I'm annoyed with the She Writes website. They invited my friend Heather and me to blog about the NWSA Conference and said that they'd put our posts on the main page, but instead they've got an activist campaign going, and it's impossible to find any of the blogs Heather and I have written. So I'm abandoning my She Writes blogging, and I'll share with you all my thoughts on the conference.
It's been a really great conference--the best one ever. No kidding. At a panel this afternoon I was sitting next to Angela Davis, and that's got to be some measure of conference quality: when you just happen to be sitting next to Angela Davis.
The theme of the conference is Difficult Dialogues, and several sessions have made dialogue not just the theme but also the method. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander, Kimberle Crenshaw and Bonnie Thornton Dill, and Beverly Guy Sheftall, Frances Smith Foster, and several others have all had public conversations as part of the conference. We've had the opportunity to see these very significant scholars in dialogue with each other. Crenshaw was probably the most brilliant person I've had the chance to hear from at the conference. She's the scholar who came up with the term intersectionality that's a central component of my WGS teaching and scholarship (and basically everybody else's, too), and she spoke extemporaneously about the origins of critical race theory, particular legal cases that structured her own thinking, and the notion of race as an intellectual framework.
I also had the opportunity to see a former student present some of her research about the media treatment of the Duke lacrosse rape case. She made a fabulous contribution to a really great panel about sex trafficking and sex work--I was so proud that she'd been my student, and I learned a lot from her paper. For example, she discovered that in the media coverage of the case, the fact that the victim was a sex worker was mentioned five times more often than the fact that she was a college student. Skewed representation of this woman and her value, you think? Jamie used the concept of "intersectional stigma" (shout out to Kimberle Crenshaw and Michele Berger here) to frame her discussion of this media coverage. Really interesting.
I also saw an excellent panel on hip hop feminism, and I bought a bunch more books, including one with the provocative title My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities.
One more day of conferencing tomorrow, then tomorrow night it's home to the Ween and Biffle.
9 years ago
2 comments:
"For example, she discovered that in the media coverage of the case, the fact that the victim was a sex worker was mentioned five times more often than the fact that she was a college student. Skewed representation of this woman and her value, you think?"
Where to begin? First, the lacrosse players had their characters assassinated by the media. You'd never know that the father of one was raised by a black family, and that the father of another built a hospital in Africa. (Not likely the sort of people who hurl racial epithets around or denigrate people because of their color.)
Second, like the two women who made false accusations in Scottsboro, the two women in the Duke case were also "working women", and both were well known to police. The principal accuser had previously made a false claim of gang rape and also made up tales about her first husband having tried to kill her, etc.
But like Scottsboro, the issue became not "accuser vs. accused", but "us vs. them"--the "us" being black vs. white; poor vs. rich; feminist vs. male athlete; townie vs. campus. Agendas were what mattered, and unfortunately, "some cases are too important for innocence is not allowed to be a defense".
...for such a long comment, including so many direct quotes, I thought the counter argument would make more sense.
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