Coalition for Women's Identities
Wednesday, 15 April 2015 - 5:13pm
Utopia Dreaming: Reflections on the 2015 Writing for Publication Workshop
By Rosemary J. Perez & Dafina-Lazarus Stewart
Rosie Perez and I, pursuant to our roles as the Emerging and Senior Scholars-in-Residence for the Standing Committee for Women (soon to be known as the Coalition for Women’s Identities), facilitated the Writing for Publication Workshop (WPW) on March 3, 2015 in a pre-conference session prior to the 2015 ACPA Convention in Tampa, Florida. This was the third year of the WPW. Our blog post is organized as a conversation between me and Rosie sharing our reflections about our experiences as facilitators and the nature of the space that we co-created with our five participants. We don’t arrive at conclusions necessarily, but invite readers to consider with us the questions that continue to sit with us.
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D-L: It has been nearly a month to the day that we co-facilitated SCW’s Writing for Publication Workshop last month in Tampa. What a month it has been since then and very different than the space we co-created with our five participants. I think that’s what I’d like to talk about in this blog post: the ways that we worked to exhibit liberatory, womanist/feminist praxis and epistemology in the workshop in both our process and content.
I should say more about what I mean by that. So, in terms of process, I saw us seek to meet the participants where they were and design a session that would best address their needs. Although we had a plan going into the day that Wednesday, we checked in with each other continually throughout the session and made adjustments so that we could address issues that arose in the session (e.g., that movement activity I came up with on the fly!). Through our content, we also deliberately and intentionally bridged the gap, and encouraged our participants to also bridge the gap, between the personal and the “political” (in this case, the scholarly/academic; Hanisch, 1970/2006). I see feminism as being [in part] about resisting the artificial boundaries between the self and others and between who we are (identities, roles, lives) and what we do (work).
I also saw us embrace those womanist notions of being womanish (Walker, 1983) – being serious, courageous, and grown up and claiming that as rightful activities for us to engage in as scholars and writers. In spite of the patriarchal and paternalistic culture of the academy and of writing, we dared ourselves that day to treat and see ourselves as “grown up” and not as “girlish” regardless of how our bodies are read and written on by others.
We held up models and affirmation of other writers who are woman- and female-identified. For the time we were in that space, we achieved an everyday utopia (Cooper, 2013) in some ways that defied adherence to patriarchal norms.[1] Leaving that space and entering into other spaces almost immediately after that were not any kind of utopia was greatly disconcerting and traumatic. I am left wondering what happened and how we can reclaim and recreate it in other locations.
But the other thing that I find fascinating about the nature of the space we created during the WPW is each of our own relationship to feminism. As we had shared that day and with each other prior, neither of us necessarily thought/think of ourselves as feminists exactly. With all the complications of that word and that history for people of color, that’s not really that surprising. Also, as a genderqueer trans* person, I have often been unsure what my place is in feminism when to be feminist is still very much conflated with being woman-identified and cis in particular. I think what is illustrated by our presence in this conversation and our ability to create this everyday [feminist] utopia of sorts is 1) the overlap in emancipatory movements and pedagogies and 2) the accessibility of non-patriarchal and non-paternalistic frameworks to people across varying gender diversities.
Rosie, what is your take on all this? What are the issues that you want to discuss as you reflect on the WPW this year?
RJP: As I reflect upon my experience at the WPW, I’m struck by how different this scholarly space felt from all of the other academic spaces I’ve been in throughout my life. At the WPW, we co-created an experience with participants where individuals were encouraged to bring their full humanity into the space which required courage, vulnerability, and authenticity from all involved. This genuine care for who was in the room allowed us to more deeply explore what we passionately care about and what that means for the work we want to share with others via our scholarship.
It’s striking to me how rare the type of space we co-created is and highlights the ways in which the patriarchal norms of academia ask us to compartmentalize who we are if we are to be seen as “rigorous” and “scholarly.” And yet, in this space to be scholarly involved moving away from separating our heads and our hearts to seeing them as being inextricably linked together. I took great comfort in knowing others wanted to live in a space where who we are, what we feel, and what we think are relevant to the work that we do. This combination of honoring the varied lived experiences in the group and collectively resisting the push to live compartmentalized lives did create a utopia of sorts and a space I long to continue living in.
Since leaving the WPW workshop, I’ve been thinking about what space I need to create, maintain, or reclaim in order to live authentically as a cis-gender, Filipina American womyn, and pre-tenure scholar. And how can that space exist in ways that allow me to speak my truth without marginalizing and oppressing others? In working to resist the patriarchal structure of academia by utilizing feminist approaches to work, I’m grappling with the notion that I may be concurrently imposing gender binary and heteronormative norms. In essence, I’m wrestling with how to enact my feminist thinking in ways that are liberatory for “we” rather than simply for me. While I may have more new questions than answers, I’m incredibly grateful for an experience that provided the space I needed to ask myself critical questions about feminist scholarship and my place within it.
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Notes
1 Dafina-Lazarus appreciates Z Nicolazzo for introducing zir to Davina Cooper’s concept of everyday utopias. As Z shared with zir in our journaling about gender and trans* identities on 4 January 2015:
…Cooper elucidated, “Everyday utopias also capture a sense of hope and potential, in that they anticipate something more, something beyond and other to what they can currently realize” (p. 4). In addition, Cooper stated, “Everyday utopias, as nondominant [sic] ‘minor stream’ social sites, are hugely fruitful places from which to think differently and imaginatively about concepts, particularly when such thinking is oriented to a socially transformative politics” (p. 11).
In this way, Z talked about everyday utopias as places where particular communities can “regroup and reimagine hegemonic social knowledge.”
References
Cooper, D. (2014). Everyday utopias: The conceptual life of promising spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hanisch, C. (1970/2006). The personal is political. In S. Firestone & A. Koedt (Eds.), Notes from the second year: Women’s liberation, Major writings of the radical feminists (pp. 76-78). Reprinted online and retrieved from http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html
Walker, A. (1983/2003). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books. (See pages xi-xii for definition of “womanist.”)
Contact info
Assistant Professor, Higher Education and Student Affairs
Iowa State University
Email: rjperez@iastate.edu
Twitter: @rosiejperez
Associate Professor, Higher Education and Student Affairs
Graduate Coordinator, Higher Education Administration PhD Program
Bowling Green State University
Email: dafinas@bgsu.edu
Twitter: @drdlstewart