Abstract:
This essay surveys the feminist work published in SOCIAL TEXT over its thirty-year history, while noting an initial lack of interest in feminism among the journal's founders. It shows that early feminist work in the journal focused on cultural analysis, while later work engaged directly with the politics of the feminist movement, and credits Ellen Willis and Alice Echols, especially, with establishing in the 1980s a SOCIAL TEXT brand of feminism based on constructionism and materialism. The essay traces the engagement of feminist theory with postmodernism in the journal's pages and finally points to feminist questions that must be considered by the journal today in the context of broader social analysis to understand how rapidly changing economic realities intersect with gender.
When I was working at the Feminist Press and decided to move to the job of managing editor of Social Text, some of my women friends were skeptical. With eyebrows raised, one of them asked, "You're going to that boys' club?" Although working at women's presses had not always been a utopian experience for me, I suddenly doubted the wisdom of my planned departure from a world of purely feminist labor to a more broadly construed left project. In particular, the raised eyebrows made me wonder if the group I had taken to be a diverse gathering of progressive academics -- the Social Text collective -- was in fact an old-style left organization, dominated by "rebel" male egos.
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