We are living in challenging times for feminist activism and for activist scholarship. The conservative backlash against women’s reproductive rights, affirmative action and immigrant rights, among other challenges to social and economic justice, is shaping the work of feminists both inside and outside the academy. From the recent appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court to the increase in anti-immigrant laws and curtailment of civil liberties, there is more reason than ever for community activists and feminist academics to join together to fight for progressive social change and to curb the rising conservative tide. 

Here are just a few sobering illustrations of the contemporary challenges we face: On March 5th Governor Mike Rounds signed a bill making abortion illegal in his state of South Dakota unless a women's life is threatened therefore ignoring cases of rape or incest. Doctors who agree to perform abortions could face up to five years in prison. Lawmakers are also introducing similar legislation in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

The first day that George W. Bush took office in 2001 he reinstated the Global Gag Rule which prevents U.S. NGOs and funding agencies from providing family planning services or assistance to foreign NGOs that perform abortions or provide referrals for abortions.  Due to loss of funding, the Global Gag Rule had led to the closure and cutbacks of family planning groups in many countries (Population Action International).  The Global Gag Rule prevents NGOs in other countries from engaging in activities that are currently legal in their own countries - and at least for now - legal in the U.S. Couple the Global Gag Rule with the U.S.’s refusal to sign treaties or pass laws that would protect the environment, women’s rights, immigrants rights and labor rights and the ongoing occupation of Iraq, and it is no wonder that many of us in the U.S. and in the rest of the world are also worried about our global future.

Whatever can a feminist do about such things? How can activist scholarship and feminism be brought to bear on these large-scale policies and social problems? While I surely do not have all the answers to these questions, I do have a few suggestions as to where we might look for guidance as we work to create a more equitable and socially just future.   In this essay, I will address four questions that I believe are central to understanding how feminist activism and activist scholarship can continue to make a difference in women’s lives despite the conservative environment that surrounds us.

These are questions that I believe must be addressed as part of these efforts:  First, what can count as a feminist issue? Second, how well does the identity “feminist” travel across time and space? Third, what counts as activist scholarship? and Finally, how can we promote activist scholarship as a legitimate form of academic research?  In addressing these four questions, I also hope to shed some light on why I am cautiously optimistic that feminist activism and activist scholarship will remain central to movements for social and economic justice in the 21st century.  I should resist projecting forward through the entire 21st century however let’s try for 25 years as a time line.   In answering these questions I draw on the experiences and insights of women community activists and Women’s Studies students with whom I have worked over the past twenty-five years.

BACKGROUND

In the minds of many Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies practitioners, scholarship and activism are inextricably intertwined. The term “praxis” has been used to convey the idea of the mutual interdependence between theory and practice.  Interdisciplinary women’s studies and ethnic studies programs were developed in the context of political struggle by activists within and outside academia. For example, when most Women's Studies programs began, the link between the academic study of women's lives and the feministmovement was for the most part unquestioned. However, as Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies programs became institutionalized, a note of anxiety about compromising one's scholarship by political engagement was sometimes heard. Increasingly, some feminist and ethnic studies scholars began to see activism as a career risk. Of course, the riskiness of a public commitment to activism varies considerably depending on one's institutional location. A teacher in a community college might be rewarded for what is seen as laudable civic engagement, while a scholar seeking tenure in a traditional academic department at an elite institution might accurately assess that activist scholarship could jeopardize her or his career.               

Whether linking academic work with activism is likely to reap rewards or punishment is clearly dependent on the political climate of the institution and its surrounding community. Navigating these minefields has led some of us to use more politically acceptable terminology like public sociology, action research or service learning rather than activist scholarship or activist pedagogy to describe our research and pedagogical strategies.

1st: WHAT CAN COUNT AS A FEMINIST ISSUE

In answering the first question: what can count as a feminist issue, I begin with a story:  In July 2002, 600 unarmed Ijaw women in Nigeria took over a large Chevron-Texaco oil terminal.  Seven hundred workers including Americans, Britons and Canadians were held hostage. The Ijaw women activists threatened to strip naked, a practice that is used in their culture to shame the offender.  As a spokeswoman for the group declared: “Our weapon is our nakedness” (Dahbany-Miraglia 2000). The women ranged in age from 30 to 90. They “demanded jobs . . . , electricity for their homes and economic development in [the] Niger delta” (83).  Drawing on their cultural practices and with a commitment to peaceful negotiations, the Ijaw women were successful in challenging this multi-national corporation, at least in this one location. Was this a feminist action?

