Rather than attempt to synopsize my lengthy essay in Feminism Beside Itself on the epistemological and political underpinnings of feminist history writing about feminism,1 1

Susan Stanford Friedman, "Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire," Feminism Beside Itself, eds. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 11-54.

(1) Great thanks to Diane Elam for the vision and work she has displayed in putting together an interdisciplinary conference of academic feminists. Most often, we attend conferences related to our disciplines and participate in feminist dialogue within these boundaries. This conference opens up real possibilities of a different kind of exchange. Given the politics of the country this year, moreover, when so many of the programs that deeply affect the poorest and most vulnerable of women are under the knife, this conference also represents a great luxury. It is a luxury that we better not use self-indulgently, but rather one that offers us a metacritical space and time to look at feminism, especially academic feminism, within the broad perspective of our larger political responsibilities to understand and resist the dangerous and disturbing effects of the times.

(2) At this historical moment in the United States, feminism in general and academic feminism in particular are under great threat. The attacks come from a spectrum of sources—from the virulently anti-feminist, such as John Taylor's widely disseminated article in New York Magazine and the Newsweek issue on Political Correctness; to the self-identified feminist attacks by women like Christina Hoff Summers and Karen Lehrman, who have limited experience of academic feminism but condemn women's /pp. 4-5/ studies for its supposed non-academic nature, while claiming for themselves a pipeline to true feminism; to attacks levied by a younger generation of "postfeminists" who dislike what they dismiss as the older generation's obsession with victimology; to attacks on women's studies made by disaffected women's studies "insiders" like Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge.2 2

See for example John Taylor, "Are You Politically Correct?" New York Magazine (January 21, 1991) pp. 32-41; Christina Hoff Sommers, "Sister Soldiers," The New Republic (October 5, 1992) pp. 29-33; Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Karen Lehrman, "Off-Course" Mother Jones Magazine (September/October 1993) pp. 45-51, 64-66; Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge. Professing Feminism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). See also the special issue on Sommers of Democratic Culture 3 (Fall 1994).

(3) We academic feminists have worked so hard to establish an oppositional discourse within the academy that we may well miss the greatest paradox of these largely external attacks—namely, that we feminists epitomize the academy to those who would attack it. I think it is imperative for our survival that we become aware of and take into account this major historical shift:

* For some twenty-five years, women's studies has defined itself in opposition to the academy, dedicating itself to the /pp. 5-6/ transformation of the institutions of knowledge within which it operates. Now, those attacking the academy frequently do so by using women's studies as the epitome of what's wrong with higher education. In the public arena, women's studies has become entirely identified with the institution that we have seen ourselves committed to transforming.

* For some fifteen to twenty years, women's studies has worked through issues of the differences among women based on factors such as race, class, sexuality, religion, national origin, and so forth. Now, those attacking women's studies completely identify it with multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, and gay and lesbian studies, largely for the purpose of condemning all these presences in higher education. The differences and divisions that have greatly preoccupied us—with such good and important effects for feminist theory and practice—are mainly invisible in the larger public arena, where people dismiss the changes wrought by women's studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and gay and lesbian studies as a single plot against the glories of Western culture and civilization.

* For some fifteen years, academic feminism, especially in the humanities but increasingly in many of the qualitative social sciences as well, has been fraught with conflict over the issue of poststructuralist theory—the various currents of philosophical thought tied to the work of French intellectuals like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Althusser, Cixous, Irigaray, and the like, all of which in some way mount an attack on humanism and insist upon the problematization of the ground upon which we stand. Now, those attacking women's studies often do so by identifying it with "theory," especially deconstruction, refusing to see the complicated, conflictual, and often highly productive relationship between poststructuralism and feminism and condemning both as engaged in the destruction of Western culture.

I conclude from this historical shift that it is imperative that we academic feminists look beyond the divisions within women's studies and within the academy to the larger societal /pp. 6-7/ context. Why are all those dedicated to the critique of the academy used to epitomize the academy? Why are all of us who are at odds with each other lumped together as the same? What do these things mean for our survival? In what way can and must we ally with the institution of the academy itself, which is so under attack in the larger society?

(4) Much of the attack on women's studies challenges academic feminism with the whole right wing discourse of Political Correctness. The term "PC," developed and used by the left as a largely self-mocking and ironic critique of the tendency to orthodoxy or "correct line" thinking, has been appropriated by the right wing to characterize and condemn all our activity, as Ruth Perry so ably shows in her essay on the history of the term.3 3

Ruth Perry, "A Short History of the Term Politically Correct," Beyond P.C.: Toward a Politics of Understanding, ed. Patricia Aufderheide (St. Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1992), pp. 71-79.

(5) There are of course many strategies for dealing with the threats to academic feminism. As others have argued, we certainly need to have more spokeswomen and men who can effectively communicate to the general public what is involved in /pp. 7-8/ feminist research and pedagogy. We need to teach our students, especially our women's studies majors, how better to explain the parameters of feminist education once they leave the academy. But I do not believe that this difficulty in communicating to a general public is solely the problem of academic feminism. Rather, we exhibit the same communicative difficulties the rest of the academy has in explaining our activities. The academy in general—women's studies along with it—has failed to educate the public about the nature of our research and pedagogical missions. As a faculty member from a large, land-grant institution whose fate is annually debated in the state legislature in lurid terms, I am acutely aware of how much we have to do to clarify the general mission of higher education in the future of society. I am aware as well of how poorly we have done so.

(6) Another strategy for dealing with the external and internal threats to women's studies requires self-reflexive and self-critical interrogation of the epistemology bases of academic feminism: objectivism (or positivism) and subjectivism (or constructionism). If we better understand the underlying, often taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie our field, then we have a better chance of developing ways of communicating with the general public at large. I see this interrogation for our own consumption as a (not the) necessary task in developing ways of defending women's studies against attack, from whatever quarter. This, I take it, was one of the larger objects of Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman's Feminism Beside Itself. I will turn now to a section of the essay that I wrote for their collection on what I see as the epistemological contradiction that drives women's studies now and has been present since the very beginning, a contradiction that is related to our roots in feminist activism, the need not only to know, but to do. I quote from the article:

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