Web Feminism, Theory and Practice: Negotiating the Academy with VG/Voices from the Gaps

A paper presented at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention 2005 in Washington, D.C. By Lauren Curtright, Carla Elaine Johnson, Rachel Mordecai, and Maria Zavialova.

Introduction

During the last two years, the four of us have been involved in the maintenance, redesign, update, and expansion of VG/Voices from the Gaps, a University of Minnesota website devoted to student writing on the lives and work of women writers and artists of color. This process has demanded that we theorize the website as well, as we have come to realize that VG presents both potential and pitfalls to women as artists and scholars negotiating the academy. To begin this presentation, Carla Elaine Johnson, an MFA candidate at UMN, will discuss VG from a writer's perspective. Then, Rachel Mordecai, Masha Zavialova, and I, who are doctoral candidates in English Literature, will approach the issue of negotiation from the standpoints of three roles that we think illuminate the tensions inherent in the work of VG: I will discuss VG as a "secretary"; Rachel will consider VG as "gatekeeper"; and Masha will theorize VG as "grafter."

Part I (by Carla Elaine Johnson):

As a unique website filling the space between academic journalism and contemporary blog, Voices from the Gaps (VG) helps to navigate the literary spectrum for women writers and artists of color. However, while VG attempts to negotiate boundaries, it becomes an unwilling enforcer of the very system it is attempting to subvert, with regard to a feminist representation in literature and the arts. VG utilizes the reality of the status of the female of color in literature and art in the past, by accenting the notion and perspective of race as a boundary. However, this boundary is flexible and limited by geographical perspective. Thus outside of the United States, many types of women who might be classified as “white” or “Caucasian” within the US are accepted by the VG site as women of color – for example, Jewish women in Brazil are accepted, while American white Jewish women are not. VG has the difficult task: It must critique and reinforce the dominant culture, including standards of the academy. As a tool of negotiation for women, VG is a symbol of empowerment for writers, students, both within and without the academy. The women whose work appears on VG demonstrate the variety of literary range, while struggling against how being limited by race and gender reinforces the very disempowering beliefs VG is meant to eliminate. The writer is the basic center of the toolbox. The reality of the female writer of color is still one of near-invisibility, although VG’s existence, numerous website hits and increased requests for and a willingness to submit new author pages demonstrates hope for the future. One area of difficulty in negotiation is the still-persistent attention to how writers appear physically, as opposed to addressing the content, style and excellence of their writing. From a marketing perspective, one positive aspect of VG is that the outer “packaging” dilemma is resolved: Writers who perhaps are not very glamorous are not supplanted by beautiful models who reflect the cultural or stereotypical expectations which then sell books. The celebrity writer is one who is not featured on VG because she has an audience, and a powerful negotiation tool in her very fame. VG is unique because the contributors range from undergraduate to graduate students, from teachers to college professors to other writers themselves. This egalitarian approach means that the women featured on VG as a whole are able to wield a larger share of power due to the presence of an international website and international contribution and participation. VG as a tool for negotiation is just the start of what hopefully will be a series of steps forward in maintaining and consolidating feminine power in the area of literature and the arts.

Part II (by Lauren Curtright):

Literary scholars, including Pamela Thurschwell and Christopher Keep, have written on the ideological impact of middle-class women’s large-scale entrance to the workforce as secretaries, in one form or another, in Britain and the U.S. around the turn of the twentieth century [1]. However, the ways in which women occupy secretarial roles in the academy at the more recent turn of the century deserves our attention. My position is that VG/Voices from the Gaps, a website devoted to women artists and writers of color, is a secretary—or, rather, is, as the term now stands, an “administrative assistant.” My argument is shaped by personal history: to date, the largest trophy in my possession is the Business Award I received for being the “Best Typist” in the ninth grade; I worked as a legal secretary during the time I spent in the ‘real world’ between college and graduate school; and, for a year and a half now, as a PhD student at the University of Minnesota, I’ve worked as a paid Research Assistant turned volunteer for VG.

