Galling Flexibilities--A Response to Katie

I am a friend and colleague of Katie's. We both got our Ph.D.s from the History of Consciousness Program at U.C. Santa Cruz. I am also tenured in a "free standing" Women's Studies department. Like Katie, I was "his conned," then had to try and figure out what it meant to be in a field called Women's Studies, a local, national and global project. Like her, I often chafe against processes of disciplinization, while also having to cope with or negotiate them, since my background and training is all interdisciplinary. I came to His. Con. from American Studies.

I said to one of my departmental instructor's today, the next new course I teach is not having the word, women, in the title. I share Katie's sense from His. Con. that feminism is self-reflexive, asking about who or what counts as a woman for example, but also about what counts as feminism, but the word, feminism, doesn't do the work I want it to in my own research and writing, although I'm still hanging out with anthropologists talking and writing about "feminist ethnography." I was on a panel at the American Anthropological Association meeting this past December, "Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?" and was completely taken aback by the number of people who showed up. I was thrilled by the number of students and the kind of questions they asked.

So, I am interested in feminist ethnography, and I'm very interested in the interface of feminist ethnography and multi-site ethnography and how that has emerged from what George Marcus, a chronicler of cultural anthropology and trained anthropologists calls "second projects," or the kind of projects anthropologists form in reaction to graduate training.

I did fieldwork in the Palestinian Territories in 1998-1999 and have gone back for summers or winter break (sometimes both) every year since then until 2006. I don't know what post-fieldwork means, since I stay in touch with people I know there vis a vis email, and I go daily to internet sites to read news about the ever changing circumstances on the ground in Gaza, Ramallah, etc. I have also been reading about surrouding countries including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, as I teach a course on Women and the Middle East--it used to be called Arab Women and the Middle East Conflict. I changed the title to try and draw more students into the course, but also to signal some consideration of white U.S. women's relationship to the Middle East post 9/11.

I am interested in galling flexibilities, because Katie's conceptualization of flexible knowledges intrigues me, but I want to draw attention to the Arab-Israeli war zone as a site where "knowledges" are embattled in practices of warfare. "Galling" signals the kind of extreme political asymmetry between Palestinians and the state of Israel that I want to keep in the foreground. Galling is about the condition of living under a military occupation that has not been temporary, is not and cannot be permanent, but also keeps grinding on with increasing levels of unfreedom for Palestinians and their long search for justice.

I find a lot of the discussion of "borders" that has occured in the academy over the past twenty years to miss something I think is profound about what it means to live, think, work, write in the Occupied Territories. As one informant, an academic aware of a lot of the theoretical currents in the U.S., stressed to me, "our problem is that we have no borders." I'll explain more about that later.