The Project, the “I,” Stories of Feminism & Place

 

The Project

The decision to name this project Living West as Feminists is a way to generate discussion of the very problems invoked by the terms “US West” and “feminism.”  

The problems are so many.  

Everywhere in the Amerícas is Indian Country. And while the mythologies of Western pluckiness or frontier ingenuity face a reckoning for white cruelty and utilitarian relations to the natural world, still, the mythologies linger.  The lands of this place, “the US West,” are fundamental to the attraction.  For where do young people go in this country, when they want to go to cool/hip and beautiful places to make their lives?  They go West – San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, to mountain West towns no longer outpost-y. Missoula anyone, or Breckenridge?  Bring your bike, your climbing gear, your surfboard, your skis, your . . . plucky outdoor fortitude?  Where do older people with time on their hands go, in their campervans?   

The West as the US West remains a significant regional site of geopolitical power, economic might, as well as nationalist placemaking. To sidestep the spaces of “the West” as the US West is to forego an opportunity to tangle with those meanings.  

Living West as Feminists means to tangle. To talk about “the West” as the US West, to engage its violent histories, its beauties, economies, wildfires and droughts; its white supremacies and militia outfits (Ammon Bundy for instance); its Spanish-speaking border cultures and immigrants from all over the world; its complex anti-blackness that lines up unevenly with the slave trade but is no the less real and makes so much Western space implicitly white and dangerous for those who are not.  

“Feminism” too is among the most vexed of political projects, under critique so relentlessly that if you didn’t have other information, you might believe that every feminism is white, middle class, driven by an economic vision of equal opportunity and blind to issues of race, Indigeneity, sexuality. Feminism as caricature, a stand figure for the professionalist program of Sandberg’s Lean In, aka as get ahead, get your female piece of the capitalist pie. 

Given the contentions of feminist collaboration, the investments by unfriendly forces to discredit feminism, and the basic operational logic of sexism, which is to put women at odds with one another, the idea of creating “Rest Areas” on this feminist road trip is important for its aspirations to some kind of wellbeing and peace along the battle trail for different worlds.  Not from an avoidance of troubles between women or between political projects, but from a larger push to create relational securities.  

 

The “I” 

Most of the scholars who participate in this conversation project write about literature, culture, history, land, issues of environment, media.  Their works develop ideas, arguments, and histories of thought.  Other scholars are usually the audiences of this work, and fields of study, not general interest topics, generate arguments and rationales for the focus of their work.  As is typical of most scholarly work, scholars do not foreground themselves as writers, their own histories, why they come to their work, personally.  To get a PhD, scholars are trained away from speaking personally, we are trained as writers to create authority by distancing ourselves as speaking voices, by burying the “I” of our work. 

Indigenous scholarship is an important exception, and the question of what is returned to Indigenous communities by the research undertaken is an explicit research ethic.  Feminist scholarship too encourages writers to position themselves in their work, to reflect on the why and the where, to be explicit about the “I” that wishes to persuade audiences.  Feminist scholarship too asks researchers for accountability.

Living West as Feminists searches out this “I” of our work, of our relations as feminists to the places we love and live, and to one another.  The big questions we pose for ourselves in our conversations – how scholars live their feminisms and live their relation to places and land — are not simple to answer.  They likely require an “I” in any response process, a blending of the intellectual, personal, and political.  The more we speak through an “I,” and reveal ourselves, the more we can potentially understand one another as well as speak to audiences who do not know our various fields or particular expertise. The more, also, we might say more, theorize more effectively, feminist relations to land and place and politics.   So the process proposed here is to practice a different way of talking about our work, a way conducive to public-facing research. 

 

Where It Starts: Pueblo (Krista Comer)

Given all that’s been said above, it’s fitting for me as the initiating writer of the project to start us off with a story from my early days as a feminist, when I was 20, 21, 22, I don’t know exactly. I think the year was 1980 or 1981.  There’s a lot of stories I could tell, there’s no single moment of political consciousness.  Still, for me, all of them are stories about places. 

Later on our road trip, when we get to Pueblo, Colorado, I will be officially interviewed myself. Pueblo is where I was born. And the early feminisms there have to do with being from a family which, on both sides, was a business family in an era of economic postwar boom. The family women had roles to play in the businesses. I am the eldest of five sisters but in Pueblo, we were only three sisters so far.  In photos I am wearing pretty dresses, a white girl with white-blonde hair in a pixie haircut, smiling prettily in her blue velvet dress, white stockings, and patent leather shoes.  My early place orientations owe everything to the southern Colorado prairies running up to Pike’s Peak, the fact my Aunt was afraid to ride her own horse, and I was becoming a rebel girl with no sense yet of the why of it. Except that white polite culture was the dread of my young girl’s life, and my female kin had no aptitude for the outdoors.  

