Arriving at a Crossroads

Women’s scholarship and activism seem to find themselves at a crossroads quite often, perhaps with a higher frequency than other areas in the academy. The reasons are to be found in the very “nature” of feminism, which requires—indeed demands—to constantly re-evaluate, deconstruct and demystify the world in order to answer the question that a curious feminist ¹ asks: where are the women? It requires highest attention to the nuanced and profound changes in women’s lives and vigilance to protect rights. It also requires a good deal of reflection on one’s own personal position and an honest look at the field and its relation to the social, cultural, and political world. I will try to address some of the questions set for us by the editors of Feminist Media Studies by first declaring a personal bias: for me, one’s intellectual work is vacuous if it is not matched by one’s politics. Intellectual work and the production of systematic knowledge cannot be separated from everyday life. As such, the politics of care imposes the obligation to always seek to understand or, as Jean-Francois Lyotard (2002) argues, to “translate” the language that “others” speak. Feminism is certainly about life politics, about changing lives and politics. To me, this constitutes the moral compass for the feminist media scholar to seek out connections that can bridge divides, even if only temporarily. As times change, often violently and rapidly, it is even more pertinent that feminist media scholars ask the difficult and unpopular questions that “post-feminisms” and various “deaths” (of ideology, geography, history) attempt to render passé. By doing so, we find ourselves at a crossroads when important changes must be understood: “languages” must be “translated,” and decisions must be made about our scholarly and activist paths. I think that we now are at a crossroads that concerns first, the directions of research we take and, second, the ways in which we turn those into action, not only in terms of feminists’ relation to the world of politicism but to “other” feminists too.