Unknown Speaker  00:06
We're about to begin the afternoon session today like CNN Welcome back to the afternoon session we're about to begin if you will see people in the hallway wave the men.

Unknown Speaker  00:47
Again. Welcome back to the afternoon session. Well, why have you wondering, I'll make some brief announcements. And then maybe somebody can remind me about other brief announcements.

Unknown Speaker  01:27
Some of you came in. It's the announcement that the Barnard women's center after years of requests for papers given at various sessions of conversations about women or the women history seminar, or the women's issues luncheon, various programs that we give throughout the year, which are often in are always in the afternoon or early evening, we finally decided to publish something called the Barnard Occasional Papers on women's issues. And the first paper that we've published is by Miranda Pollard, who is a graduate student at Columbia. And it's on images of women in the New France, Vichy and the regulation of female sexuality 1940 to 1944. And those of you who haven't yet, got them, there's a pile of them in the front of the auditorium, and you're welcome to take them, we hope to put out three a year in the first year, and they will be of you know, works in progress in process. And we invite you to contribute asides or critiques or participate with counterexamples there, there are more. So you know, take these and then they will give you some more. So Miranda power gave this in the Colombian bar. The Barnard was what is it called the Women's History seminar, which is co sponsored by the Women's Center, and the history departments of Barnard and Columbia. But we hope to, to publish things on film criticism on literary criticism on politics on, you know, contemporary issues of all kinds. So they'll excuse me, I'll get some more and there'll be some more at the end. Okay. No, it's, it's really a tremendous pleasure. Some of you have heard me say that I first saw Joan Dhoni Wallach, as I knew her, when I was 17 years old, standing at a podium, much like this one, in the midst of some academic crisis, handling an audience so that everybody got to speak and making making very difficult issues much more clear to the people who are participating. And I've known her to be that kind of intellect for my whole adult life. She's the author of the glass workers of camo, French craftsman and political action in a 19th century city in 1974. She's the co author with Louise Tilly of women work in the family. She's the author of numerous articles. Many of you had have had have had the pleasure of working with her at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. And now she is the second permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced effects. I'm sorry, start over. She is the second permanent fellow who is a woman at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University with great pleasure that I introduced

Unknown Speaker  04:58
actually time I think it was a PA political meeting and not an academic one at Brandeis. And it probably had to do with nuclear testing, which was our issue in the early 1950s. In the late 50s, and early 60s. Well, my task or I have been charged with somehow summarizing, bringing to closure this conference. Those of you who've been here since this morning, probably feel you've had all the closure you need that is it's the day has been long the time is over. And we ought to drink, talk and drink and take it easy. It also is impossible really to summarize, when 20 panels are all meeting at the same time. And when even if I walked from one to the next and spent two minutes in each one, I could never recapitulate what in fact, went on there while I was there. And what while I wasn't, in fact, I ended up being so intrigued by one panel that I stayed at it most of the time, which is probably what happened to most of you. So what I want to do, instead of summarizing is trying to place this conference into its historical perspective, into the history of recent feminist inquiry, and current feminist politics. For historians, it's the easiest way to come to terms with anything, even as the present becomes the past, you turn it into history, we're far less good at predicting the future. So in fact, we turn the present into the past. What I want to do is look at what this conference was today, as I said, in the context of other moments of feminist inquiry and feminist politics. And as I do that, I'm all too conscious of telling you a story of progress of linear evolution from simple to complex, naive to sophisticated of offering new images of growth, even if from a kind of homogeneity, homogeneity, or beautification, to fragmentation and diversity. And I can only justify or explain that by saying that the linear story is not as simple as I will probably make it, that the stages or phases, I want to point out, in fact, overlap and intertwine. And that progress may not be the right characterization of the changes, I want to describe. Still, my discourse and my discipline our history, and I cannot fully escape the training that I have been given.

