"Women as the Sponsoring Category": A Forum on Academic Feminism and British Women's Writing

At the 2008 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers conference (BWWC), Ann Cvetkovich, Susan Fraiman, and Susan Stanford Friedman presented the opening-night plenary panel devoted to mapping feminist scholarship's current priorities and concerns. Conference participants reported being both intrigued and perplexed by the speakers' seemingly bleak view of "women writers" as a useful scholarly category. This essay, conducted by the authors as a year-long email conversation, extends that plenary discussion. In addition to sketching the intellectual history of feminism within the American academy and assessing how Women's Studies (broadly defined) engages with a host of pressing interdisciplinary concerns, the authors also revisit their discussion of what defines and justifies continued work on 18th- and 19th-century British women writers.