Happy Women's History Month! A Celebration, A Challenge and a Call

Of course, every month is women's history month if you are the Tenured Radical. And, if you are the intersectionally-inclined person that I am, Black History Month isn't over at the end of February either (although I'm sure organizers everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief that it is, particularly at Zenith, where a group of students organized a great calendar of events this year.)

To celebrate, a few of us in the feminist history blogosphere have been drawn into a great project initiated by Ann Little, over at Historiann. Four feminist history bloggers are responding to Judith Bennett's book History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.) One of us will write every Monday for the entire month of March and, in round table style, drop in and out of each other's blogs to comment. The first post, Should politics be historical? Should history be political? went up at The Adventures of Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar last night at midnight. So please join us!

And just in case you are starting to wonder what the relationship is between feminist history blogging and the professional world of feminist history, I am pleased to announce that The Journal of Women's History has commissioned the radical to coordinate a round table on this very subject. To wit, a call for papers:

Call for Papers: Feminism, Blogging and the Historical Profession. The Journal of Women’s History invites submissions for a round table on the emergence of blogging as a location for critical thought among women in the historical profession; historians of women, gender and sexuality; and feminist scholars who may, or may not be, historians. Participants may wish to address one or more of the following questions in an abstract of no more than 250 words: What role does self-publishing on the internet play in a profession where merit is defined by scholarly review and a rigorous editorial process? What are the intellectual benefits, and/or costs, of blogging? What are the ethics and consequences of blogging under a pseudonym? What kinds of electronic acknowledgement already correlate with established scholarly practices; which can be discarded; and which need to be attended to, perhaps more rigorously than in printed publications? If many scholarly publications and organizations have already adopted blogs as a way of spreading news and inviting conversation, is blogging itself developing rules and practices that will inevitably produce intellectual and scholarly hierarchies similar to those that blogging seeks to dismantle? Does feminist blogging offer particular opportunities for enhanced conversation about race, sexuality, class and national paradigms, or does it tend to reproduce existing scholarly paradigms and silences within feminist scholarship? Finally, are new forms of colleagueship and scholarship emerging in the blogosphere?

The round table will consist of a short introduction, several essays of 2 - 3,000 words, and a concluding comment/response. Abstracts should arrive no later than July 15, 2009, and can be submitted electronically to Claire Potter at tenuredDOTradicalATgmail.com. Final submissions are due October 1. Pseudonymous bloggers may publish under their pseudonyms, but must be willing to reveal their identities to the editor of the round table and the commenter. Bloggers based outside the United States are particularly encouraged to contribute.