s03director

Partnering
Alice Gambrell

Early in March, Dean Aoun sent out a College-wide memo detailing the notable successes achieved by college faculty through practices of intra- and inter-institutional “partnering”; he noted how, as “a small private research college,” LAS can extend its capabilities by encouraging work that extends across departments and schools, as well as into collaborations with other institutions: “partnering with others,” he wrote, “provides a multiplier effect, giving us resources we wouldn't otherwise have.”

“Partnership,” it occurred to me, might usefully be understood as another word for the kind of coalitional intellectual activity that has been performed during the last three decades within a range of fields that took shape in the U.S. academy during the late 1960s: most influential among them, Gender Studies and the study of U.S. Ethnicities. These fields emerged during the late 1960s; lacking strong institutional support, their development was fueled by the energies of faculty who were willing to work, often on their own time, at the interstices of traditional fields in order to create models of intellectual inquiry elastic enough to encompass the new questions and the new information that they were bringing to the scholarly table. I have written elsewhere and in more detail about these particular histories; more recently, the archive of the early days of the development of “Women's Studies,” “Black Studies,” “Chicano Studies,” and a range of other fields has grown exponentially, making it possible for us to observe far more closely than before these home-grown models of ingenuity, resourcefulness, intellectual engagement, theoretical complexity, and commitment to principles of social justice.

It remains to be seen how the notion of “partnering” will be transformed now that its status has shifted in such a significant way: no longer the renegade collaboration of a marginalized few –whose influence percolates, so to speak, from the bottom up—“partnering” is currently an institutional ideal with the strongest possible top-down support. I, for one, will be paying close attention to this shift, and to the incongruities that might well be generated by it. My own hope is that we will move into this new phase informed by and ever-cognizant of the efforts of our predecessors, who mapped similar strategies for us, and whose political courage and seriousness provided daunting models for scholars who followed them. An awareness of this history undergirded CFR’s major programming effort during Spring semester 2003: our speaker series on “Feminist Ethnographies” co-curated with UCLA's Center for the Study of Women.

Like many (perhaps most) successful collaborations in the US feminist-academic tradition, the USC/UCLA “Feminist Ethnographies” series was partly serendipitous—we realized during the planning phases that we were working on complementary calendars—and partly a matter of need: neither CFR nor CSW had the resources to put together a series that could encompass the exceptional range and depth of the topic of “Feminist Ethnographies,” which has exploded in importance during the last decade. A relative rarity as a cross-town collaboration, the USC/UCLA series nonetheless built upon relationships forged over the last 12 years as the two Centers have cosponsored the graduate “Thinking Gender” conference. Each Center invited two scholars of international stature to speak on its own campus: UCLA hosted Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Sherrie Ortner, and USC hosted Gayle Rubin and Kamala Visweswaran.

At USC, the series held special significance, in that one of the vanguard areas of scholarly inquiry among faculty in the College is in the interdisciplinary reengagement of the significance of ethnographic research. The landmark 1995 volume Women Writing Culture—which comprised a thorough recasting of the history and theory of scholarly modes of cultural observation—contained contributions by no less than four USC faculty: Gelya Frank, Dorinne Kondo, Nancy Lutkehaus, and Judith Stacey. Lois Banner has just completed a book on Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Janet Hoskins’s books and teaching have located her squarely within the field of experimental ethnography. Carla Kaplan’s scholarly edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s letters makes major contributions to the history of U.S. anthropology. And Lanita Jacobs-Huey’s work on the cultural politics of African-American hair has generated her own groundbreaking reconsiderations of the location of the cultural observer vis-à-vis her informants. These faculty members are scattered across departments, fields, and emphases, but taken together, they present dazzling possibilities for USC as a major international player in ongoing dialogues about the place of ethnographic research at the interstices of a range of fields including anthropology, sociology, history, literature, linguistics, theatre, and visual studies.

