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| Thanks due to editors. This issue of Con/text goes online with the expert help of an excellent editorial team. Con/text's new content editor is Chris Demaske, a former magazine editor who's feminist sensibilities led her to complete a doctorate in communication law at U of Oregon. Chris presently serves on the communications faculty at U of Washington's Tacoma campus. Rosa Leslie Mikeal, who begins her second year as Con/text's production editor, is a doctoral candidate in communication at U of Pennsylvania. Rosa produces online publications for a number of feminist organizations in Pennsylvania. FSD is fortunate to have their skills, dedication and labor. A huge thanks to you both for the beautiful work that goes into this issue |
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| Making history. In October, I accepted the invitation to chair ICA's 2003 Nominations Committee, which will select candidates for the open board positions. In 2003, those positions will include ICA's President-Elect Select, one at-large seat representing Europe, and one graduate student representative. My task is to coordinate the work of a six-member committee in the next six months. (The details of the committee can be found in the November ICA newsletter, online at www.icahdq.org. The article on the committee also contains info about qualifications of candidates and how to submit nominations). I invite you all to consider submitting candidate names for the three positions to make sure we have good representation among those to be considered. |
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| Borderlands theme and FSD. I'll add a few thoughts to those Cindy Carter has already expressed in her own article about San Diego (this issue). This year's program occurs within a feminist-inspired framework, since the Borderlands theme is strongly associated with feminist scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa. The concept of borderlands has also been widely applied to other scholarship concerned with the politics of identity and difference that have come from the margins to revolutionize the intellectual center. Feminist theory - and the lives of many of us who reside here to do our academic and political work - exists in those borderlands, so this year's conference has tremendous relevance to us. Because of this, and also because both the FSD program and the rest of the conference promises to be wonderful, I hope all of you will participate. |
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| Random postscripts on snipers, violence, peace and the media. On a more personal note, I have appreciated the recent messages many of you have sent expressing concern about the snipers who plagued our neighborhoods in suburban Maryland (where I live) and nearby Virginia. It appears they are now caught, and so the level of fear and caution we all lived with those weeks of October are eased. But this return to so-called normalcy is an imagined sense of security, in many ways, a false-consciousness. The reality is that more people died here in the greater Washington DC Metro area from the daily random shootings and stabbings in that same time period than from the snipers' gun, and it's an on-going thing. On a "normal" day in early November, for instance, the news reported six shootings in the Metro area, all but two fatal. Unlike the two suspects in the sniper killings, most perpetrators are never caught. This local violence has a larger context, of course, if one considers the wider array of interpersonal violence and abuse and war on a global scale. |
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| This feminist scholar asks how women fit into the picture. I see or hear so few women's voices or analyses on the matter of violence in the public discourse that I grow increasingly alarmed. I ponder the problem of who owns the media and how women's concerns are systematically excluded from this daily information as well as public policy forums, classrooms, and other places. I see a tremendous need to develop critiques of the gendered nature of violence, proposals for non-violent resolutions to conflict, ways to address social injustice that leads to structural violence of so many kinds, ways to use our scholarship and our political wills to stand up and be counted. The weekly gatherings of the Women in Black Movement grow larger on my own campus and in downtown Washington, DC, one important way that women give their opposition to violence a public face. In mid October, my partner Kay and I stood with 150 other Quaker women at the Pentagon to say no to the Iraqi war. A week later, more than 100,000 thousand marched in Washington to protest the war, and millions more around the world in other cities on the same day. Women were in those crowds, too. But the media's coverage of these events varies considerably around the world, and, here in the US, it is almost absent, causing some to decry censorship of dissent (particularly that coming from females). |
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| Film is one medium through which social analysis is surfacing. For example, Michael Moore's powerful new film "Bowling for Columbine" uses the mass killings by two teenage boys at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 as a focus for examining the American culture of violence, including the ways that the US has visited violence upon other nations over many decades. The film lacks a gender analysis, and this is one serious flaw in Moore's work. But his questioning of public policy and the underlying ideology that create the structures for poverty, racism and gun use in the US is brilliant. |
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| What are other feminist communication scholars seeing in their nations with respect to coverage of violence? I encourage you to submit statements -short or long - for us to include in a future issue of Con/text. |
