The 30th Anniversary Roundtable on JFSR: “I Will Write. But I Will Not Lie. Nor Will I Write Alone.”

“I Will Write. But I Will Not Lie. Nor Will I Write Alone.”

Hannah Hofheinz

From the 30th Anniversary Roundtable on JFSR: Volume 30, no. 2:

Writing is essential to the political work of seeking transformative justice. It archives inquiry and insight. It catalyzes and catalogues curiosity. Writing pauses time and traverses space to allow the collaboration of communities across generations and contexts. Writing—as both a process and a product—fuels the production of knowledge in the academy. For the academy to change, writing must change. The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion does this: it expands writing in order to change the academy. In doing so, it strengthens feminist praxis. Over the years, JFSR has provided a respected forum for the publication of feminist writing on religion while cultivating an active and broad feminist community. This matters. Indeed, it matters deeply to me and to my scholarship. With JFSR, I have found something similar to what Namsoon Kang called a “transit home”¹ —a place to meet with others through their writings as [146] a part of a scholarly community united by feminist praxis. However much progress has been made, the academy remains reticent to engage the lives, ideas, and words of all people. I continue to need JFSR, and I believe we all continue to benefit from its praxis. Yet I wonder if it ought to look the same given our changing circumstances. 

When Judith Plaskow and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza introduced the first edition of JFSR, they clarified their intention “to fill a gap in the intellectual, feminist landscape. [JFSR] is meant as an organ for the presentation of feminist scholarship of religion and a forum for discussion among the widest possible range of feminist voices.”² The journal’s pages brought together scholastic essays with collaborative thematic roundtables, which were stitched together with activist narratives and literary possibilities. Positioned in the academy, while part of and accountable to the feminist movement, Schüssler Fiorenza and Plaskow inaugurated a textual forum for feminist theory, praxis, and religion. The effects have been significant: by expanding the writing with access to academic publishing and the writers who matter in the academy, the journal has been integral to broadly reshaping academic and religious discourses. Both the tenth and twentieth anniversaries of JFSR named and celebrated a continuing and collaborative commitment to addressing gaps in the intellectual, feminist landscape. In the tenth anniversary roundtable, María Pilar Aquino challenged JFSR to attend to the need for feminist theoretical models “to be more accountable to the interaction of race, culture, class, and religiosity.”³ In the twentieth anniversary roundtable, while reminding JFSR to do better with “factor[ing] in race and class and at points sexualities,”⁴ Emilie M. Townes amplified the challenge that Judith Plaskow raised ten years earlier. Plaskow asked: Given that academia “rarely rewards, and sometimes punishes, engaged scholarship . . . how do we maintain our commitment?”⁵ “At its best,” Townes wrote, “jfsr encourages an engaged pedagogy / that requires ‘a commitment to dialogue / and to critical reflection.’”⁶ JFSR, at its best, represents the meeting and collaboration of fabulously dancing minds.

While there have been many transformations of the academy that have in- [147] creased the inclusion for women and opportunities for feminist scholarship, the past decades have also witnessed an ever-widening gap. Currently, in the United States, few institutions have the resources or the will to support communities of engaged and collaborative scholarship. Indeed, most struggle to access sufficient resources to provide a baseline of education for students, much less support the layers of scholarly materials and intellectual community that are necessary to underwrite future knowledge. Whether or not we consider the roots of these struggles in terms of particular exigencies of neoliberalism—for instance, the corporatization of universities or the celebrity culture of academic superstars—it is hard to deny the growing prevalence of fissures in the structures of the academy that make study, teaching, and a collaborative commitment to the articulation of knowledge increasingly difficult. Precarity and debt alone silence too many young scholars, especially, but not only, from communities who do not enjoy the financial or social capital to self-fund. Mentoring and scholarship programs may ameliorate some of the imbalance. Yet the systemic lack of livable postgraduation opportunities footnotes any gains with a persistent question mark. 

When a choice must be made between working toward economic survival and writing what needs to be written, usually (and understandably!) the former will come first. Yet the consequences of losing writers and their writings undermine a feminist praxis of transforming knowledge and society. The patterns of exclusion are distressingly familiar. They reiterate long-standing systems of oppression, including the “good ol’ boys’ club” of patriarchy, heterosexism, colonialism, and racism. The work of JFSR to fill a gap in the intellectual, feminist landscape by providing a forum for discussion among the widest possible range of feminist voices continues to be desperately needed. The vision is no less timely and no less urgent than it was thirty years ago. Our current challenge, however, is to do so in the twenty-first century. For JFSR to live its commitments today, we need to address the patterns and effects of gender, sexuality, labor, class, nationality, and race in an academy beholden to neoliberal demands or desires. If we can be honest about our complicity, compliance, and consent to these illusions, perhaps that honesty will lead us to creative accountability for life-giving changes.

Here, Stephanie Mitchem’s words resonate: “Creative solutions are needed; collectively, we have the power to find them, and we must use it.”⁷ There are many questions to consider: How ought the practices of publishing change, not only to survive but also to provide an effective forum for transformative knowledge in a neoliberal academy? Do the styles of writing likewise need to expand? How might we wrestle with the ambivalences of technological media so as to [148] harness new media for the work of participatory inclusion, as opposed to distraction, surveillance, mass-marketing, and consumption? Are we willing to resist the rewards of celebrity to disrupt the invisibility of most feminist scholars in a celebrity culture? How can JFSR support the writing of feminist scholars, who struggle against the silencing effects of academic precarity or debt? Ultimately, as a feminist community of praxis, are we willing to transform our own values, practices, and structures, so that we can continue to insist on a better world?

In fall 2010, JFSR published “Psalm 4” by Rebecca Gayle Howell. The speech of a burning tree opens the poem: “The ever kindling. / Thing that should not talk, / but does.”⁸ Before closing, Howell returns to speech, this time describing the decision to speak herself: “What the hell— / this dumb tongue is only a muscle. / I will speak, but I will not lie.”⁹ The poem meditates on divine and human speech—especially the moments of speech that by expectation should not happen but yet do. In some important sense, these are JFSR’s moments of speech. For three decades, the journal has filled the gaps in the intellectual, feminist landscape with what otherwise would have been excluded scholarship and writing. It publishes feminist speech that—by kyriarchal expectation—should not happen. The exclusions of the contemporary academy need JFSR’s continuing praxis. I look forward to the years to come.

1. Namsoon Kang, “A Transit Home Away from Home,” in “Special Section: JFSR Twentieth-Anniversary Celebration,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 2 (2005): 123–26, quotation on 123.