Editorial Introduction
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I have come to look forward to writing the introductions to our journal issues. The process of reflection entailed in this kind of writing forces the fast-paced tempo of journal work to slow down a bit. It is also a rewarding stage of production because it signals that the articles, art, and poetry that the authors, artists, peer reviewers, and editorial team have worked with over a long period of time are finally ready to be put into circulation and will find their way into classrooms, conference presentations, bibliographies and feminist conversation. From cover to cover, this issue of Feminist Formations is filled with articles that take fresh approaches to important problems, poetry that is at once fierce and loving and that speaks to the ever-present effects of settler colonialism in the United States, and a cluster of articles called “Crossing Boundaries: A Tribute to Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy.” Across the material in this issue, many generative connections can be made, including that between the indigenous languagepreservation projects of Kennedy and our featured poet, Natalie Diaz.
On the cover of this issue, we continue our new practice of featuring politically charged feminist artwork. “Ghetto Frida” is the stunning, irreverent work of Rio Yañez, a Chicano artist and curator born and raised in the San Francisco Mission District.1 He is the son of the renowned Chicana/o artists Yolanda Lopez and Rene Yañez, and his art is driven and enlivened by a politicized Chicano engagement with the popular culture of his childhood:
My primary interest, as an artist, is in combining icons and mythologies.
As a child growing up Chicano I was often frustrated that Chicano art and
iconography rarely intersected with my personal mythologies of comic books,
pro-wrestling, music, and Godzilla movies. My images bring together my
heroes, friends, and childhood fantasies with Chicano aesthetics, traditional
images, and politics. They are a fulfillment of my childhood yearnings and
an exploration of my relationship to the worlds I walk between. (Yañez 2008)
“Ghetto Frida” propels Frida Kahlo squarely into the present-day Mission District and vibrantly transforms her into a tough chola, complete with teardrop tattoo. And that is not all. “Ghetto Frida” is part of a larger series with the same title that includes brilliant interviews between Yañez (2006, in the voice of “El Rio”) and the persona Ghetto Frida. Explaining that the series began as “an exercise in adapting an exhausted icon into a modern context,” Yañez (2009) gives Kahlo a voice—a chola voice—and allows her to express fatigue with, among other things, the commodification of her image, or in “her” words (2006):
Look, I know it looks like I’m commin’ down hard on artists but let me ask
you, who has my back out there? I’m the second most used image in Latino
art, the first is the Virgen de Guadalupe. She can’t collect no royalties every
time her ass gets printed on a cholo’s tank top. Ain’t no helping her; but
Ghetto Frida? I’m fresh in the flesh. You use my image and I gotta get paid,
that’s how it’s going down.
The Mission District is more than a backdrop in Yañez’s “Ghetto Frida”
series. Like the Chicana poet Cathy Arellano, whose work will be featured in
the next issue of Feminist Formations, Yañez is especially invested in rendering
the district from the point of view of a homegrown resident who has witnessed
firsthand how gentrification has radically altered his neighborhood. Yañez’s work
can be found in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (Jacoby 2009), and<
in his illustrated guide to San Francisco’s Mission District, My Mission (2010).
The strong sense of place that shapes Yañez’s artistic sensibility can also be
acutely felt in the work of our featured poet, Natalie Diaz, author of When My
Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which was honored as a Lannan Literary Selection.
Diaz’s poetry reflects her life experiences on the Fort Mojave Reservation where
she was born and raised, and where she now directs the Fort Mojave Language
Recovery Program. As she articulated when interviewed by Jeffrey Brown for
PBS’s NewsHour:
The goal in any revitalization program always has to be that we will again
speak Mojave at Fort Mojave. That our kids will learn Mojave in their home.