In my research on the grassroots activism of women from poor communities in the U.S., I have been exploring how local struggles become the grounds for larger challenges to inequality. Many critics of locality-based struggles have often dismissed community-based protests as particularistic or parochial. These critics view with suspicion the emphasis on localism, community and tradition that often accompanies locality-based struggles. In contrast, while these concerns are somewhat justified given the extent to which many community-based actions are designed to protect individual interests or narrowly-conceived community values, I have witnessed the power of local struggles for the development of political analyses and strategies that contribute to broader movements for progressive social change.  I have been particularly interested in the myriad of ways women in communities around the world are challenging the negative effects of global economic restructuring that are disrupting their livelihoods, their environment, and their abilities to care for their families.

In this regard, I would like the definition of feminism to be broad enough to include the diversity of women's political analyses and strategies. The community activists I have worked with do not see women’s issues as separate from broad-based struggles for social justice and economic security.  While not necessarily working on so-called gender-based issues, they challenge deeply held patriarchal and heterosexist traditions and confront the limits of democracy for poor and working class people in the U.S and elsewhere. They fight against corporate poisoning of their neighborhoods and police harassment, against homophobia and racism, against the abuse of women and children, and for people-centered economic development, immigrants' rights, access to health care, educational equity, and adequate wages.  Many have been engaged in such struggles for most of their lives and continue despite the decline in the wider society's support for a progressive social agenda.

Their political praxis seems in line with that envisioned by many of my women’s studies students who are from 20 to 50 years younger than the women whose political practice I document.  For example, the following definition of feminism was offered to me by a women’s studies student who recently graduated from the University of Connecticut.  In defining what feminism meant to her, Nikki McGary wrote:

To me, feminism is the promotion of open-mindedness. It is the reflection of the hope in equality. It is the desire to raise consciousness and critique social barriers and inequalities. It is the knowledge that things can improve. It is the understanding that there are silenced whispers in our history and society that should be heard and shared. . .  It is the desire to listen to the silenced voices and promote change that can improve the lives of the oppressed. Feminism allows me to critique with an open mind and find my voice so that I can promote improvement and share my perspectives. Feminism challenges ignorance, encourages empowerment, and embraces diversity.     

Like many of the Women’s Studies students I have worked with, Nikki demonstrates her feminist commitment through a broad range of organizing efforts. She participated in the War Resisters League, organized on behalf of Justice for Janitors, linked with the Students Against Sweatshops movement, organized workshops on tolerance and antiracism, and following graduation she worked with the Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Taskforce as Coordinator for the LGBTQ Community in Connecticut.  Nikki is currently in California completing her master’s degree in cultural anthropology with an emphasis in gender and ecology.

Nikki’s organizing efforts illustrates the point raised by Kaplana Kishnamurthy, former co-director of the Third Wave Foundation, that for contemporary feminist activists, “The traditional issues of pay equity and reproductive health have been expanded to school reform, environmental justice, reproductive health including issues of sexual health and safety, globalization, . . . [and] prisons.” Many of these issues have always been central to the low income, African American, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and white women community activists whose political practice I have analyzed. In that sense, we are witnessing a broadening of what counts as feminism and feminist activism that, in many ways, speaks to the concerns of poor women and women of color in this country and beyond.

2nd: HOW WELL DOES THE POLITICAL IDENTITY “FEMINIST” TRAVEL?

In addressing the second question: how well does the political identity “feminist” travel? I want to point out that in response to their different histories and local economies, women activists and their allies in different parts of the world have developed diverse definitions of feminism. For example, African feminist Obioma Nnaemeka (1998) defines African feminism in terms of “power-sharing, complementarity, accommodation, compromise, negotiation, and inclusiveness.” From another social location, “Moroccan and Tunisian feminists have developed a kind of social feminism, one which emphasizes not only the modernization of family laws, but also the rights of women workers.” According to sociologist Val Moghadam (2003) “this may be due to the different history and political culture of Morocco and Tunisia, which includes a stronger tradition of trade unionism and socialist and social-democratic practices, as well as higher female labor-force participation” than in other regions (pp. 73-74). 

