and she did very well with them. PhD students who wanted to write on women’s studies found ways to provide for themselves. Eventually, they would somehow cobble together a committee for the dissertation that could work. If you get at least one person on there who knows something about the field, then the others sort of fill in. There wasn’t a really solid structure. I think things are much better now there. Of course, Jean [Howard] came, and Margie Ferguson came first, before Jean. That was a great boon, but she didn’t stay. Carol Kay was the partner of Jonathan Arac. She was here for a while. We did have women, but they didn’t stay.

Intellectual Spaces, Laura Ciolkowski

“You can’t study gender in isolation from race, or class, or ethnicity…”

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LAURA CIOLKOWSKI

Associate Director of IRWGS
Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference
Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature

The audience [of the Center for the Study of Social Difference] has always been other faculty, but we’re always interested in expanding that, which is why we launched this blog [Social Difference Online] this past fall. Now that we’ve been taken under the wing of university development, we’re doing a lot more for trustees and alums. There’s a much broader reach at this point. It’s continuing to broaden. That’s a good thing. We have multiple audiences, so that’s a little bit challenging too. Learning how to pitch your research to different constituencies has been a kind of interesting but worthwhile thing. I feel like one should always be able to explain what one is thinking and doing. That’s almost a no-brainer, right? We should never only be talking to other academics. We should all be public intellectuals to some degree. That’s kind of what we’re aiming for.

Part of the competing vision of the center is reflected in the makeup of the working groups. If the vision is strictly an advanced study center, then there’s not a whole lot of artists and activists. It’s more focused on getting together and workshopping papers and discussing things. If the model is more capacious, or more about disseminating ideas and also pushing the boundaries of research and so forth, then you have a project like Women Mobilizing Memory, archives, other projects that are specifically interested in performance, and activism and other things, and do a lot of public programming. That was a big point of contention actually. Do we want to do any public programming? Do we want to do none? Because that takes up time and energy.

The whole idea of the center is to—we were just talking about intersectionality before—it’s really, kind of an outgrowth of that, that one can’t study gender only. You can’t study gender in isolation from race, or class, or ethnicity. It doesn’t make any sense. Certainly if you think about where gender and sexuality studies is going right now, that’s also a no-brainer. Nobody does that. That’s the starting point for pretty much everyone. Our feeling was that obviously IRWGS is immensely relevant and we do really important work, but that we needed something, some other thing, that could pull together the kinds of research, the kinds of work, and the endeavors that go on in these other centers and institutes that otherwise wouldn’t really connect somehow. So the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Institute for Research in African American Studies—the whole litany of everybody [IRWGS, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society]—and that the center would be the place where you wouldn’t have to worry about these kind of disciplinary boundaries. You wouldn’t have to constantly try to make the argument that when one studies gender, one has to think about race, and ethnicity, and class, and all this other stuff. The center is that. I don’t think it could be any other way. The idea is that we’re trying to do something unique in some ways because the way the university is organized, it’s really hard to initiate a working group or research project that addresses these kinds of issues. Where would it go? I’m not sure. It doesn’t fit anywhere and that’s the problem that CSSD was designed to address.

Interdisciplinary Leadership, Shamus Khan

“…the institutional home of power women”

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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…”

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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”

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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, IRWAG to IRWGS, Sarah Chinn

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

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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."

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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”

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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.