Unknown Speaker  07:46
I'm struck by the title of this conference, women's images and politics. Because first of all, it recalls what I think of as the very first focus of recent feminist inquiry since the reemergence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 70s. I'm going to talk about academic feminist inquiry to some extent about women's history, probably to an even larger extent, but always with the notion that academic feminist inquiry is a political project, always formulated in concert or dialogue with the political movement, as well as with philosophical developments in the communities of discourse that we also operate in. In any case, we began in the late 60s and early 70s By looking at images and attitudes about women. The earliest historical studies that were produced involved on problematize documentation of women's oppression, we use men's writings to evoke the misogynist spirit of almost any age. And we did that I think for a number of reasons. First, because they were the most available source we could find. For every John Stuart Mill, they were 40 or 50, John Knox's whose blast of the trumpet against the monstrous rain of female monarchs. I use because it was the only thing I could find to talk about early modern Europe in the first women's history course I ever taught. The students wanted to know why we were using that. And the answer was that I couldn't find anything else at that point in 1971, to talk about women in that period. But we really were, I think, in those early days, reduced to or left with the angry scribblings of the red face professors that Virginia Woolf described or encountered when she looked up women in the British Museum catalog hoping to find answers to questions about why what Shakespeare sister would have been like if he had had a sister. So what first of all we did that because those were the sources that were most immediately available. Secondly, because images were thought to come tene objective information about otherwise silent women. And the notion was that you could tease out of contexts, bits of information, pieces of information about women, that you could somehow reject the misogynist caste that was being given to the descriptions, but that you could say from those descriptions, information you otherwise couldn't get. And finally, that approach, that initial approach about to images and attitudes about women fit the collective identity that was being articulated by the women's movement at that time. That is that women were victims had been oppressed, that the women's movement involved rising up, a rising up of the oppressed against oppression, a negative collective identity was being established. The point was that we were not what these attitudes and images said we were we were refusing those images and the subordination that it implied, and in fact, united in a refusal of many of those attitudes. So the purpose of that moment of feminist inquiry, if we can retrospect, retrospectively attach clear intention to what then seemed hasty improvisations and attempts to study a problem that had just become a problem. The purpose is we're exposure of biases against women, a documentation of the long history of women's oppression, and the construction of a collective identity for women on the common ground of the experience of oppression, victimization, and subordination.

Unknown Speaker  11:41
As I said, that moment, is with us still, but was surpassed or pushed aside by a second moment in the history of feminist inquiry, which was an entire rejection of the study of images and attitudes, images and attitudes were squishy and imprecise, and not susceptible to systematic analysis. They paid too much attention to male voices and the myths that those voices articulated. And here it's important to note, I think, the emergence of a social scientific approach to the study of women and their experience and approach which is embodied in history in social history in other fields and an emphasis on getting at what the real experience of women actually was. The studies that come out of that moment involve studies of myth versus reality, attempts to disprove claims of contemporary ideology such as the one that said that femininity and work for wages were incompatible. An example of that moment I think, is Alice Kessler Harris's book, which is called Women have always worked. The title is a direct reply to the notion that somehow femininity was antithetical to work for wages, or Linden Auckland's brilliant study of women artists, which took on the notion that artistic genius was a male trait, and argued instead that conditions have training conventions of painting standards of criticism, the social context within which artistic expression was made possible, explain the reason that there had been no great women artists in the past. A second aspect of this, studies of myth versus reality of the attempt to find women's experience apart from the myths and ideas that men had had about women, was a turn to a reality that could be found in statistics in analyses of social structure and social institutions where women worked, what opportunities for education they had had, and it turned to the personal testimony of women themselves. This was an attempt to document women's experience in the past and present to counter both men both the notion of men's myths and the oppression that they were thought to cause and these developments were tied to developments in academic scholarship. That stress looking at the experience of those below history from below was the term used at that period. The point was to accumulate evidence in archives in old books in oral history project of what life had really been like for people. Apart from the way in which the articulate representatives of institutions, the framers or articulators of ideology had said that experience was this turn away from myth to reality was also tied to developments in the women's movement to a new emphasis on the agency of women on their power as historical actors to act in their own interest. They were not absent from history in this formulation, but hidden from history. The point here was to find out what women's interest had been to show where they had been and what they had done at various times in the past and to document the agency that women had and could exercise. The second aspect of this relationship of the dispelling of myth and the name of reality that was tied to developments in the women's movement was the notion that consciousness raising could articulate or arrive at an authentic women's experience, also free of myth and ideology, that we could somehow find out what a genuine women's interest was, that we could search for a positive, we might say, an essential female identity, unpolluted by ideological defamations. The notion was that if women could tell us what their experience was, we would somehow know what it was, know what they needed, what their interests were, apart from the framework within which that had usually been presented to us. And all of this took place, I think, unify the sense that there could be a unified notion of women in their interest. Access to unmediated women's experience took place within a growing burgeoning women's movement united in some way or another under the umbrella of the political movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. That was the moment I think of Kate's Simpsons feminist cultural consensus, as she talked about it this morning.

