Introduction to ‘Racism’

(May-July 2003): There was a time, in the middle 1990s during the writing of my PhD thesis, when I made an attempt to open up some dialogue on the question of racism in the women’s movement. I didn’t have much success, my efforts being rejected by conference organisers and journal reviewers more often than they were accepted. This section of the website documents those attempts and what happened to them. 

This ‘Racism’ section contains:

– a letter to the Sydney Women’s Liberation Newsletter, written in 1992 in response to a friend’s request that I write it. It preceded my later attempts to start up a more nuanced debate about racism within feminism, and was unconnected to those attempts.

– ‘Asking Questions about Racism’ presented at the ‘International Feminisms–Towards 2000’ conference, organised by the Australian Women’s Research Centre, Deakin University, Geelong, and held in Melbourne, 1 August 1994. The paper was initially rejected by the conference organisers, but when I complained about the rejection they overturned their original decision. The paper was criticised in the journal, Australian Feminist Studies, and I sent two responses to that criticism. The first was published, the second was not.

– ‘Feminism and Racism: What Is at Stake?’ presented at the Women’s Studies Conference, Deakin University, Geelong, 4-6 December 1994. It was accepted automatically by the organisers, as was every other presentation submitted to this conference. The debate afterwards was vociferous and acrimonious.

– ‘What Does it Mean to Call Feminism White and Middle-Class?’  versions of which were 

– offered to the Women’s Studies conference in Stirling, Scotland in June 1995 and rejected, – presented at a postgraduate seminar at the University of New South Wales in November 1995, – presented at the Sixth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Adelaide, in April 1996,- offered to the Women’s Studies conference in Perth in November 1996 and rejected, and – sent to three journals, Women’s Studies International Forum, Australian Feminist Studies and Signs, all of whom rejected it. 

Some of the correspondence about the reasons given for the rejections, plus my responses, are included here.

There’s a fair amount of repetition in the above-mentioned papers because they were all taken from the same source, although there are also variations because they were presented at different times over a period of two years. The original is ‘What Does it Mean to Call Feminism White and Middle-Class?’, the latest and most detailed version of which is to be found in Radical Feminism Today.

Papers

Click here for ‘A letter to the Sydney WL Newsletter (1992)

Click here for ‘Asking Questions about Racism’ (1994)

Click here for ‘Feminism and Racism: What is at Stake?’ (1994)

Click here for ‘What Does It Mean to Call Feminism “White and Middle-class”?’ (1995/96)