Scholar Liz Rohan advocates “that feminist scholars embark on the task of revealing the technological and literacy skills employed by women in jobs considered to be low status by the academy and the world at large” (Rohan 3) [2]. Rohan identifies typing, proofreading, and word-processing as secretarial skills that remain undervalued, invisible, and diametrically opposed to “problem-solving” and “knowledge” by most academics, including feminists. The secretarial work of VG includes the day-to-day tasks on Rohan’s list, as well as html coding, email, artist screening, database management, and identity categorizing. The real theoretical work of VG, I argue, is not in the expository textual analyses that we publish on the site, but in the decisions that we make of how to label the site’s featured artists. Each time we, the VG staff, post a new artist page, we check off at least one box, by which we assign to that artist at least one “axis” indicating her ethnic, racial, national, or regional affiliation. This is an entirely problematic practice however one that seems necessary for maintaining a database by which students, teachers, and scholars can search for women artists of color within a more particular category, such as Caribbean, or Native American. The utility of the site demands that we comply with some schema for thinking racial and ethnic difference. Our difficult job as ‘organizers’ is to invent a catalog that, at once, critiques racist taxonomies, enables productive searches, and responds to feedback on alternative means of classifying artists and their work. To date, we have received such input from our more illustrious labor of interviewing artists, such as Detroit-based fiction writer Lolita Hernandez, who told us that she self-identifies foremost as a “worker,” not as a Caribbean American, but also through the seemingly more tedious (i.e., secretarial) work of responding to email from the site’s users and potential contributors, such as from Charlotte Honigman-Smith, who argued that VG should feature “Jewish women writers of color,” and from a Female-to-Man user who suggested that it might be more appropriate to include “feminine” male artists on VG than “people who are transgender (vs. transsexual) and have the female body but see themselves as men, or as butches, or as something else, but not as women.” In its secretarial capacity, VG decides which identities qualify as “voices from the gaps” and which, therefore, merit reception by our “employer,” the academy. This is a position of tremendous responsibility and power. It demands our continual inquiry into the ways in which VG, in practice, may propagate the very racial ideology it is intended to critique. This inquiry simply cannot take place without secretarial labor. However, VG’s home institution, the University of Minnesota, effectively disregards this work as research by its official policy that internal funding is non-renewable beyond a project’s initialization stage—which the University defines as five years—after which the project’s continuation depends entirely upon its corporate marketability. As this policy reflects, maintenance and revision—the real work of VG—are not research according to the academy. This view contributes to the cultural devaluation of secretarial work, and of humanities research, in general, of which secretarial work is rightfully a part. By design and necessity, VG is both administrative and scholarly, both practical and theoretical. To successfully negotiate the academy, we must align VG with efforts, such as Rohan’s, to recognize the intellectual labor required and produced by “administrative assistance.”

[1] Thurschwell, Pamela. “Supple Minds and Automatic Hands: Secretarial Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Literature.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 37.2 (2001): 155-68.

Keep, Christopher. “The Cultural Work of The Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies: A Journal of the Humanities, Arts and Sciences 40.3 (1997): 401-26.

[2] Rohan, Liz. “Reveal Codes: A New Lens for Examining and Historicizing the Work of Secretaries.” Computers and Composition: An International Journal for Teachers of Writing 20.3 (2003): 237-53.

Part III (by Rachel Mordecai):

VG pushes the traditional limits of the academy in several ways: it participates in the project of expanding the literary canon, it privileges the Internet as a site of scholarly production, and it is committed to publishing the work of undergraduate scholars. However, it strikes me that VG’s project is beset by tensions deriving from its location at the edge of the academy. VG exists in a precarious position: it wants to be revolutionary, to challenge traditional canon-formation processes and assumptions, to champion the work of under-represented women writers and artists, to encourage alternative pedagogies. But it lives within the academy, and derives the conditions of its existence (once and future funding, equipment, staffing [although currently unpaid, this is recruited from the ready pool of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in the subject matter], and, perhaps most importantly, authority) from that location. It is therefore understandably – if not necessarily – constrained by academic culture. And the academy, as we are all aware, is a bounded space, its borders maintained by admissions standards and policies, hiring and tenure procedures, publishers’ peer-review practices, and many other structures which require the supplicant to present evidence of his or her worthiness to gain entrance. In other words, the academy is a space protected by a variety of gatekeepers.

This is hardly a new concept, and there is a body of literature devoted to exploring its ramifications for our work as educators. To the extent that VG is a pedagogical project, a resource for teaching, it participates, at least potentially, in the teacher’s negotiation of her role as gatekeeper – if we regard good grades as a “benefit”, the teacher decides who gets access to them. But to the extent that VG is also a publishing project, and a research resource, it partakes in another kind of gatekeeping: that of the editorial board, deciding who gets published. This has a double aspect in VG’s case: the board decides not only which students/scholars get their articles published on the site, but which writers and artists “merit” having their work represented – this last decision made according to sets of criteria that are in themselves problematic, and yet necessary, as addressed in Lauren’s discussion of VG as administrative assistant. Thus, the democratizing impulse that is at the core of the VG project – and that, left unchecked, might lead us to throw the site wide open, following the Wikipedia model and allowing people to post at will – is constantly in negotiation with the more restrictive, policing functions described above.