Unknown Speaker  16:41
The third moment is the one that I think we're in now. In recent years, there has been a return to images and attitudes. And so the title of today's conference, in fact, seems on one level, a return to an earlier preoccupation to an earlier set of questions about women's images, or images of women. In fact, the title of the conference, I think, suggests a more complicated agenda. The title is women's images and politics, implying not only images about women, but images that women create, implying not only that, we can find out what people thought about women or what the reality of their lives was by looking at what people said about them. But that, in fact, we can learn something about politics, both the politics of the imagery itself, the politics of those who write about women, and the politics of the women who create images of those kinds. So in a sense, the title of the conference suggests the much more complicated agenda that the return to images and attitudes represents. In fact, I think the return is more appropriately labeled something else that is we no longer talk so much about images and attitudes as we do in what some see as the jargon of post Structuralism. As we talk about representations and discourse. The notion of representations and discourse or discourses, suggests a number of complicating things about the question of images and attitudes, things I think that were available to us or represented here today, and the diversity of workshops and of approaches embodied in them. First of all, the notion that images and attitudes do not literally reflect anything, but in fact, involve the study of ideology, ideology defined as something that creates and reveals relationships of power that locates the places where politics actually happen. The notion is that images and attitudes tell you something about not only what people think about other people, but where they are being placed hierarchically, where they're being placed in relation to other people. And a relationship that's real is being created in those images and notions of what a woman and a man for example, is or are. So they don't literally literally reflect an external experience. In fact, they create or help create that experience. And that experience is a political one, it involves power. It involves hierarchy, it involves inequality.

Unknown Speaker  19:33
Secondly, in this in this new notion, or this redefinition, or extension of the definition of images and attitudes, the notion is no longer that there is myth and there is reality. But in fact that reality is in part constructed by myth. There's no such thing in this notion as unmediated experience with an authority of its own, and authority to speak outside the social and cultural and political conditions within which people are defined and created. And the argument goes further and says that women like men are the products of cultural processes, which shaped the way they understand the world, whether you call it socialization, whether you call it subjectivity, whatever you call it. The point is that people are defined by the world in which they live and incorporate those definitions, those images and those attitudes into the way they understand who they are, and how they live. And so you cannot document the experience of women, apart from the ideas and attitudes that are held about them, and that they hold about themselves. So it becomes a complicated relationship, the one between myth and reality, not a simple oppositional one, that we can toss away the myth and find the reality and alternative formulation, then somebody's notion of what woman is, is no more authentic and unmediated than somebody else's, you run into the problem, in fact that all of these ideas are real, create relationships of power, that in fact affect the way people live. The point is to figure out how they work and how experience is constructed by these myths or ideologies. Finally, the third notion is that identity is not an inherent quality, but a product or creation of politics broadly defined the politics of gender, of race, of class of social organization of political movements, and the questions that then get asked our how and under what conditions are identities imposed, constructed, or chosen? What are the limits of human creativity and discovering, formulating inventing identities for ourselves? The notion is that identity is not a single, but a multiple and changing phenomenon. We are not only women, but black or Chinese or white women, lesbian or straight workers, professionals, Americans, Nicaraguans, French, what those identities mean has changed for all of us in our lifetimes. For all of us, these are acquired identities, things we decide to embrace, or we don't decide to embrace, but we somehow accept as defining what we are. And what all this means, I think is that feminism is a self conscious political gesture, a choice of identity, and a subsequent commitment to forms of political action against patriarchy, and on behalf of women, that women's identity is not something we can find or point to, but in fact that we have to create and what it is we want to create as women's identity seems to me the problem both for academic feminists and political feminists, but these notions these change notions of ideas, and attitudes within Academic feminism are correlated as in every other period, with scholars engagement with post structuralism and its powerful demystification of the notion of the wholeness and stability of modern man, both with capital M's. They're also coincident with the fragmentation of what Kate Stimson called the feminist cultural consensus with the inability of feminist theory and feminist politics to speak to or for woman of the need to acknowledge the pluralism of our experience of our identities and of our lives. And of the loss of the kind of single political agenda provided for an earlier period by the movement to ratify the era. We are in other words, confronted with theories of fragmentation, just as our movement is fragmenting and our sense of what exactly what it is we are about, is broken into many pieces, rather than groups solely either around a sense of rejection of what others thought we were a sense of definition of what we thought it meant to be a woman. So the new attention to images and attitudes says something both about our own discovery of differences within the feminist movement, of the seeming disarray of the movement and of the discovery of very complicated and intriguing questions that it seems to me we need to ask. I think this moment that we're at the one of the complicated breaking up of the notion of the identity of woman or or even of women and their interest, has wonderful possibilities, and raises many questions and problems. And I'd like to point to the possibilities, and then leave you with the questions and problems. And those, in fact may be a way of beginning the final discussion that were to have at the end.