That the babies will hear that as their first language. And that always has to<
be the goal. . . . But in the meantime we have to hit all of those smaller goals,
which for us, means working with the high school students, letting them
know that being Mojave is something they carry with them. (Brooks 2012)
Diaz’s commitment to language, and to the insistence on the power of language to help shape communities and preserve ways of life, helps explain the fierceness of her own poetry, whether she is writing about falling in love, unspeakable grief, or settler colonialism. As she has explained elsewhere, Mojave “seems simple, but in that simplicity, you really have to know what you are talking about. There is no bullshitting in our language. You don’t waste a lot of words because there aren’t a lot of words to be wasted” (Nolan 2011). The precision of this poet’s pen, evidenced in the three poems published here in Feminist Formations, demonstrates that certainly learning Mojave has taught her to not waste words.
In the opening article of this issue, “‘I Just Want to Help People’: Young Women’s Gendered Engagement with Engineering,” Jill M. Bystydzienski and Adriane Brown offer a valuable contribution to the literature on—and programmatic efforts to rectify—the underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The article reflects on the authors’ revealing participant observation based on their National Science Foundation-funded research and intervention project with adolescent girls exploring career possibilities in engineering. What is innovative about their article is its illumination of the norms that often underwrite even the most well-intentioned efforts to intervene in the male-dominance of those fields and actively recruit young women. The article is richly layered; it draws from Butlerian theories of gender performativity to question the naturalized (and, interestingly, racialized) association of technology with masculinity. At the same time, it acknowledges—and provides many instructive examples of—the persistence and power of the norms that regulate that association and curtail gender transgression.
Taken together, our next two articles implicitly engage the tension between
feminist and postfeminist thought and discourse. In “Modesty and Feminisms:
Conversations on Aesthetics and Resistance,” Leslie A. Hahner and Scott J. Varda argue that “modesty advocates” may not be as diametrically opposed to
feminism as one might think. The growing cross-cultural, cross-religious modesty
discourse, which encourages girls and women to “uphold the demure style
as resistant” to the patriarchal gaze, they argue, actually has much potential
for progressive social change. Using rhetorical analysis to forge a collaboration
between modesty advocates and those feminists for whom modesty represents
a conservative, sex-negative backlash, the authors argue that it is actually “the
figure of the liberated, autonomous subject [that] structures the divide between
these two groups.”
If Hahner and Varda argue that feminists are unwilling to tolerate the
difference that modest-invested girls and women represent, our next author,
Marjorie Jolles, defends feminists from the postfeminist charge of intolerant
groupthink. In her article “Going Rogue: Postfeminism and the Privilege of
Breaking Rules,” Jolles situates postfeminism as a neoliberal discourse that
is predicated on the cult of the self and personal responsibility. Like Hahner
and Varda, Jolles focuses on the way that girls and women dress themselves.
Interested in “the fashion rule-breaker,” she holds in tension the double (and
highly class-based) imperatives of self-regulation and self-invention, such that
“[i]n perhaps the most vexing aspect of normativity, norms produce uniformity
and encourage conformity, which takes on positive connotations when rulefollowing
is the mark of self-regulation, and negative connotations when selfinvention
requires the cultivation of a unique, anti-normative individualism.”
The next six articles comprise our cluster, “Crossing Boundaries: A Tribute
to Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy.”2 The cluster draws from, and extends, the
conversations about Kennedy’s lifework that were initiated by three conference
panels held on the eve of her 2011 retirement: “Feminist Anthropology
Meets Queer Anthropology” (American Anthropological Association, 2009);
“Women’s Studies Legacies and Futures” (National Women’s Studies Association,
2010); and “Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy’s Interdisciplinary, Queer Career”
(American Studies Association, 2011). As this listing suggests, Kennedy’s
feminist and queer scholarship, together with her tireless work in helping to
build the field of women’s studies, has been generative across a number of fields.
