Conclusion: Lessons from Signs: Revisiting Feminist Field Formation

Abstract

My book sought to trouble a disconcerting and inaccurate narrative about the past of feminist scholarship in the United States that has gained ascendancy in some feminist scholarly circles. Throughout I have called this inaccurate account feminist scholarship’s stock narrative; I have argued that it incompletely and incorrectly summarizes the past of feminist scholarship. The picture that the stock narrative paints of feminist field formation is limited and requires modification in several ways. In particular, this book was concerned with how the stock narrative renders sociopolitical—and geopolitical—dynamics involved in feminist field formation invisible; these dynamics demand further scrutiny for the multiple dispersions they effect in feminist scholarship. Geopolitics has dispersed into the seemingly most unrelated modes of inquiry, including feminist scholarship. In this book, I account for how these dispersions manifested in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The stock narrative functions to foreclose further scrutiny into the myriad sociopolitical and geopolitical referents of feminist scholarship, because it misleadingly limits the social grounds of academic feminism to the 1960s new social movements, the New Left, and the changes these political and intellectual movements wrought in higher education.

The Signs [editorial] board, to a large extent—and surely not everyone—had this intellectual trust and this willingness to celebrate in other people’s ideas. I mean that’s what an editor does really. You’re not putting forward your ideas. You’re celebrating someone else’s.

—Barbara Gelpi¹