Unknown Speaker  25:21
The possibilities, it seems to me are enormously exciting again, both academically and politically. And really, there's no separation. For feminist I think between those two things, there are different ways of talking, but about the same sorts of things. The first possibility is that this new way of thinking about representations and discourses, ideas and attitudes, creates new ways of seeing and understanding that extend beyond literal descriptions of what people say or portray about women. You can learn how to read images or representations in a more complicated way than thinking that they reflect the experience or a particular set of ideas about women and what they ought to do and how they ought to behave. I thought this morning, for example, in the discussion of the Katharine Hepburn film, there were all sorts of readings that began to emerge in the question period that had they been pursued probably would have added up to either a different reading from the one that Anne Kaplan gave us or a more complicated one. Not that hers was wrong, but that in fact, the different perceptions of the audience were crucial to the meaning that the film had for the people who were reading it or reacting to it. And it seems to me the notion that people have many responses to what seemed to be fixed images suggest that images are not fixed. That

Unknown Speaker  26:53
in fact, one has to work with an idea of playing around with symbols and what they could evoke in people. The discussion of the abortion film of a silent scream this afternoon seemed to me to elicit from the audience any number of references, which showed how the images in that film worked. People remembered horror movies that they had seen, talked about experiences with doctors, there are all sorts of things that images call upon, that are in fact not confined to the intentions of the filmmaker, or to the dominant reaction of the audience. In any case, it seems to me when we think about how to read images, in the terms in which I've talked about, we're presented with the possibility that there are many readings, and that if we learn to read well, and learn to play with symbols, well, we can in fact, open creative and imaginative possibilities for thinking our way out of the difficult situation that feminism is now in. Secondly, I think analyses of visual and verbal representations. Let us get it questions about how gender works. Gender, meaning the relationship between men and women, with the rules of behavior set by any society for women and men with a wet gender as a way of enforcing lines also of racial and class division, gender as a way of legitimizing certain forms of social organization, and political power. Gender doesn't only work as a way of setting rules for men and women. Gender also legitimizes political organization. Because the normative understanding given to men and women, the natural roles ascribed to men and women, by any particular period, or any particular group, serve as a way of providing references for the other sorts of things that people do. If women are weak, and men strong, then kings can portray themselves as the fathers of their country, the rulers of their people, and so on and so forth. It would take too long, in fact, to go into all of the illustrations of that my point really is, though, that if we think in terms of how gender works, how the images of the relationship between men and women are established, we would have a clue not only to the ways in which relations between women and men are established, but to how race, class and power are organized and implemented. There are two examples I think we need to consider in exactly these terms, and they're ones that I will leave you to think about because I haven't really thought them through but one is the campaign about lost children, which is all over our milk cartons and grocery bags, and which on one level appeals to my maternal sympathies and all of the sort of instinctive risk sponsors it's supposed to evoke, and on the other hand seems to me to be playing to a set of ideas about who is responsible for the loss of these children. That could be terrifying and in fact, conservative in its impact on us, there's something about the way those children are depicted, the way those the posters of the FBI is 10 most wanted men are, that at least is what it reminds me of that these children are wanted for some sort of crime, that they have committed the crime of running away from their families, that their families have somehow neglected them, and therefore they have been stolen away by abductors or terrorists. The play on the evil empire waiting out there to get your kid, if you let them out alone on the street, seems to me very much written in to those sorts of notions. And they resonate to me with all sorts of 1950s notions about latchkey children and juvenile delinquency and ultimately, the responsibility of working mothers, for destroying the families that these children have fallen out of, or for abandoning their children so that the snatchers on the street can get them. That's clearly not the only reading that can be done. But there seemed to me to be a way in which those images of those children I get little cards in the mail also with pictures of these, these these kids, on the most of whom are in fact running away from abusive families, or have been kidnapped by parents because of divorce suits, not snatched by the evil empire from neglecting parents, many of whom are neglected, because social welfare services have been dramatically cut off, as balms are paid for instead of care for for children. And there's something about the message that's being portrayed about who's responsible for those children. And what we ought to be doing in response to them that I think is profoundly antithetical to what feminists ultimately ought to be thinking about. I say this with with great trepidation, because I'm sure somebody's gonna say that I hate children and think that they ought to be somehow abandoned, or that I'm not sufficiently sympathetic to families that indeed have lost children. That is not the point. There is some sort of ideological campaign being waged in those pictures, that is meant to get us at a level we're not supposed to think about. And it's exactly the kind of analysis I've been talking about of images and attitudes of how gender and representation works. That is needed to get at what that campaign about the loss of our children is doing to us. Another place, it seems to me that a similar kind of questioning could go on, has to do with the area that we rarely look at because women are excluded the area of high politics, the the tables around which the masters of our destiny sit and make decisions, we of course, criticize the fact that they don't care about life and about the future and the ways that we might care about it. But there's another issue as well, that is, seems to me that the way in which the authority of high politics works, the way in which it's asserted, the way in which it's enforced is precisely by the absence of women at the very centers of power. It was, I think, one Caspar Weinberger who said is much earlier in the year, but the kind of analysis of images and attitudes that this calls for calls for us to look not only at where women are represented, but where they're not represented. And it seems to me to tie together the kind of institutional analysis we would make the one that says we need women in those places, with an analysis of why they are excluded, and analysis of how the system of representation works, to enforce authority and power, the gender relations of our society as well as the political ones.

