Feminist Commitment and Feminized Service: Nonprofits and Journals

The activities and commitments I've been asked to reflect upon are not necessarily intentional or linear enough to include under the heading "professional development," although they certainly flow directly into what I "profess" on the job. Alongside my graduate training and the progress of my academic career to what I am learning to call its midpoint, I've been involved in independent feminist and LGBTQ media distribution and exhibition through service on the boards of nonprofits: in the 1990s I worked with the New Festival, which presents the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Film Festival, and over the past decade with Women Make Movies (WMM), the feminist media arts organization and educational distributor of films by and about women. This work has been crucial to my pedagogy and scholarship, and I try to invest whatever cultural capital I've accrued as an academic back into the organizations that have sustained me. Many questions that press on us in the humanities—new technologies and distribution systems, digital rights, arts funding, globalization—affect media arts organizations in interlocking ways, and the structures particular to each institution can support the other.

But I'm mostly into the films. Commitment to the work of independent filmmakers is central to Film Studies, with its politicized disciplinary history and the many producers/ theorists and departments that teach both theory and practice making the pursuits complementary ones. Think of what P. Adams Sitney did for the New York avant-garde. But it is notable the degree to which women, people of color, international scholars, and queers in the profession remain connected to community-based media organizations as sustaining contexts for their work—evidence that the questions they pursue in their research matter. In particular, the explosive growth of LGBTQ festivals in the 1990s offered an unprecedented symbiosis—the phenomena of AIDS activism, television deregulation, niche marketing, and globalization had a direct impact on the production and circulation of alternative media and generated scholarship not only about the work but also about these shifting contexts and forces, often by young scholars involved in curating for these events.¹ My own experience participating in the premieres of Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1991) and Go Fish (Rose Troche, 1994) in New York, organizing a panel with Marlon Riggs, Pratibha Parmar, and Richard Fung, and inviting Vito Russo, Richard Dyer, Thomas Waugh, Judith Mayne, Judith Halberstam, and Gayatri Gopinath to present clip shows (all pre-digital) in the festival context shaped me as a lesbian film scholar and built political commitments and professional and social networks that I brought back to campus. Of course, curating and nonprofit board service do not necessarily count for tenure; but they foster institutional knowledge, including how to value working for the public good.

The New Festival still presents the annual festival, though it has not attained the prominence and fiscal stability of its peer organizations Frameline in San Francisco and Outfest in Los Angeles, with their demographic advantages and successful navigation of the queer media market explosion of the 1990s. In contrast, WMM has an unmistakable institutional identity, a worldwide brand, one that is exemplary for independent distributors and for feminist media organizations founded in the 1970s, and my work on its board is accordingly less hands-on. WMM has a grassroots history, but its institutional position depends on the university as both primary market and source of critical commentary (publicity) for its collection. My involvement with WMM has been coincident with my professional development. Booking WMM films for the Feminist Film Society (really) at college led me to a summer internship there; generations of my students have followed, and though it is a radically changed organization and media climate, a similar passion animates them. Later, during a period of indecision about academia, I joined WMM's small staff. The late 1980s wasn't necessarily the most robust time for media arts (with Reaganomics, the culture wars, and the adoption of VHS as the first of many big disruptions to distribution models due to technology changes), but WMM with its exciting and extensive collection...