Dialogues: (Post) Institutionalized Feminism: Defining the ‘F-word’


Holly M. Kent


This issue’s Dialogues section features papers from three different roundtables held at the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)’s annual Feminist Workshop. In their papers, workshop participants tackled questions about feminist praxis, feminist pedagogy, feminist history, and the complexities of both defining and practicing feminism in a wide variety of academic and non-academic contexts. An introduction from co-organizers Kirsti Cole and Stephanie Shawn Morgan, discussing the origins and development of the CCCC’s 2008 Feminist Workshop, is followed by three different series of dialogues drawn from this workshop. The first series of papers (featuring works by Jessica Ketcham Weber, Lisa Costello, Allison Gross, Lorie Jacobs, and Regina Clemens-Fox) considers the possibilities of feminism within the academy, the second (featuring works by Emily Hoeflinger, Elizabeth Allen, Cara Minardi, and Hildy Miller) centers on feminism’s rich history and possible futures, and the third (featuring papers by Layne Craig and Erin Hurt, Morgan Gresham, Cambria Stamper, and Jessica Restaino) considers contemporary feminism in a diverse assortment of contexts including warfare, motherhood, feminist communities, and academia.