Many more women activists refuse to identify under the political identity, “feminist.”  For example, less than half of the women that I have interviewed in my work on women’s community-based activism defined themselves as feminists.  However, historian Temma Kaplan argues that since many grassroots women activists do not construct their activism through an identity as feminists they can play with gender stereotypes in a way that those who center their identities as feminists may not.

Many college students, including some in Women’s Studies, are also resisting a “feminist” identity. Some find the term “humanist” more useful in capturing their multi-issue approach to social justice. The politics of identity can be especially contentious in the context of coalition-building efforts. If activists require participants to take up labels that may or may not be of their own choosing, we might be unable to build certain kinds of progressive alliances. However, as feminist scholars and activists point out, there are “gender dimensions” to all struggles for social justice, and “feminists better be in these struggles and bring out those dimensions because certainly nobody else will.” Feminist scholars consistently demonstrate how gendered and race-based inequalities under gird capitalist expansion and argue that even broader left movements have yet to incorporate the ways that gender and race inequalities constitute the foundation for many of these economic and political projects.

In addition, women activists have applied a feminist analysis to the organization of, and strategy used by social movements to more fully integrate the movement politics with the political goals.  For example, Cynthia Enloe (2000) describes how Okinawan feminists who are fighting for the closure of U.S. military bases in Okinawa, developed “a feminist critique of the standard rituals of the male-led peace movement” (122).  They challenged what they viewed as “the mainstream peace movement’s masculinized culture” (122).  The women began to meet separately to develop analyses and political strategies that reflected their own vision of peace and anti-militarism and to enhance each women’s capacity to participate in the movement. 

They organized an event in the city of Naga which they defined as a “walk -- not a march.” Activist scholars Yoko Fukumura and Martha Matsuoka report that the walk proceeded with no “raised fists,” and “no prominent women public figures.” In this way, they were able to bring together a large number of women’s groups to support a referendum against the new U.S. navy heliport (pp. 122-123).  Although the referendum was overridden by the Japanese government, the women went on to form a new activist alliance they called “May Our Women’s Voices Speak to Your Heart” (124).  In their first action, they presented “the Okinawan governor with a washbasin full of letters written individually by women, each expressing in her own words her opposition to [the] proposed navy heliport” (123). As Fukumura and Matsuoka explain, in Japan, the washbasin symbolizes the last stop in accountability: in other words, “the washbasin stops here” (123). Okinawan feminist activists have also “publicized the problem of sexual assaults on women by U.S. military personnel and developed an analysis of masculinzed sexualized violence wielded by men of any nationality” (122).

The case studies I have used as illustrations of an expanded view of feminist activism have been gathered and analyzed by feminists who I consider activist scholars including Dina Dahbany-Miraglia, Val Moghadam, Obioma Nnaemeka, Cynthia Enloe, Yoko Fukumura and Martha Matsuoka. They participate in struggles for social justice and chronicle and, in collaboration with other activists and activist scholars, offer critical analyses of these efforts. There are many more feminist scholars around the country and around the world who inspire us with their commitment and astute critical lens on social problems and social justice. They are located in different academic sites women’s studies, sociology, history, political science, urban studies, ethnic studies, education, and theatre. They teach at community colleges, teaching colleges, and research universities. They are adjuncts, assistant professors, and tenured professors. Some are working or have worked with government organizations or NGOs.  They demonstrate through their politics and publications that it is possible to combine activism and scholarship.

3rd: WHAT COUNTS AS ACTIVIST SCHOLARSHIP

I want to shift now to consider what counts as activist scholarship. In my view, research that supports an activist campaign or a progressive organization and that chronicles the lessons of organizing against oppression in its many guises constitutes the central purpose for progressive activist research.  A wide array of research strategies, data analyses, and cultural products can serve this goal.  Yet such analyses and cultural products can be of more or less immediate use for specific activist agendas.  For example, activist research includes documenting and analyzing the history of activists, activist art, diverse community actions, and social movements.  Such analyses are often conducted after the completion of a specific struggle or examine a wide range of different campaigns and activist organizations. 

