Small Strokes Big Oaks

This past week, I had the good fortune of being able to not only attend, but present my paper on Literacy in the Feminist Blogging Community at my first-ever international conference.  The Contemporary Women’s Writing Network conference in San Diego was a great place to connect with fantastic women and those who write about women.  It was great fun to present, as well, with a woman from York who is writing about feminist bloggers for her PhD dissertation!  As you can imagine, we had much to talk about.

Although I attended many other panels and learned much about Margaret Atwood, women and adolescence, and other interesting female bloggers, I feel I learned more about the academic community than anything.  Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly), this is still a community for which gender binaries still exist in full force.  Every panel I attended discussed the differences between men and women, or how men appear in books versus how women appear in books, or how men write differently than women do.  There didn’t seem to be much of a discussion about, say, how feminism or feminist ideas can help men better function in society, or what benefit men might get from reading women writers.  There was also not much discussion about the trans community or anyone that may exist between the gender binary.  Granted, I did not attend all of the panels, but from what I saw from the titles of the presentations, this conference was very much fitting of the title: Contemporary Women’s Writing Network.

This is also a community for which feminism does not seem as problematic as it does in the internet community.  In fact, it is a way of being for many of these women and men, almost comically and overtly stereotypical.  For example, Tim was there with me because we turned this trip into a little vacation.  He, naturally, came to see me present since, you know, he was already there.  Another man who was attending the conference asked him what he was presenting, and Tim informed him that he was my fiance and there to see me.  The man proceeded to poke fun at us a bit, saying I wasn’t much of a feminist if I couldn’t even present a paper by myself.  I wasn’t actually a part of this conversation, or I would have given him a piece of my mind, but this is just an example of the sorts of things I overheard throughout the conference.

Not only was much of the focus on women and only women, but privilege at this conference was obvious.  Not so much white privilege or heterosexual privilege so much, but definitely economic privilege.  This may seem obvious considering that this conference was academic in nature and, therefore, mostly professors and students from esteemed universities were in attendance, but this was so much so that I felt a bit out of place.  This is not to say that I am not economically privileged; I am.  I attended a small, private, expensive school for my undergraduate education and I also attended a small, private, expensive school for my graduate education.  However, I felt as if I was the only person presenting at this conference who was not teaching in a university in some capacity – even as a TA – or working on her PhD.  When asked what university I was affiliated with (as I was asked on more occasions than I can count), I said I had just graduated with my MA from [insert grad school here].  When asked where I was teaching, I responded [insert high school here].  I then received the typical shocked response from almost every participant: “You teach high school?  And you’re here?”  Why yes, why shouldn’t I be here?, I wondered.  Why shouldn’t high school teachers work on other pursuits besides high school education and take pride enough in them to visit conferences and present papers?

I think there might also have been a bit of surprise that I was attending this conference without any affiliations, that is to say, without any university to support me or reimburse some of my expenses.  Then it occurred to me: Do people do independent research?  If I wanted to further my work about feminist blogging, would I have to re-affiliate myself with my university?  Or would I need to continue on to a PhD?  Would it be possible to continue the research and write papers and attend conferences on my own?  It saddens me to think that I may not be able to fly solo and continue doing the sort of work I want.  And it saddens me even more to think that there are many people out there who could be writing excellent papers and attending conferences and really changing the face of academia but who don’t necessarily have the means to attend colleges and work towards advanced degrees and fly cross-country to academic conferences.

But, all-in-all, it was a spectacular experience to be a part of this conference and to interact with so many wonderful writers and thinkers.  Although I found it quite problematic on many levels, and felt the need to write about the problematic nature of it all here, it was more rejuvenating than anything.  I found myself wanting to blog and tweet so much of what I learned while I was there (but made myself not do it so as not to waste valuable time in San Diego!), so you can look forward to some more blog posts about many of the interesting sessions in the very near future!