Unknown Speaker  34:21
The third possibility of these kinds of analyses has to do with the creativity of our own feminist politics. In the science fiction workshop this afternoon. They were wonderful discussions of the utopian imaginings of feminist or feminist science fiction writers and the enormous difference between those and the terrifying masculine scientific science fiction. Work that's that's been produced. But it seems to me that a notion of the importance of representation of addressing discourses of all kinds of attitudes and images in their more complicated way, suggest that utopian utopian imagining imaginings, have to disrupt simple notions of masculinity and femininity, male and female, have to, in fact refuse the simple category that a woman is this, and a man is that and insists that the whole issue is more diverse, more plural, more complicated, that we do not reply to the notion that the world is male and female simply by reversing the hierarchy by saying, Yes, we are women. And we are all of those things, but we're good or we're not any of these things. Women are something else by refusing any single definition. And instead looking for one that is as complicated and diverse and plural as some of those utopian imaginings of the women science fiction writers. That was being the possibilities and there are probably more there are also difficulties. difficulties that it seems to me have to be posed simply as questions at this point for us to think further about. The first is if we believe that images are contextually defined, constantly changing constituent constituent of, of as well as reflective of reality, is it possible to develop political strategies that insists that a certain reality ought to be the one that prevails? A certain reality ought to be the one that we all live and experience? Can we develop political strategies carefully and quickly enough to meet changing contexts and changing times? And also to address the fact that reality and experience are different for different people? How do we do that? The second is if we have a notion of the complexity of meaning, if we say that things mean different things to different people, then we have to entertain the possibility that competing interpretations are right. interpretations that are not our own, that what we say that the solutions we offer to contemporary problems will be transformed even by the people whom they are supposed to address and help. Can we build political movements that recognize and encourage improvisation and reinterpretation that criticize existing gender norms without imposing new ones? Can we really work in the complicated, diverse and pluralistic way that our theory tells us we ought to in a political movement that requires strategies, goals, norms to be articulated if people are going to follow the lead that you offer? And finally, I think the most complicated and challenging problem of all, if we say that identity is in fact, not fixed, if indeed, we want to undermine patriarchy, by saying that the categories of gender as they have been defined are only normative impositions, and not at all the limits of nature or of possibility. If we want to argue that, it seems to me we face the question of how you construct a political movement, political movements require a notion of collective identity, require an articulate least have historically require an articulation of interest? It is in the interests of women, that life be preserved, it is in the interest of women, that children be protected whatever the particular interest or interests are, can there be a feminism without a definition of woman and her interests? Can we do that? And how can we do it? And that seems to me the question that in one way or another all of us face, whether we are largely in the academy or out organizing the particular political movements that are loosely grouped today and what we would call a feminist movement.

