« VG Paper--4 personas | Main | RM's "gatekeeper" piece »
December 13, 2005
Literary scholars, including Pamela Thurschwell and Christopher Keep, have written on the ideological impact of 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. 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.
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). 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 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, mediation, 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.”
Posted by LaurenCurtright at December 13, 2005 02:23 PM
research
Referencing Sites:
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/virtual/mt-tb.cgi/2213