This form of research on activism is extremely important for progressive activists working toward a broadened vision of political action and can help generate new strategies for coalition-building. These studies may not answer specific questions activists have about the value of certain strategies for their particular political struggles.  Yet these broad-based critical analyses do shed new light on processes of politicization, diversity, and continuity in political struggles over time. On the one hand, many activists could be critical of these apparently more "academic" constructions of activism, especially since the need for specific knowledges to support activist agendas frequently goes unmet.  The texts in which such analyses appear are rarely made widely available and further create a division between feminists located within the academy and community-based activists.  On the other hand, many activist scholars have developed linkages with activists and policy arenas in such a way as to effectively bridge the so-called activist/scholar divide.  In the early 1990s, sociologist Ronnie Steinberg (1996) brought her sociological research skills to campaigns for comparable worth and pay equity.  She reports on the moderate success of the movement for comparable worth and the significance of careful statistical analyses for supporting changes in pay and job classifications.  As one highlight, she reports that systematic standards for assessing job equity she developed "were incorporated into specific guidelines on gender neutrality issued by the Ontario Pay Equity Tribunal” in 1991 (231). 

Measures of a rigid positivism are often used to undermine feminists' credibility in legal and legislative settings.  Even more problematic, research generated for specific activist goals may be misappropriated to support anti-feminist aims by those who do not share feminist political perspectives.  For example, Katherine Edin (1996) describes how her research on welfare recipients' strategies to “make ends meet” could be used to further stigmatize low-income women who are forced by their economic circumstances to gain additional funds through illegal means or who do not report income earned in the informal (or unofficial) labor market.

In an effort to democratize the research process, many activist researchers argue for adopting participatory strategies that involve community residents or other participants in the design, implementation, and analysis of the research.  Collaborative writing also broadens the perspectives represented in the final product.  Participatory research has been promoted in a variety of arenas by university-based researchers as well as those working in the applied fields of agriculture, education, and economic development.  However, these strategies are particularly difficult for graduate students and junior faculty to adopt. With the emphasis on single authorship in the social sciences, it is even difficult for senior faculty to engage in collaborative writing, especially with community members or movement participants.  Here I want to emphasize the importance of the mentorship by senior faculty and other support provided by feminist professional associations like NWSA and Sociologists for Women in Society. These professional organizations help legitimate activist scholarship by providing avenues for dissemination of this work in meetings and in their journals. They also provide the context for mentoring junior scholars and graduate students who are interested in conducting this form of research. This leads me to the fourth question: how can we increase the legitimacy of activist scholarship.

Students come into our interdisciplinary programs with tremendous passion to fight against injustice. They are motivated by their desire to understand the forces that contribute to inequality, oppression, and discrimination and to explicate diverse strategies for resistance that can be effective in different political contexts. I should add that many students in sociology - my other academic location - are also passionate about these activist intellectual goals.

In most discipline-bound programs, students’ passions are met with cautions against appearing politically biased and they are advised to take on a dispassionate scientific attitude in their research and writing. Some of the most passionate of these students leave academia for other forms of political engagement. Those who remain are either socialized into the dispassionate academic identity or manage to find the mentorship, language and methodological strategies to continue on their quest.

Before starting graduate school one of my former graduate students, Clare Weber worked for Witness-For-Peace in Nicaragua and later headed a group that was organizing street vendors in LA. She began her dissertation proposal defense with a description of how her research questions derived from her activism and was promptly told by one member of her committee that, instead, research questions should be developed out of the existing literature. Although she could effectively tie her questions to a broader literature in social movements, she responded that no literature she read offered an adequate framework for her analysis.  She was then met with this reply: “Well perhaps you haven’t looked hard enough.”

