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NWSA Journal 14.1 (2002) viii-xviii



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Women's Studies, NWSA, and the Future of the (Inter)Discipline

Bonnie Zimmerman


I am proud and delighted to be writing this introduction to the special issue on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA): proud to have been asked to serve as guest editor and delighted that, in 2002, NWSA is still around. I have been teaching Women's Studies since 1970, when I joined the collective that developed the first course at State University of New York at Buffalo, and ever since Women's Studies has been my profession, my passion, my life. I have been an active member of NWSA since 1979 and a participant in its governance since 1995. I believe fervently that sustaining a national women's studies organization is a necessary, if not sufficient, part of creating and sustaining a vibrant, proactive feminism that can be an agent for change at both the local and global levels.

Some people with memories as long as mine may object that such a goal is laudatory, but that the NWSA has too troubled a past to be that force for change. I do not wish to review that history in this introduction, although several of the articles in this issue discuss the tensions and struggles that began with the first organizational meetings in 1977 and came to the point of explosion at the 1990 conference at the University of Akron. As this issue will vividly demonstrate, Akron was a watershed in the history of NWSA. Already NWSA had acquired a reputation for fights and struggles between different factions and perspectives that, some might argue, impeded the development of a national women's studies agenda. And both before and after the 1990 conference, NWSA had been and continues to be criticized for inadequate attention to scholarship or activism, for too much or too little focus on identity politics, depending on the bias of the individual critic.

After the 1990 conference, to be honest, some of us considered whether or not the organization should be allowed to die and then, perhaps, be resurrected under another name. Some may even have considered that the future of Women's Studies as an educational and social movement had been so severely compromised that it was no longer worth working within it. I think it fortunate that that position did not prevail, since I prefer not to think about what higher education would look like without Women's Studies. Ultimately, as some of these articles chronicle, a heroic group of individuals saved NWSA and laid the groundwork for rebuilding it almost to the point it was in the late 1980s, although, in 2002, we still have a long way to go. Is NWSA the organization I would like it to be? No, certainly not. We have much work to do if it is to meet our needs as educators in this new century. But we have learned much from our past struggles, not [End Page viii] the least of which, to quote Adrienne Rich, is that our "power comes from the same place as our wounds" (1978, 3).

Still, I beg my original question: why do we need a national organization? Isn't the work we do on our campuses, through our scholarly journals, and in our local and regional conferences and consortiums enough? I would argue no, it is not enough; without national structures and institutions, Women's Studies would remain marginal, drift aimlessly, or fade away entirely. I confess that, to a certain degree, my opinion is shaped by my early socialization in Marxist feminism, although in recent years I have been as touched by Michel Foucault and Yves Lyotard as the next feminist scholar. But, much as I appreciate the notion of the micro-practices of power and share a postmodern skepticism over grand narratives with their concomitant overarching structures, I still believe that power tends to congeal or clump in specific places we might call centers, leaving many of us struggling in locations we often call...

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