Videos

Alondra Nelson, Core Faculty, Interdisciplinary Leadership

“…I’m giving up a lot of what’s important to me to hopefully do this other kind of work…”

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ALONDRA NELSON

Dean of Social Science, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies
IRWGS Directors, 2013-14

We really wanted to both create a space for students so we, when I was director, allowed students to use the space for student groups, for meetings, anything that they wanted to do. We also started this, as part of the Queer Futures series, a series of explicit talks around lesbian and gay issues but issues around transgender in particular. There was just so much I wanted to do and to accomplish. When I met with David [Madigan] in December, when he offered the job to me—so it’s the second conversation. I first said to him, “Is it a fulltime job? Can I do that and still direct the institute?” He like jumped back and said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody’s ever asked. Let me think about it. I’d have to ask,” but that was my first impulse was to really want to continue that work, because I loved doing that work. I felt like we were doing—it just felt special and we were getting better at outreach. We were really expanding the Twitter feed and the Facebook feed and bringing students into the space and having more students at events. When I first came to the institute, we sometimes had big, well-attended events, but that was not the norm. We would have events where you just had a couple of people and some crickets. I always thought that that was such a shame. Part of it was, one of the first things I did was to really schedule out for almost a whole year, such that when Patricia [Dailey] became director this year—actually the event that was last week with Jeffrey McCune, I planned that event. I just was planning out so you could give people enough notice.

It was often the case that we were planning things a month ahead, two weeks ahead, and people just have other commitments and can’t make it. One of the things I wanted to do in part to increase the size of the community and grow the conversations, was to just to be able to give people more notice and be better about advertising and these sorts of things. Certainly one of my major reservations, if there were two or three, was no longer being central in the leadership of the institute, not only as director, but even DUS/DGS [director of undergraduate studies/director of graduate studies], nothing. After it became clear to me that no, I could not both be Dean of Social Science and director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, but moreover, I could probably not be Dean of Social Science and teach. That was a lot. I’m giving up a lot of what’s important and what feeds me, to hopefully do this other kind of work. Lots of reservations.

David, to his credit, took a lot of meetings with me and Sharon Marcus, who was the DGS at the institute for a time. After a few meetings we each had with David, we pretty much decided to negotiate the terms of our contracts together. I love this because it is such a feminist action, practice, instinct. Who would think to do that? It’s like, “Let’s negotiate our contracts together.” We had a little labor union of two. To be able to think that through with someone who also had never thought about this, it felt like a safety blanket that we could say, “Well, what about this?” and we would go back and forth thinking about that. That actually really helped with the decision, both because Sharon and I would be doing it together, starting together, but also because we had a lot of rich conversations in which we talked through what we thought we needed or might need or, “Had you thought about this?” “No, I’d never thought about that.” “You were thinking about that? Oh my goodness.”

That was one of the things that allowed me to feel comfortable in taking the position.

Early Challenges, Jean Howard

“Feminist thinkers were thinking with all those who had come before…”

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JEAN HOWARD

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

Martha [Howell] and I decided we would teach a graduate course together, and one of the services we thought we would do for the university is—so many departments didn’t have any feminism at all. So we didn’t want a graduate program, but we wanted graduate courses that people could take from any department, and they’d mostly be team-taught, and we would give them training in feminist methodology. Martha and I boldly decided we’d teach the first one, and we put together what I can only describe in retrospect as the most ridiculous syllabus that I’ve ever seen, because it was so ambitious.

We were teaching Marx and Freud and Foucault, because they’re basic to feminist theory. But then we were teaching psychoanalytic feminism, and we were teaching Marxist feminism and we were teaching Black feminism and the syllabus was just overwhelming. And we had something like twenty students in there. The two of us, we were reading like crazy. Every week we’d call up and say, “Have you read the Freud yet?” “Can you do that part and I’ll do this part?” It completely exhausted us. It was an exhilarating course. So many of the students who took it—Gina Dent was in that one, Colleen Lye was in that one, and people who have gone on to be big scholars. It was completely exhilarating but it was very combative because it was the early days and everybody had their take. It wasn’t calm teaching. It was like, “Is that right?” Or, “Shouldn’t we do it this way,” or, “What about Black feminists?” It was, like, high-energy level as well as enormous intellectual challenge.

After that, we decided to striate the curriculum a bit, and we would have a more introductory course that would do certain key thinkers, and then we’d have more focused courses on special topics. Gradually, we got a graduate curriculum that had many pieces instead of trying to do the entire corpus of feminist work in one semester. But we remember that very happily, that moment.

Q: How did you come up with that title [Genealogies of Feminism]?

I thought we thought that feminism didn’t come out of nowhere, and people shouldn’t think that. Feminist thinkers were thinking with all those who had come before. We did owe a lot of prior people, not just people like Wollstonecraft, but Marx. And you couldn’t actually do feminist theory without knowing Marx, Freud, Darwin, you know, Burke—all these people had to be known. So that’s why the idea of genealogies. Feminism has a genealogy from the ‘70s and we must know that, but that feminism has a genealogy before that, in the lot of European traditions of thought, and you need to know those, too.

Farah Griffin, Intellectual Spaces, Interdisciplinary Leadership

"…these are young people who are organizing and responding because they also know the history."

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FARAH GRIFFIN

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

It’s fed my creativity, it’s fed my activism. It’s touched me in ways that I did not expect to be touched. Essence did a first-ever special issue on Black Lives Matter. There was no model on the cover. It was a black on black cover with Black Lives Matter, just the graphics. They asked me to write a piece, along with many other people. I had to write about this generation. Those that I teach are very privileged, but even those who weren’t privileged, those who had been written off and put in the worst schools, abandoned in their schools and their communities—talked about, because their pants sag, that this is what they’re up against. Just recently, in McKinney, Texas, we see how that officer treated those children. This is what they’re up against. But look at how they respond. I worry about them, I’m concerned with them. Those children in Ferguson were confronted by tanks. But they did that, and the rest of the country said, “Oh, maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Maybe we shouldn’t have that militarized police force. Or maybe there is a problem with mass incarceration. Or, at our own university, maybe we shouldn’t be investing in companies that invest in private prisons. It’s the students who are leading us. I’ve always believed that. As a young activist, I believed it too. It’s one thing to believe something in the abstract, theoretically, and it’s another thing to see it in action.

Q: Right. So not only talking about recovery, but regeneration.

Yes, right. And knowing the importance of history to that regeneration. So many of these young people are young people who are organizing and responding because they also know the history. They’ve studied it. They know how their world is different from the one they’ve read about, but they also have learned from what’s come before. It’s the best—it’s the way it’s supposed to work.