A farewell to jargon: a note on the growth in mass-market feminist publishing
Courtney is an adjunct professor of gender studies at Hunter College in New York, and she recently interviewed several other"feminist blogging academics" (including me) for a story that appears today at Women's E-News. It begins:
Usually the Sunday morning slot of an academic three-day conference is a ghost town.
But"Publishing in Women's Studies: A Public Voice" had professors with roller bags postponing flights and scribbling furiously on their notepads as Deborah Siegel described her journey from doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin to New York public intellectual and author of the 2007 book"Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild" (Palgrave) about infighting, both historical and contemporary, within the feminist movement.
"I was sitting in this academic perch with my hands in all this knowledge and feeling frustrated with the limitations of where my work was going," recounted Siegel.
Heads nodded vigorously around the room.
Siegel and Martin are both feminist academics who've had success in the popular marketplace. I'm trying to join them (I recently signed with an agent, but am not giving out any other details at this time). Off the top of my head, I can think of several feminist blogger/teachers who are in one stage or another of the book proposal/book-writing process.
I'm quoted in Courtney's piece making the case that feminist scholarship needs to be accessible to those outside of traditional academia. While there is important scholarly work to be done in the realm of feminist philosophy, let's say, most men and women in this country outside of graduate programs aren't interested in curling up with Irigarary or Cixous. What they want is good, solid, mainstream writing that brings a feminist analysis to the issues that average people are struggling with today.
I think there are parallels to the work traditionally done by Christian theologians. For decades, many Christian professors in the nation's leading seminaries (I think first, of course, of Richard Mouw) have sought to produce two kinds of written work: the first narrow, scholarly, and aimed at fellow professors and graduate students; the second mainstream, accessible, aimed at the mass market. A first-rate Christian scholar might write a treatise distinguishing prelapsarianism from sub-and supralapsarianism; he or she might also write a trade paperback on how to be a more loving and effective Christian spouse and parent.
Similarly, those of us who are trained in feminist scholarship of one kind or another need to be familiar with the specific jargon of our field. But when we write in that jargon, of course, we lose a huge chunk of our potential audience. Because feminists, like Christians, generally do have a sense that our political and theological commitments ought to impact the greater world, it's obviously frustrating to realize that our "shop talk" often comes across to a broader audience as inaccessible, myterious, and, worst of all, stupefyingly dull.
I'm excited by the huge growth in the market for gender studies literature. I'm excited not merely for myself or for my friends, but for all of those people we can reach in new and effective ways. The message that men and women are radically equal, far more alike than our culture acknowledges, is one that needs to be spread far and wide. It needs to be made in the language of the academy, and it needs to be made in the demotic of the street. True egalitarianism, the sort that sees all human beings as equally capable and equally responsible, is indeed Good and Wonderful News. And getting that Good News out into the wider world is surely at the heart of the feminist Great Commission.