Trained at Cambridge as a social anthropologist in the 1960s, with fieldwork
among the Wounaan people in Colombia, she launched her career in the
Department of American Studies at the University of Buffalo (UB), where she
spent the next thirty years (1969–98), and where she was a founding member
of the Women’s Studies College (1971). In 1998, she moved to Tucson to head
the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona,
where she served on the faculty until her retirement last year. In addition to her
groundbreaking work to build women’s studies, she is best-known for her collaboration
with Madeline D. Davis on a community oral history project about
working-class lesbian bar culture in pre-Stonewall Buffalo, New York, which led
to the watershed publication of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of
a Lesbian Community (1993).3
When we were deciding what to title this cluster of articles, we chose to
borrow “Crossing Boundaries” from the title of Kennedy’s own contribution to
the cluster. And, following Kennedy, we meant for this boundary crossing to
signal both interdisciplinarity and transnational scholarship. But it strikes me
now that this title also captures the inter-generational force of the cluster, itself
a tribute to the way in which Kennedy’s work and example continue to motivate
scholars at all stages of academic careers. In “Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous:
The Anthropologies of Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy—A Personal Reflection,”
Florence E. Babb reflects on being one of Kennedy’s graduate students at UB
in the 1970s. These firsthand experiences of working with Kennedy are rich,
not only because they illustrate Kennedy’s mentoring and teaching of one
student, but also because they help historicize the creation of women’s studies
as a field, and, in particular, Kennedy’s innovative attempts to resist the norms
of academic hierarchy. A consistent theme across the articles in the cluster is
Kennedy’s commitment to feminist pedagogy and praxis, and Babb helps us to
visualize what that meant at UB through vivid examples of how Kennedy, her
feminist colleagues, and UB students “pushed the limits of the university to
allow for experimental, transformational teaching and learning.”
Ellen DuBois, in “Women’s Studies in the Thicket of Academe in the 1970s:
Liz Kennedy in Buffalo,” describes her “tough-as-nails friendship” with Kennedy,
from their time together as colleagues at UB when, with the late Lillian Robinson
(1941–2006), they helped to build women’s studies. DuBois manages at once
to beautifully capture Kennedy’s verve and tenacity—“profoundly democratic,
unceasingly inquisitive intellectually, and capable of amounts of work that would
stagger any other human being”—while at the same time offering an honest
account of some of the pragmatic challenges in carrying out the nonhierarchical
vision that Kennedy had for women’s studies.
The next two pieces of the cluster take up the innovations of Kennedy
and Davis’s oral histories on butch-femme culture in Buffalo. Nan Alamilla
Boyd focuses on Kennedy’s contribution to oral history methods in “Elizabeth
Kennedy’s Oral History Intervention.” For Boyd, Kennedy and Davis’s research
for Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold was an instrumental act of de-subjugating
knowledge in ways that would “flip, in a sense, the causal function of sex from
something incidental to history to something that motivated historical actors
to secure and defend public space.” And Evelyn Blackwood, in “From Butch-
Femme to Female Masculinities: Elizabeth Kennedy and LGBT Anthropology,”
situates the careful attention to the historical and ideological contexts of butchfemme
identities in Boots of Leather as crucially creating a space for the eventual
exploration of female masculinities and gender transgression by other scholars,
including her own study of tombois in West Sumatra, Indonesia. In contrast to a
strand of 1970s lesbian feminists who were critical of butch-femme, Blackwood explains how Boots of Leather “demonstrated that butch-femme culture was not
an imitation of heterosexuality, but a specifically lesbian culture and lifestyle.”
In many ways, all of the themes that emerge in the previous four articles culminate in Erin L. Durban-Albrecht and Maria Cecilia Galup’s “‘Bristling with the Desire to Confront Injustice’: Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy’s Queer Contributions to Transnational Feminism,” which cogently weaves into a moving tribute Kennedy’s socialist feminism, anti-imperialism, interdisciplinarity, oral history methods, commitment to women’s studies, extraordinary mentorship, belief in collaboration, and generosity. We are especially fortunate to publish this article in the cluster, because it takes up at length Kennedy’s work with the Wounaan in Colombia and Panama, which some readers will learn about for the first time.