Unknown Speaker  39:21
Those are the issues that we face. Remember, I, I leave you with the hard questions, but they're also wonderful possibilities. It seems to me they're complicated and tricky questions. But if the discussions today in the workshops and this morning are any indication, I think we are richly equipped to argue this out, discuss it further, and come up with the solutions that have always served us well in the past. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  40:04
All right, any questions responses? I think first to, to Jones questions, and then to anything that's occurred during the day. There's an open mic right on the floor here. So if people who want to comment, wish to they can line up anybody? Give me some time. Well, I wanted I wanted to respond, because one of the issues, Joan raises is the question of commonality. And also the you one of the one of the paradoxes about community is always that the communities are often organized in opposition to outside opponents. And that cohesion is often at the expense of diversity. And one of my favorite stories is about an anthropologist who worked in under Lucia and found that it was discovered that he and his wife drank coffee at the wrong time of day, which was bad enough, but that they had moved the pots around in the patio of this house that they rented. And the landlord came in, and move the pots back to the way he had had them when they had come in. And then, when he left, they put them back the way they liked them. He came back again. And he said, Look, everybody in this town knows you drink coffee at the wrong time of day. And now you won't keep the pots in order. This is unacceptable. If you live here, this is the way you do it. And this is about trivial matters. But in effect, you know, we have some of these orthodoxies ourself. And I think, as Catherine was saying this morning, that a lot of the consensus that had to be broken of the early feminist movement had a lot to do with never discussing our differences. And the, you know, the examples that also come to mind is that many people may disagree with this, but that, you know, in the 70s, there were very bloody and brutal battles between Lesbian and Straight women about you know, about feminism and who gave more to it and and who controlled it and who, you know, whose it was anyway, and who lived the contradictions, worst, and we fought them out sometimes in the higher on the high road, and sometimes in the gutter. And some of us bear boo, you know, when they are wounds of those struggles, but we're stronger for them, we can we can joke with each other, and we can fight with each other. Because we've had that experience, to a certain extent, that hasn't been fought out so much around issues of race, within the feminist movement, it's never really been fought out around issues of class within the feminist movement. And it was, it's clear that a lot of the facts fractionalization that many of us perceive now in the feminist movement has to do with the struggles that many of us have put off for 20 years. That is we can have a mass movement of feminists so long as we don't discuss the critical issues, but once we discuss the critical issues, you know, as as we differ about them, they're going to be conflicts and controversies. And there's a real question about how you construct a movement that can deal with difference in that way to deal with our differences and still remain together in certain ways fighting for certain principles that we share, but can you know perhaps other people have some other you know, some other issues they would like to raise about this problem of difference or about this problem of of controversy within the feminist movement Well, we can we can click Yes, come on

Unknown Speaker  44:35
I just want to thank John for being the first person I've met who's given form to my own distrust about these milk cartons. It's written No, really, it's, you know, it is verification that I'm not completely mad. I feel felt a little bit sitting there the same way as I did after I had this incredible distrust about we that we are the world thing and so everyone, I believe I don't live in an academic community, I live in a sort of working class community. And so everyone running to the TV over this until Marcos government went down and the TV showed film clips of his private party on board his yacht singing, We Are the World. Sorry. I'm not gonna say it again. But thank you very much. And I think we should analyze.

Unknown Speaker  45:35
Okay, also on the milk carton issue, what that brings to mind for me is the question of text, and how that's become increasingly important in in history, the creation of a history, and that what comes up for me is, first of all, what counts as a text, not only in who writes the text, but how it is read, where it is read, how it is distributed, and that the question of the distribution of this kind of a text, you know, this sort of text the milk carton becomes, becomes very political, because the text itself is a very political means the fact that it is something on a milk carton, which has to do with milk, mothering, nurturing all these things, the idea of the of the grocery bag, what that says about daily life and the sort of role the text will have, and how we can begin to look at all these different texts as part of a historical moment where we're having a contest over who has power, who has speech, and the question of who's writing these and who's who they're speaking to, and who gets to speak back. So that's it. That's just, I guess that's all I want to say.

Unknown Speaker  46:45
Well, basically, I'd like to do No, good.

