I got back from Feminisms & Rhetorics yesterday morning, and I want to transcribe my notes while they're fresh. Pardon the length of this post!

On Thursday, the first session I attended was "Performing or Reforming Gender in Classroom Spaces," and I heard the following papers:

• Donna LeCourt, University of Massachusetts "Performing or Reforming Gender: Agency and Structure in a Feminist Cultural Studies Course"
• Sara Jane Sloane, Colorado State University "From Cyborg to Oncogen to How Like a Leaf: Teaching Donna Haraway’s Theories of Knowledge and Being to Graduate Students in Digital Rhetorics and Composition"
• Sarah Rilling, Kent State University "Challenging Notions of Gender and Power in Second Language Teacher Education"

Unfortunately, I lost the notes I took during that panel, and I wasn't fully present anyway as my panel was next and I was nervous, but here are a couple of highlights: First, I found LeCourt's choice of theory to be excellent (specifically, she talked about Butler). Hearing her talk, I got the impression that she really knows her stuff in Women's Studies as well as in Rhetoric. Sloane, obviously, discussed Haraway's uses of optical metaphors, AND her students in the class she was discussing in her talk kept blogs.

My session went okay; the people who presented with me did a fantastic job:

• Michele Polak, Miami University "We Hear you, Ophelia: Mary Pipher and her Rhetorical Mark in the Girl Culture Movement"

• Lanette Cadle, Bowling Green State University "Commonplaces and the Camp Fire Girls: A Feminist and Rhetorical Analysis of What It Is (and Was) to Be Useful"
• Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau, Rutgers University "Bubbles, Girl Power, and Commodity Culture: Contested Literate Activities at One Community Organizations"

Michele and Mary went before I did, so my attention was again divided. When it came my turn, we could not get the laptop and the projector to talk to each other, so the projector was showing "no signal," and I had to do my talk without all the images I had to show. I should have brought overheads, but oh well, whatareyagonnado. Lanette's presentation was after mine, and I got to appreciate fully how great it was. She was talking about the Campfire Girls and all the things they did in their groups, including reading books about women who made a difference in their history, government, or culture. They read, for example, Helen Keller's biography and Louisa May Alcott's biography. They also learned useful skills that they could use to support themselves (as well as survival skills). Unfortunately, we don't have groups like that anymore. These girls, in the 1920 and 1930s, learned so much from their experience in Campfire Girls, and one of the overarching themes of Campfire Girls is to teach other girls what you learned. Wow.

Next, I attended a panel titled "Contesting Intimacy: Hegemony and Legitimization in Discourses of Female Sexuality."

• Lili Hsieh, Duke University "A Queer Sex, or How to Have Sex Without Phallus"

It seems I'm a janie-come-lately to Misbehaving.net:

misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology. It's a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field.

Tracy has already done a link roundup on many who have weighed in so far. Cindy has a smart post about Shelley's not being asked to join (although she is on the blogroll). I'm not a regular reader of most of the parties involved in Misbehaving, nor do I read Shelley's blog regularly, but I'm going to start paying attention to what's being said here.

On Sunday, I attended a roundtable discussion at AoIR called "Broadening Options and Raising Standards for Qualitative Internet Research: A Dialogue Among Scholars." Speakers included Annette Markham, University of Illinois-Chicago; Nancy Baym, University of Kansas; Susan Herring, Indiana University Bloomington; Shani Orgad, London School of Economics; and Kate Eichhorn, York University. First, let me say that this was a PACKED affair: The chairs were filled (luckily, I got one in the front row), people were sitting on the floor in the center aisle and along the perimeter of the room, and there was even a crowd standing in the doorway. The goals of the roundtable were to build the strength of qualitative inquiry and to improve the state of credibility of qualitative internet research. Keep in mind that these are just notes I'm typing up from that discussion, and they shouldn't be cited as the absolute truth of what went on at the session; I'm paraphrasing when I represent what these people said.

Conference call for papers: (un)knowable violences: non-innocent
conversations



March 13-14, 2004, at the University of British Columbia



Deadline for proposals: December 15, 2003

The notion of experience in feminist theory has been a powerful and empowering one for many feminist women. For example, radical cultural feminist Sonia Johnson, in the introduction to her 1987 book Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation, argues that often, women do not see themselves as theorists, because “philosophy has been so mystified by the men” (p. ii). For Johnson, it is crucial that women see themselves as always already feminist theorists who “spin theory out of the strands of our lives” (p. ii). Johnson claims that

Feminist analysis, more than any other analysis of the human situation, has its origins in direct experience. All feminist theorists first observe and draw conclusions from their own lives; all feminist theory results from the transformation of that experience and observation into principle. But not all feminist theory reveals its underlying process, the specific experience and the analysis of it that led to the generalization. (p. ii)

Johnson calls for a “show your work” approach to feminist theory, and Going Out of Our Minds is an account of five years of lived experience that led to her conclusions.

Experience has been an important epistemological stance in opposition to the dominant practices of aligning oneself with and building upon the work of Plato, Kant, Heidegger, and other white, male, European philosophers. However, the impact of poststructuralist and postmodernist theoretical interventions led feminist theorists to problematize the authority of experience as evidence and epistemology. How can experience have any verisimilitude when two people, even two women, who are at the same place at the same time can give completely different accounts of it? Joan W. Scott (in her 1991 article "The Evidence of Experience") and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (in her 1992 article "Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience") both address this problematic, Scott with the goal of producing historical knowledge, and Mohanty with the goal of building a feminist politics.

I didn't do one thing on my itinerary except present my paper, but I still had a great time. I met Liz, Alex, Andrew, Tracy, and Jeremy, and I also met Jason and Jason, which was lots of fun. I spent a little too much money at LUSH, but hey, when do I ever have the opportunity to go to a LUSH store?!

Anyway, now for the linking roundup:

Tracy blogs about a panel she and I both attended (and Tracy was one of the presenters by proxy): "Online/Offline Intersections." Tracy also writes about our panel in that same post and has more notes here. On Sunday, I attended a roundtable on qualitative internet research which was excellent. I took three pages of paper notes and will blog those as soon as I get a chance.

Yesterday, I received an email from Amrita Ghosh, a Ph.D. student at Drew University. Amrita asked me to circulate the following call for submissions:

Cerebration, a trans-cultural web
journal is calling for submissions for essays, columns, poetry, art work and
fiction. Cerebration exists to bridge the gap between academia and
non-academic circles and initiate critical thought and critical expression
in cyberspace. The editorial advisory board has been fortunate to have
eminent intellectuals and critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jack
Lynch, Cassandra Laity, Sandra Jamieson, and some well renowned journalists
and filmmakers from India.

AKMA is making his book of sermons, Flesh and Bones, available as a .pdf file. If you want to buy it, the money from the book sales will benefit St. Luke's Church. I've got my Christmas shopping (for my family) done!