In her closing essay, “An Interdisciplinary Career: Crossing Boundaries, Ending with Beginnings,” Kennedy reflects on the shifting political context
that has influenced the difficult decisions she made during the past fifty years
as a student of social anthropology, a scholar of LGBT history, an advocate
of women’s studies, and a socialist feminist with strong commitments to antiimperialism
and anti-racism. Her article offers a captivating and affective
account, for instance, of why she chose not to publish her dissertation about
the Wounaan people of the Chocó rainforests in Colombia after she completed
her fieldwork there in the 1960s; she wanted to “make it harder for capitalism to
remove Wounaan from their land and disrupt their culture. In the 1960s, I had
few other options.” Now, more than forty years later—and with new insights
from LGBT studies and queer theory—she has returned to the work she began
as a graduate student, this time by working with the Wounaan on languagepreservation
projects in Panama, a return that she describes as “the bringing
together of the beginnings and endings of a career.” 4
Throughout Kennedy’s article, one can see the trait that is so quintessentially Liz: the relentless and honest self-critique and deliberation with which she lives her life. We offer this cluster not only as a tribute to one woman’s work and feminist vision, but as a set of ideas and difficult questions about the relationships among knowledge, language, power, gender, and sexuality. And, like Kennedy, we hope that it will “encourage feminist scholars to take control of their careers and follow their curiosity to pursue significant social questions, using all the tools available.”
—Sandra K. Soto
Notes
1. I am grateful to Brooke Lober, PhD student in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, for introducing me to “Ghetto Frida.” For
more information about Rio Yañez, see his personal website at http://rioyanez.com.
2. Feminist Formations managing editor Erin L. Durban-Albrecht deserves much
credit for organizing this cluster of articles.
3. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold received the 1994 Jesse Barnard Award, the
1994 Ruth Benedict Award, and a 1993 Lambda Literary Award.
4. During her original fieldwork, Kennedy and her then husband Perry Kennedy,
made three ethnographic films about the Wounaan in the Chocó rainforest of Colombia:
Wounaan: A People of the Rainforest (Wounaan: un pueblo de la selva tropical); Rainforest
Technology: Wounaan Agriculture; and, Rainforest Technology: Building the Wounaan
House and Canoe. Recently, they were able to digitize the first film, and it was shown
at the XI Festival intenacional de cine y video de los pueblos indígenas, “por la vida,
imágines de resistencia” (2012) in Bogota, Colombia. There, the film received the prize
of mención especial (honorable mention). Liz and Perry Kennedy are in the process of
fundraising to digitize and edit the remaining two films.
References
Brooks, Mary Jo. 2012. “On Wednesday’s NewsHour: Poet Natalie Diaz.” PBS NewsHour,
Art Beat, 20 June. <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2012/06/wednesday-onthe-
newshour-poet-natalie-diaz.html>.
Diaz, Natalie. 2012. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Port Townsend, WA: Copper
Canyon Press.
Jacoby, Annice, ed. 2009. Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo. New York:
Abrams.
Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. 1993. Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge.
Nolan, Andrea J. 2011. “A Triptych of Interviews with Natalie Diaz.” Barely South
Review, January. <http://barelysouthreview.digitalodu.com/all-issues/january-2011/
a-triptych-of-interviews-with-natalie-diaz>
Yañez, Rio. My Mission. 2010. San Francisco: Mission Loc@l.
———. 2009. “DIGITAL MURAL PROJECT Ghetto Frida’s Mission Memories.”
Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, 22 August. <http://www.galeriadelaraza.org/eng/
events/index.php?op=view&id=1476>
———. 2008. “Bio.” Rio Yañez {Art Tortillas Revolution}. <http://rioyanez.com/about/>.
———. 2006. El Rio’s photostream, “Ghetto Frida.” flickr, 30 September. <http://www
.flickr.com/photos/elrio/257069149/in/set-72157594566662293/>.