Unknown Speaker  46:57
I don't know if this is an act of stupidity or bravery. But since we did address the issue of lesbians, I just want to respond to sudo doesn't fall flat on the ground, having been involved in a struggle, which, personally I don't think I have anyway, and various groups and some few women I recognize here from other years, have dealt with groups such as daycare, and other groups about class about race, and I just have felt, and I'm speaking for, whether I have the right or not, for other women that I went to these meetings with, that we were at odds, no matter what we said, you know, we never really it's nothing you resolves really, you just keep working at it. And we're still working at the lesbian straight issue. I mean, now that, that the gay rights bill has passed temporarily, hopefully, yeah. I still felt alienated because it was mostly man. And a friend of mine called from a celebration, who had been working one of the first women I met in the movement in 1968, or something. And she said, there's nobody here. I know. And I know she meant women, because she would have run up to almost any woman, she mentioned a couple that I know we're not generally friendly with. And I just don't understand how we ride around and these problems we know they exist, some of us do try to work them out with our friends, and where we feel safe. But just as my initial reaction was, Well, where did we get with lesbian versus or whatever straight? Not too far?

Unknown Speaker  49:03
All right. Are there any other comments or questions? Yeah, sure. Oh, you don't have to run

Unknown Speaker  49:23
this is not gonna follow very well. But one of the areas in which there has been a lot of mythology, a lot of misrepresentation is Middle East. There's going to be a film series and a film and discussion series called Women in the Middle East myths and realities. Right here, a hop skip and a jump across the street at Casa italiana Columbia, the first three Wednesdays in April. The first one is the film on Mubaloo are the daughters of Utopia speaking of Utopia, and it's the Really oral histories of a couple of 80 plus year old women who left Russia, they were socialist feminists and scientists and they left Russia and went to Israel and lived in Israel. And the film, not only interviews them, but contrasts and compares their views with the contemporary reality not only of Israeli women, but a Palestinian women. The second on April knife, which will be fertile memories, which contrasts a modern Palestinian women woman with a traditional woman, and also talks about the relationship between women's issues and the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. And the third is veiled revolution, which is a film, which talks about the relationship between imperialism, the reaction against imperialism, and where the veiling of women fits in. And there's also a short film, which was taken from an International Women's Day March in Iran, in which women protested the imposition of Islamic regulations against them. The debate should be very, very hard, because it's, it's a big controversy among women from Islamic cultures. And they're going to be discussions and lectures at each of these. And I strongly encourage you to come to it, because this is certainly an area in which we have been treated to tremendous misconceptions about women, and about the whole issues of the Middle East. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  51:44
Yeah. This was, it's kind of an odd form, because it doesn't really encourage conversation. So I guess I'll just continue sort of to interject something. Um, one thing that seems to be implicit in terms of, of a lot of what we're seeing, both to the keynote speeches, is a different sort of, of knowledge. And a lot of ways I mean, in many ways, a certain kind of cultural knowledge. And one of the things we haven't made explicit, I think, is that, particularly in the academy, rational scientific knowledge is pretty much sort of the ideal type for knowledge. And I think one of the reasons our claims often become marginalized is because we don't sort of take on a critique of that sort of knowledge and understand that we're making an alternative claim when we're talking about identities and cultural knowledge. Really, I think it's something I mean, it's basically it's suggesting a whole other level of discussion. But I think it's something we need to remember we need to deal with explicitly or we'll just wind up I'm basically talking to ourselves, and I think we need to really take on rational scientific modes of knowledge and realize how dominant they are. And we're making a different sort of knowledge claim. I'm in many ways. I think that's what's really exciting about a lot of feminists have a lot of feminist discourse so.

Unknown Speaker  53:11
Can people hear when, when someone's speaking into that microphone? Okay.

Unknown Speaker  53:16
When we were discussing pluralities in the women's community, I just wanted to mention that it would have been nice if the subject of disabled women were to be more stressed and also addressed in general. We had a wonderful wonderful workshop on it this afternoon, very poorly attended, unfortunately. And I think it is a major issue and a growing issue in the women's community and could almost even form a I don't want to say the only subject of a conference but certainly an important one. Thank you

Unknown Speaker  53:55
Okay, if you make your way very slowly to Macintosh where you had lunch, you might be able to get a drink. Which, if you they may be set up now they're scheduled to be set up at six. So the over but you know, you can open the wine yourself if it's not yet open. Thank you all for coming. Oh, no more. Occasional Papers are in the front in the box.