Mamadi Corra and David Willer’s comment-- “Gatekeepers control access to ‘benefits’ valued by others who are their ‘clients.’… [T]hat access is granted, not to something owned by the gatekeeper, but to benefits external to both the gatekeeper and the client-gatekeeper relation.” [3] --is worth pondering here, as it changes the terms of the allegiance I have posited above, in which the gatekeeper’s primary function is to serve the bounded space (the academy) by keeping the unworthy out. In Corra and Willer’s construction, the gatekeeper’s relationship is with the supplicant, “the client” who wants to gain entry. It is perhaps in this light that we might regard VG’s commitment to dialogue with its various publics, people who often challenge the decisions we make, the criteria we establish and uphold, in our role as gatekeeper. Yet we should acknowledge that VG engages in this dialogue – this negotiation – in good faith, but from a position of power. While our position within and allegiances to the academy cannot be denied, our political commitments and the demands for interactivity and responsiveness that proceed from the very nature of Internet communication urge us towards a constant critique and renegotiation of the gatekeeper function.

[3] Corra, Mamadi and David Willer. “The Gatekeeper.” Sociological Theory 20:2 (July 2002): 180.

Part IV (by Maria Zavialova):

Rachel’s comment that a gatekeeper of the VG can renegotiate her/his own function as well as decide who gets admitted to the site suggests a higher degree of authority than an ordinary gate-keeper would have. My first idea was to think about the VG portal as the grafting device and VG staff as gardeners. Texts by women writers of color from outside the academy are brought into contact with academia through the work of undergraduate researchers who engraft them (the texts) onto the tree of the academic discourse through their projects.

In real life, when wildlings are grafted to a garden fruit tree, they begin to bring forth new cultivated fruit identical to that brought forth by the mother tree, and, in fact, undergraduate research projects that result in author pages published on our web-site are the cultured fruit of the grafting device of the VG.

If such were the case, however, then new texts of women-writers would just serve as raw material for the academic research lab that would use the non-canonical, the marginal, and the non-academic, to produce more and more of the same: research papers and dissertations, the cultured fruit of the time-honored academic discourse. This is might be the case, to some extent, but there are other sides to it.

The ‘wildlings’ grafted to the cultured tree, viewed as texts, or more generally inscriptions, might conform to different laws, the laws of scriptural economy, and it is these laws that impact their negotiation.

For Bruno Latour, inscriptions are not just representations, they are evidence, hard facts employed in an agonistic encounter for the purpose of gaining victory. Science is not just an attempt to represent as much of the world as possible and it has never been. Inscriptions help to solidify victories in the situation of competition. Official science (scholarship, discourse) is an accumulation of traces of documented victories. A university website whose mission is to make accessible a marginalized group of writers is a thoroughly agonistic endeavor. It is the point where the marginal and the integrated systems of inscriptions, the latter in the form of academic scholarship based on the accepted literary canon, meet. An integrated system of inscriptions is a historical effort. It is an accumulation of traces, each layer being deposited on the former only after the confidence about its meaning is established (Latour 17). The VG website provides a venue where ‘the confidence about the meaning’ of the new material can be stabilized, in the words of Bruno Latour who saw this as a necessary condition for the inscriptions, texts, or, more generally, traces, to be included into the already stabilized group of texts (the canon). The moment of establishing this confidence is the moment of negotiation - interfacing with the institutional power when the very notion of what is marginal can be discussed and redefined. Negotiation becomes the temporary opening, or breaking, of the borders to allow new voices to penetrate the institutional borders, a point “at which voices slip into the great book of our law” (de Certeau 132). The process of negotiation implies a certain amount of force applied to open up a point of entry. So the VG becomes a place of sabotage, and its officers – saboteurs, strangely combining this military function with that of receptionists and gatekeepers at the beck and call of the academy.

The setting works like a giant ‘optical device’ that creates a new laboratory, a new type of vision and a new phenomenon to look at (19). It is a transitional space: what comes out - comes out with the marks of power and belonging. “The scriptural enterprise transforms within itself what it receives from outside and creates internally the instruments for an appropriation of an external space (de Certeau).

The VG is the point where the border is broken – what enters through this border is not a new name but rather a community of writers, with ill-defined, due to the nature of the Internet, borders.

The VG website offers a course that is listed in the class schedule together with courses on Shakespeare and Melville. Thus, marginalized writings become one of the items on the list of canonical works but still marked as marginal – an excluded inclusion. Marginalities can be integrated into the system and sometimes they do but their integration will have to be framed in ways that would indicate their marginality.

The important thing, however, is that marginal texts become part of a chain or a cascade of inscriptions, whatever their status is and integrated systems, viewed as methodologies, according to Heidegger, adopt themselves to their own results, and thus , even included as exclusions can contribute to the subsequent developments of literary studies. Once an item of information is received, classified, inserted into a system it begins to act on the environment and transform it (de Certeau 135).