We hoped to capitalize on these enormous strengths as we assembled the “Feminist Ethnographies” series, and in that spirit we invited two scholars whose theory and practice have exerted widespread influence upon the manner in which “feminist ethnography” has been conceptualized: Gayle Rubin and Kamala Visweswaran. Rubin, of course, is a scholar often credited with setting the agenda for feminist studies in the U.S. academy—first with her mid-seventies essay “The Traffic in Women” and later with her “Thinking Sex” essay and her more recent archival, ethnographic, and theoretical work on the formation of sexual subcultures and communities in urban spaces. Less well-known, however, are Rubin’s thoughtful, provocative, and highly illuminating comments on the history of the development of Gender Studies as an interdisciplinary field (these, published in a 1994 interview with Judith Butler titled “Sexual Traffic”). For many of us, Rubin’s comments about the history of our field have provided a kind of road map for the development of a multidisciplinary brand of scholarship: she thinks hard about what has worked in the past, what the possible pitfalls are, and—perhaps especially—what we gain by attending closely and respectfully to historical precedents.

Kamala Visweswaran is newer to the scene, but her 1994 book Fictions of Feminist Ethnography and her subsequent work also model a daring, rigorous, extraordinarily innovative approach to cross-disciplinary scholarship—an approach, moreover, that has proven widely influential (in the U.S. and internationally) in the decade since the book was published. Visweswaran’s scholarship brings together and enacts mutual interrogations of a range of fields, topics, and modes including anthropology, South Asian Studies, feminism, postcolonial theory, human rights activism, literature, drama, and the law. Situated within a careful reconsideration of the history of U.S. anthropology, her work is both critical and respectful of precedents as it sketches out entirely new ways of constructing a scholarly “argument.”

As demonstrated by these women’s work—and the histories that support that work—a version of the idea of “partnership” has been built in to the practice of feminist studies and the study of ethnicities from their earliest days. It is, as my colleague Lisa Bitel has reminded me, a “venerable” tradition. In these contexts, “partnering” was (as it remains) as much a product of material need as of intellectual inclination: lacking institutional space, that earlier scholarly cohort was compelled to invent new spaces, and from those new positions was able to take up questions that could not have been properly addressed within the purview of traditional scholarly fields. We continue to collaborate—across departments and schools, and across town—for many of the same reasons. Following Rubin’s and Visweswaran’s example, we'll do well to keep our own rich history in mind even as we focus on the future.