But that is later.  Here, as a launch point for the blog, what came to mind as a fitting place to start is a story about a different road trip, one taken out of battles with male domination and one that gave me some first glimpses into areas for feminist kinds of rest, feminist reprieves.  The US West is a very hard place to be a feminist, its inevitable masculinities are not, as my mother might phrase it, for the faint of heart. 

 

Early 1980s, West Coast Women’s Music Festival

Clipping from The Advocate, January 8, 1981 on the West Coast Women’s Music Festival. Archived at https://queermusicheritage.com/wmf-westcoast.html

My introduction to the West Coast Women’s Music Festival was not seeing women walk the slack line naked. I have no memory of a slack line, I’m not sure I would have recognized it then, or the talents it requires.  What I remember is a white woman, not young, beckoning me into the festival’s grassy parking expanse.  A few women staffed the border (so to speak) of the festival grounds and its outsides.  The white woman wore an orange construction safety vest, open, no shirt. Other women had on less than she did.  This woman wore baggy shorts, and boots, and her walkie talkie chattered softly as she made her way to my car window, leaned in, and with a huge comforting smile said, “Hey honey, over there,” nodding her head toward the spot where I was to park. 

I was 21, 22?  I already had the feminist bug, the fever.  My boyfriend at the time was crushed by these trips I took. . . I had maybe learned about this happening on another road trip, to Oakland, Berkeley? Also for him, a source of hurt. I was hearing things, sometimes outlandish claims about “the matriarchy.” I remember how much I was driven to pursue “it,” this thing I was doing, the havoc and confusions it caused between us.  I remember calling him on the road, calling home to him in Oxnard, where we had a stucco house across the street from the beach at Silver Strand. Where we had a whole world of ocean, dogs, a vision of how to live well alongside the water.

I must’ve pitched a tent on the festival grounds because I remember trying to find my tent later in the dark, walking past other women’s campsites under a starry sky, drunk.  This again, I remember feeling, drunk and lost in the dark.  

Clipping from The Advocate, January 8, 1981 on the West Coast Women’s Music Festival. Archived at https://queermusicheritage.com/wmf-westcoast.html

The West Coast Music Festivals were where I first saw women in stunningly huge groups put up their hands when a speaker asked, from the stage, how many had experienced sexual violence. It’s where I saw lots of women’s bodies, their shapes, hair, across ages, across race. Swimming, holding hands, laughing loud, running the stage lights, the communal kitchen, the show.  The feeling was for me that it was easy, unself-conscious. It was Herland before I knew names like Gilman, a world away from southern California bikini culture. I was wary of the bikini because I definitely knew what it was to have guys trail after you, sniffing for your scent, looking for their angle.  This outdoor place of feminism was a reprieve, a Rest Area.  I remember the signs directing us to “Women Only” spaces, “Women with Boy Children” and, perhaps, “Women of Color” space.   I was amazed anyone had thought of such categories. Reading newspaper reporting on the Festival since, I recall conflicts during the Festival, conflicts over the boy children. I am a feminist mother today to 2 sons and I know it does no one any justice to target boy children with feminist rage.  But now is so far from then, when I was only me, solo, very alone, no feminist friend on the horizon. 

When I got home to Oxnard, to my boyfriend and our dogs, I doubt that I had language yet for what I learned at the Festival, what I had seen, how scared I was about even finding that off-road place, how much confidence those women in the orange safety vests gave me.  I imagine there was beach walking, the troubled sandy walks where we did our apologizings and trying to make sense of things and especially, our making up.  Those places on the beach cemented our him and me, and the textures of our bonded and unfeminist life.  I was sorry, so sorry, to be such a problem. I could not explain why I had the feminist fever, why it was so serious that I would turn over my life and quarrel with all our friends.   He did not deserve the drama of my feminist coming out, and of course many things, I did not deserve. He cut me off, more or less, once we parted and our beach house and other work together was sold.  When my younger sister Lee moved in with me during her high school years, while I was still living in the beach house before everything changed and I left town to return to school at Wellesley College, I took her out of class and we drove up together to a later Music Festival, maybe 1983.  A sisterly gift of the most critical kind.

The break with him was a break with place, with that beach, our foggy morning walks, with that world of musty ocean and treks in the little truck with surf racks on top.  It was break necessitated by the young feminist I was because being feminist was not optional.  The Festival was an official place of feminist consciousness, where women like Starhawk and Z. Budapest, Sweet Honey and the Rock, initiated me into a new way of living.  

All that sense of urgency and personal heartbreak and dawning “movement consciousness” is mixed in to those festivals, for me, especially to them being outdoors among northern California mountain lakes and trees.  Drunk or not, I was proud of myself for getting there.