A Tale of Two Fora

You are holding in your hands a very full issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, containing newly available letters by Anna Letitia Barbauld, a trio of essays on Latin American women authors, and an Academy forum on academia in the age of Me Too. Our Latin American forum is the product of several years of planning and labor. When Carolina Alzate approached me and my then coeditor Laura Stevens about guest editing this trio back in 2014, we jumped at the opportunity. First, we were honored to work with Carolina, an illustrious academic in her field and an integral contributor to broadening the scope of TSWL. Second, we welcomed the opportunity to bring the study of Latin American women authors to a broader international and English-speaking audience. I will leave Carolina to speak more directly about the significance of these essays in her own preface, but I do want to emphasize that the authors featured in these articles—Soledad Acosta de Samper, Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, and Camila Henríquez Ureña—are all important voices in their respective nations who interact with early feminism and the restrictions of patriarchy. They also interact in different ways with contemporaneous feminist struggles in the Anglophone world; these authors both responded to and in turn influenced the writings of women in English-speaking nations. I am certain that these pieces will be of great interest to our readership, and I am so glad that they are finally available in print.

Interest in internationalism also underpins our Me Too forum. While we received numerous excellent pieces in response to our call for essays, the pieces I have selected are international in scope, featuring the voices of academics from Canada and China as well as the United States. I have also deliberately selected pieces written by women at different stages of their careers, from a recently hooded Ph.D. to tenured academics. The pieces discuss a range of offenses, including microaggressions, consensual but problematic relationships, and physical assault. All raise important questions about consent, the experiences of being a woman in academia, and the ways we might begin to mitigate harm.

In "The #MeToo Movement by Committee," Kate Krueger traces the different forms of gender bias she has encountered in her career: seemingly minor comments on her body while on the job market, illegal discrimination while pregnant, gendered bullying and retaliation after tenure. Empowered by the Me Too movement, Krueger recently took action against her harasser, but her essay powerfully details the emotional toll associated with that act of resistance. Her contribution to the forum thus compels us to ask: How many books are not written, how much knowledge is not produced, when women's energies are focused on fighting bullies, navigating bureaucracy to file complaints, and defending one another? How many women and people of color have left the academy because that emotional toll has been too great? How can we better protect targeted faculty when we see microaggressions or gendered harassment occurring in our midst? In other words, how do we reform a system that in many ways not only tolerates but rewards bullying by senior colleagues?

Turning from conflicts among faculty to conflicts between faculty and students, Corrinne Harol and Teresa Zackodnik detail the struggle of one department and university to mitigate the harms caused by faculty/student romantic relationships. "Consenting to Conflict" questions how we can respect students' adulthood while diminishing the harm such relationships can cause both to students involved in these relationships and to other students whose learning environments might be affected by them. To forbid such relationships entirely potentially drives the myriad harms that might occur underground and makes it difficult for students who have been harmed to come forward. However, their essay implicitly asks readers to consider whether restrictions on conflicts of interest go far enough to outweigh the damages potentially posed by professors who treat students as a prospective dating pool. In a moment in which many universities are seeking to rework—and in some cases institute for the first time—policies governing faculty/student relationships, Harol and Zackodnik's piece is...