At the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), the annual Feminist Workshop was entitled “(Post) Institutionalized Feminism: Defining the ‘F-word’- Sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession.” In the workshop, we -- the co-organizers -- were interested in exploring what has happened to feminism since its institutionalization in the 1970s. Knowing ‘pre-institutionalized feminism’ only from its histories as so-called ‘third wave’ feminists in academia, we have benefited from (and resisted) feminist dialogues and definitions, as well as feminist mentors in our personal and professional lives. Establishing our feminist identity often seemed connected to making ourselves independent from both a patriarchy still imbued with white male privilege and a feminist matriarchy grappling with its own occasional essentialism. This struggle to define ourselves as Feminist (with a capital F) and identify (and perform) feminist work is made even more confusing when the label ‘feminist’ seems to be applied to any number of events and items, from music festivals to catalogues to pornography, and yet is still not the identity of choice for many young women and men. We felt that a lot of the work that feminism does or is meant to do was being lost in a generational debate that rendered the dynamic activism dead.

The impetus to address the present and future of feminism arose from our fascination and frustration with the 2007 Feminist Workshop. This workshop highlighted some of the ideological struggles that we wanted to articulate. As the workshop’s sponsoring committee within the CCCC infrastructure was facing dissolution because, as we were told, “there wasn’t any work left to do.” Indeed, the Feminist Workshop seemed to be suffering from falling attendance at the Conference. Thanks to the urgent work of several members of the FW and the CCCC Committee on the Status of Women, the committee and the Workshop were salvaged. Now, what to do?

Offering ourselves up as 2008 Feminist Workshop co-chairs, we were elected by the members on the platform that we would make the coming session about the work we as a community were doing under the sign of Feminism to help us define what that sign was. We wanted to approach this workshop of scholar-activist-teachers and ask questions not only about this history of feminism itself, as well as its tenure in the academy, but also the relationship between inside/outside the academy and how feminism sees itself today. In certain terms we felt that we were approaching a monolith because of the popular and academic images of feminism, and post-feminism, if some major scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition are to be believed.

We began our conversation with Stuart Hall and included his discussion of instititutionalized feminism in our call for papers.

As demonstrated in the list of questions, we were, and still are, interested in the space between the rhetorical construction of the prompt questions provided and we, therefore, left them relatively broad. Participants in the panel could, as we envisioned, begin to construct meditations, answers, and explorations from multiple identity positions, including teacher, activist, student, scholar, or feminist. Since the popular discourse on feminism has recently taken a turn that appears anti-feminist, indeed ‘the other f-word’ has appeared in multiple headlines recently indicating a fear and distaste for the feminist agenda, we felt that it was necessary to confront the debate over the efficacy of feminism itself and what the movement has become in the burgeoning third, and in some cases, fourth wave.

As we began receiving submissions, we were immediately excited and fascinated by the kinds of perspectives the papers provided. And, as represented in this issue of thirdspace, the questions proposed by the papers included represent a sophisticated, diverse, and necessary debate over the trajectories of post-institutionalized feminism.

In this collection, a series of virtual roundtables in which there is a central essay followed by three response pieces, readers will find, possibly, more questions than answers. However, at this point in the history of the feminist academy, it may be more necessary than not to question not only feminist praxis, feminist pedagogy, and feminist history, but also what feminism itself means today.

In the first series of papers, Jessica Ketcham Weber, Lisa Costello, Allison Gross, Lorie Jacobs, and Regina Clemens-Fox craft a dialogue in which they meditate on the possibilities for feminism in the academy. Central to their argument is the issue of ‘doing’ feminism and what it means to take action as a feminist in today’s academy. Important to their work are the questions that they ask in their central essay, including, “Are these feminist spaces [such as women’s clinics or women’s centers on campus]?” and “What happens to places when they become official, formalized…institutionalized?” Their essay roundtable questions pedagogy, representation, and the possibilities of a kairotic moment for feminist action.

The second series of papers dovetails from the first roundtable by looking back, into the history of feminism, and projecting forward, asking where do we go from here? Emily Hoeflinger’s central essay discusses the rhetorical aspects of the wave construction. In it she dissects the boundaries and binaries implicit within the rhetoric of the wave and overviews the scholarship on feminist waves in order to frame her proposal that we look at feminism as a new economy in the academy. In the response essays Elizabeth Allen, Cara Minardi, and Hildy Miller grapple with the issues of institutionalized voices debating the efficacy of feminism in its current construction.

In the final roundtable, Layne Craig, Erin Hurt, Morgan Gresham, Cambria Stamper, and Jessica Restaino discuss current feminist issues. Craig and Hurt begin by discussing feminist space in action, and the relationship between theory and praxis on university campuses. Stamper follows by discussing issues of solidarity and essentialism in her compelling work on women and war in relation to technology. Gresham focuses on the webs of connection that provide the multiple and diverse members of the feminist community the possibility of communication, and finally Restaino discusses the important issues of terror rhetoric associated with feminism and motherhood in popular texts.

The women who participated in the CCCC Feminist Workshop 2008 and those that submitted to this collection provided provoking and diverse perspectives on feminism after the academy. The themes and debates represented here do not necessarily answer the broad (and possibly unanswerable) questions we posed in the CFP, but they add vital perspectives to the vibrant tapestry of institutionalized feminism. Indeed, these virtual roundtables represent a cross-generational and dynamic activism.