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Partnering Alice Gambrell Early in March, Dean Aoun sent out a College-wide memo detailing the notable successes achieved by college faculty through practices of intra- and inter-institutional “partnering”; he noted how, as “a small private research college,” LAS can extend its capabilities by encouraging work that extends across departments and schools, as well as into collaborations with other institutions: “partnering with others,” he wrote, “provides a multiplier effect, giving us resources we wouldn't otherwise have.” “Partnership,” it occurred to me, might usefully be understood as another word for the kind of coalitional intellectual activity that has been performed during the last three decades within a range of fields that took shape in the U.S. academy during the late 1960s: most influential among them, Gender Studies and the study of U.S. Ethnicities. These fields emerged during the late 1960s; lacking strong institutional support, their development was fueled by the energies of faculty who were willing to work, often on their own time, at the interstices of traditional fields in order to create models of intellectual inquiry elastic enough to encompass the new questions and the new information that they were bringing to the scholarly table. I have written elsewhere and in more detail about these particular histories; more recently, the archive of the early days of the development of “Women's Studies,” “Black Studies,” “Chicano Studies,” and a range of other fields has grown exponentially, making it possible for us to observe far more closely than before these home-grown models of ingenuity, resourcefulness, intellectual engagement, theoretical complexity, and commitment to principles of social justice. It remains to be seen how the notion of “partnering” will be transformed now that its status has shifted in such a significant way: no longer the renegade collaboration of a marginalized few –whose influence percolates, so to speak, from the bottom up—“partnering” is currently an institutional ideal with the strongest possible top-down support. I, for one, will be paying close attention to this shift, and to the incongruities that might well be generated by it. My own hope is that we will move into this new phase informed by and ever-cognizant of the efforts of our predecessors, who mapped similar strategies for us, and whose political courage and seriousness provided daunting models for scholars who followed them. An awareness of this history undergirded CFR’s major programming effort during Spring semester 2003: our speaker series on “Feminist Ethnographies” co-curated with UCLA's Center for the Study of Women. Like many (perhaps most) successful collaborations in the US feminist-academic tradition, the USC/UCLA “Feminist Ethnographies” series was partly serendipitous—we realized during the planning phases that we were working on complementary calendars—and partly a matter of need: neither CFR nor CSW had the resources to put together a series that could encompass the exceptional range and depth of the topic of “Feminist Ethnographies,” which has exploded in importance during the last decade. A relative rarity as a cross-town collaboration, the USC/UCLA series nonetheless built upon relationships forged over the last 12 years as the two Centers have cosponsored the graduate “Thinking Gender” conference. Each Center invited two scholars of international stature to speak on its own campus: UCLA hosted Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Sherrie Ortner, and USC hosted Gayle Rubin and Kamala Visweswaran. At USC, the series held special significance, in that one of the vanguard areas of scholarly inquiry among faculty in the College is in the interdisciplinary reengagement of the significance of ethnographic research. The landmark 1995 volume Women Writing Culture—which comprised a thorough recasting of the history and theory of scholarly modes of cultural observation—contained contributions by no less than four USC faculty: Gelya Frank, Dorinne Kondo, Nancy Lutkehaus, and Judith Stacey. Lois Banner has just completed a book on Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Janet Hoskins’s books and teaching have located her squarely within the field of experimental ethnography. Carla Kaplan’s scholarly edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s letters makes major contributions to the history of U.S. anthropology. And Lanita Jacobs-Huey’s work on the cultural politics of African-American hair has generated her own groundbreaking reconsiderations of the location of the cultural observer vis-à-vis her informants. These faculty members are scattered across departments, fields, and emphases, but taken together, they present dazzling possibilities for USC as a major international player in ongoing dialogues about the place of ethnographic research at the interstices of a range of fields including anthropology, sociology, history, literature, linguistics, theatre, and visual studies. We hoped to capitalize on these enormous strengths as we assembled the “Feminist Ethnographies” series, and in that spirit we invited two scholars whose theory and practice have exerted widespread influence upon the manner in which “feminist ethnography” has been conceptualized: Gayle Rubin and Kamala Visweswaran. Rubin, of course, is a scholar often credited with setting the agenda for feminist studies in the U.S. academy—first with her mid-seventies essay “The Traffic in Women” and later with her “Thinking Sex” essay and her more recent archival, ethnographic, and theoretical work on the formation of sexual subcultures and communities in urban spaces. Less well-known, however, are Rubin’s thoughtful, provocative, and highly illuminating comments on the history of the development of Gender Studies as an interdisciplinary field (these, published in a 1994 interview with Judith Butler titled “Sexual Traffic”). For many of us, Rubin’s comments about the history of our field have provided a kind of road map for the development of a multidisciplinary brand of scholarship: she thinks hard about what has worked in the past, what the possible pitfalls are, and—perhaps especially—what we gain by attending closely and respectfully to historical precedents. Kamala Visweswaran is newer to the scene, but her 1994 book Fictions of Feminist Ethnography and her subsequent work also model a daring, rigorous, extraordinarily innovative approach to cross-disciplinary scholarship—an approach, moreover, that has proven widely influential (in the U.S. and internationally) in the decade since the book was published. Visweswaran’s scholarship brings together and enacts mutual interrogations of a range of fields, topics, and modes including anthropology, South Asian Studies, feminism, postcolonial theory, human rights activism, literature, drama, and the law. Situated within a careful reconsideration of the history of U.S. anthropology, her work is both critical and respectful of precedents as it sketches out entirely new ways of constructing a scholarly “argument.” As demonstrated by these women’s work—and the histories that support that work—a version of the idea of “partnership” has been built in to the practice of feminist studies and the study of ethnicities from their earliest days. It is, as my colleague Lisa Bitel has reminded me, a “venerable” tradition. In these contexts, “partnering” was (as it remains) as much a product of material need as of intellectual inclination: lacking institutional space, that earlier scholarly cohort was compelled to invent new spaces, and from those new positions was able to take up questions that could not have been properly addressed within the purview of traditional scholarly fields. We continue to collaborate—across departments and schools, and across town—for many of the same reasons. Following Rubin’s and Visweswaran’s example, we'll do well to keep our own rich history in mind even as we focus on the future.