As a mentor to graduate students interested in social change oriented research, I have learned to include in the lessons I teach, how to negotiate these boundary maintaining academic rituals. I offer the students lessons in translation: how to repackage their experiential and critically reflexive insights into recognizable academic frameworks. But even these lessons are often insufficient for legitimating the rights of our students to pursue activist scholarship. What was needed, I quickly realized, was an extensive body of literature that demonstrated the legitimacy of activist scholarship which our students could turn to, learn from, and, more to the point, cite in their research proposals and academic writing 

To that goal, I proceeded to publish four books: the first was a collection of analyses of community activism written by authors who define themselves as activist scholars, the second was a book called Teaching Feminist Activism that is designed to provide teaching tools for instructors interested in using experiential learning in feminist classrooms, and the third is a book called, Feminism and Method, one section of which highlights the challenges of conducting activist research. The fourth is a collection I co-edited with Manisha Desai on Women’s Activism and Globalization which demonstrates the diverse ways that women in communities around the world have attempted to link their community-based activism with transnational politics and, in turn, bring transnational organizing to bare on local problems.  I am also pleased to report that since the late 1990s there have been a significant number of other books and articles published in highly regarded academic journals that further demonstrate the legitimacy of activist scholarship. We also have a growing body of literature that deal with the methodological challenges of activist research.  Here I whole-heartedly recommend the work of sociologist Dorothy Smith. Her new book on Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005) has just been published in the Gender Lens series by Rowman and Littlefield.

Yet I must caution, producing activist scholarship is difficult, not only because it is rarely rewarded in academia, but because it is time-consuming and emotionally draining.  One form of activist scholarship involves chronicling and assessing activist struggles in which we participate. Activist scholars must find a balance between the passions we feel for the movement politics or community actions we are involved in and the goal of presenting a critical analysis of the political struggles.  I have found that when one's personal vantage point is incorporated into the analysis, we are better able to produce a more honest account and that our analyses are deepened by making our activist experiences and viewpoint visible. 

Furthermore, activist scholarship, especially when done in partnership with communities or social movement actors, tends to avoid some of these traps because the audience for the analysis will not be impressed by our nice turn of phrase or elaborate statistical apparatus. These research partners will demand more transparency in the research process and findings. Public debate, dialogue among research collaborators, and other forms of reflectivity practiced throughout the research process offers activist scholars an opportunity to subject their analyses to critical interventions that can temper distortions that arise out of the social organization of social science.

Academia is enriched by the contributions of activist scholars. Interdisciplinary activist scholars, in particular, have a great deal to offer in their ability to act: as translators who are conversant across disciplinary and institutional borders; as critical analysts who have demonstrated the limits of major conventional academic approaches by critiquing these frameworks for their inability to adequately analyze and explain the dynamics of gender, race, class, sexuality, and power; as intersectional theorists who have generated rich theoretical insights about knowledge, power, inequality, subjectivity, and resistance; and as innovators who adopt reflective theoretical and methodological strategies and are therefore quick to develop new research questions and frameworks.

As I have mentioned, insights provided by activist scholars are also important for activists and social movement organizations. But here I want to point out that sophisticated political analyses and theoretical insight do not derive solely from those located within the academy. In fact, there is tremendous permeability between political analysis and the strategies developed by movement activists and those taken up and elaborated by academic feminists and other activist scholars.   For example, queer activists generated a critique of identity constructions like gay and lesbian and produced a fluid conceptualization of identity that was used to mobilize people across many different sexualities. Queer scholars in the academy took up this critique and developed an even more nuanced analysis of how categories function to discipline social movement actors. This further illustrates the importance of praxis, namely, that theory and practice need to be linked in order to produce knowledge that is relevant and socially useful.

IN CONCLUSION AND INTO THE FUTURE

During the later part of the 20th century, feminists along with other activists with diverse political agendas have experimented with new forms of activism. Cultural politics and cyberactivism have proven to be two of the most effective forms of organizing that contest, respectively, distinctions between culture and politics and separation of local and global organizing. Cultural politics expanded as a form of activism in the 1980s and 1990s as exemplified by the Guerrilla Girls and Lesbian Avengers. Lesbian Avengers was first organized in 1992 in New York City and drew on the lessons of ACT-UP and created spectacles such as eating fire to creatively challenge homophobia and work towards lesbian visibility.  The Guerrilla Girls is a group of art activists who identify themselves through names of deceased women artists, have been challenging sexism, racism, and homophobia in the art establishment, film, and other media since 1985. Wearing gorilla masks in public, they have generated a series of provocative posters and collective actions that draw on humor and satire to draw attention to expose sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film and the culture at large.” As they explain:

We use humor to convey information, provoke discussion, and show that feminists can be funny. We wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than our personalities. Dubbing ourselves the conscience of culture, we declare ourselves feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do‑gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. Our work has been passed around the world by kindred spirits who we are proud to have as supporters. The mystery surrounding our identities has attracted attention. We could be anyone; we are everywhere. (Guerilla Girls 5/18/05)

Many of my students have been drawn to the creative performative and “in-the-streets” form of activism modeled by the Guerrilla Girls. While much of the Guerrilla Girls’ political performances are unique innovations, their use of spectacles and alternative modes of communication has precedents in the 1960s and early 1970s.  For example, other radical feminist performance artists like Hannah Wilke and Eleanor Antin used spectacle, ritual, and their own bodies to challenge sexism and the patriarchal art world.

The expansion of access to media and information through cable television and the Internet has facilitated a wide range of activist efforts and has proven a significant resource for the development of feminist organizing. Over the last decade, we have witnessed the power of cyber-activism in fighting the globalization of capitalism and the U.S. war against Afghanistan and Iraq as well as promoting domestic legislative lobbying and fundraising for diverse political causes. The Internet has proven a significant resource for the development of the links between academic and activist organizations and between community-based and transnational feminist organizing.  However, while the Internet and other technologies offer important resources for activists to link their efforts across the globe, it remains a privileged tool that few people can afford and few grassroots organizations can access.

Despite these and other challenges, I expect that feminists will become increasingly more sophisticated in understanding processes of racialization and globalization and will be better equipped to build coalitions across diverse constituencies, different issues, and national borders. I also believe that feminists have many insights into how to create democratic structures at all levels of organization beginning with the consciousness raising and politicization strategies developed in the beginning of the Second Wave Women’s Movement to more recent efforts to organize across borders, regions, and religions. Furthermore, feminist praxis reveals the power of reflective practice for revitalizing political analysis and political strategies. Feminism also offers methods for contesting dominant categories and revealing the complexities of relations of ruling as they are manifest in everyday life.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, feminist praxis contains important insights into how to sustain activist engagement over the long haul.  Women's social networks, in particular, are powerful resources for promoting resistance strategies especially for those most marginalized in contemporary society.  Despite the overwhelming odds against achieving a peaceful and just world in the foreseeable future, I believe that we can contribute to progressive social change by adopting the some of the following strategies: First, taking inspiration from those working for social justice in even more oppressive contexts around the world. Second, challenging passivity - in ourselves and others around us. Third, seeking opportunities to organize with others as equals and putting democracy into practice. And fourth, remaining open to those who disagree with us in order to understand what their investment is in a post-democratic political environment.

In the meantime, we cannot ignore the fact that some of the gains we have made over the past 25 years are under attack. We will need to develop new political strategies to protect reproductive rights, affirmative action, employment equity, and abortion clinics, battered women shelters, as well as women=s studies programs while also trying to contribute to some of the broad-based efforts I have outlined in this essay.  On a more upbeat note, I would like to conclude with Women’s Studies student Bonnie Durgin’s answer to my query: What does being a feminist in the 21st century mean to you?

For me, being a feminist in the 21st century is a slow process of opening my eyes and realizing, as I look around, that most of the world is still asleep. It is awakening to the distant screams of women far away, in maquiladoras, computer factories, and production plants, who are being worked into premature old age, so that I can wear J Crew sweaters, type this paper, and drive a subaru with a sunroof. . . . It is wiping the sleep from my eyes and looking out of my window to see a pitifully small line of protesters marching for peace, for basic human rights, for respectful treatment of the earth, freedom from oppression, and social justice. . . . I realize, as I come to full consciousness, that now, awake, I will never again be lulled to sleep by the great American dream. When I finally find beautiful, older and younger women, who are wide awake, they speak with me about things I have always known to be true, they tell me that maybe together, with this knowledge, we can make a sound so loud that we can wake everyone else, or at least stir them up a bit.

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