ENACTing Feminism: The Feminist Methodology of Community-Based Arts

ENACTing Feminism: The Feminist Methodology of Community-Based Arts

Beth Berila

Department of English

Women’s Studies Program

Syracuse University

For years, U.S. feminists have struggled with the relationship between theory and practice, too often situating the former within the academy and the latter outside of it. Though theory can and has been used in elitist ways in social movements, the theory/practice binary has always felt faulty to me, since theory can lead to informed practice, while practice often demands revisions of theory. They operate in a dialectic, one that holds multiple and shifting locations: academia, for instance, is not the only place where theory is produced, nor is it entirely removed from practice, even within ivory tower walls. Third wave U.S. feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks recognize the complexity of the theory/practice dialectic when they argue for a multi-faceted feminist movement/theory that addresses the complex intersections of oppressions which many women experience.[1] Moreover, as recent work in American Studies illustrates, the interdisciplinary efforts that result can prove both full of possibility and challenges. One of the realms that is receiving growing attention within American Studies--including sessions at the 1999 ASA conference in Montréal--is that of community-based arts.[2] This talk analyzes a community-based arts group, ENACT, which I argue offers a feminist methodology that productively negotiates relationships between theory and practice, academia and the broader community, by revealing the necessity and the challenges of situating feminist work in partnership with other political commitments. ( In making this argument, I should make clear that I am speaking as an individual and am not claiming to speak for the group.) It also reveals some of the tension points of a Feminist American Studies, which I will explore in the latter half of this paper.

First some background about ENACT. The Eastside Neighborhood Arts, Culture, and Technology Center (ENACT) is a grass-roots community-based arts organization located in Syracuse, New York that is committed to creating space for diverse artistic expression by and for the local community. The project began a couple years ago when Altered Space Community Arts learned that the former Jewish War Veterans Home--a turn of the century Queen Anne--had been sold to developers and was scheduled for demolition. Altered Space joined together with ENIP, a comprehensive community development organization, along with other local groups and residents to save the building, which was designated an official city historic site. ENIP then purchased the building and is in charge of restoring it; we expect construction to begin in the very near future.

The momentum which grew out of that effort continued into the project that became ENACT. Its goal is to create a multi use arts and cultural space that is available to the surrounding community. ENACT will provide performances and hands-on activities in a wide range of arts and culture, including access to sound recording, computer and technology equipment, studios and spaces for workshops in visual and performing arts, and residencies for artists with low income. Several local organizations have already committed to maintaining a presence in the building, including Altered Space Community Arts, Community Media Action Group (CMAG), Eastside Neighbors in Partnership (ENIP), Eastside Youth Congress, Syracuse Community Radio, Syracuse Alternative Media Network (SAMN), and the Westcott Teen Center. These groups will provide programming and educational opportunities in their various areas of interests and expertise, while the facilities will be available to area residents. ENACT is one of the few community-based arts centers across the country with this combination of visual and performing arts and cutting-edge computer and electronic technology.

I want to talk about ENACT here because it illustrates some of the successes, possibilities, and challenges of a Feminist American Studies. Like most effective community-based arts groups, it is diverse in its membership and expansive in its goals, so much so that we are faced with the challenges of doing multi-issue work in a sound and sustained manner. ENACT adheres to the Bread and Puppet Theatre idea that art should be accessible and affordable to everyone and that anyone can create art, which we understand in a broad sense to include much more than the fine arts.[3] In fact, we hold a yearly auction similar to the Bread and Puppet Cheap Art auction in which the goal is to make art--the wittier the better--out of found objects. While most items auction-off for under ten dollars, the event is both a strong fundraiser for ENACT and an entertaining illustration of our vision of art: an inclusive sense of what counts as art and who can create it. As Nina Felshin argues in her introduction to But Is It Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism, much community-based arts is collaborative in nature and includes an element of social critique, which makes it congruent with feminism.[4] And, like feminism, it is process-rather than simply product-oriented (10-11). Indeed, artist and critic Mark Alice Durant suggests that activist community-based art gives voice to the voiceless and insists on a public presence for groups and issues which otherwise remain invisible.[5] I suggest that this emphasis on inclusivity and social change makes community-based arts--and ENACT-- particularly appropriate for a Feminist American Studies, since both components share the activating impulse. In their introduction to the Cultural Studies anthology, Cary Nelson, Lawrence Grossberg, and Paula Treichler write that despite vast differences amongst cultural studies critics, “in virtually all traditions of cultural studies, its practitioners see [it] not simply as a chronicle of cultural change but as an intervention in it, and see themselves not simply as scholars providing an account but as politically engaged participants” (4).[6] This call to action, this move to intervene in culture, provides common ground with feminism, which also critiques the power structures inherent in culture with the goal of transforming them.

In ENACT, this intervention takes the form of an inclusive arts and cultural space with high-end technology that is available to area residents, many of whom would not otherwise have access to such facilities. ENACT’s commitment to social change involves working collectively to reclaim a space from commercial development and turn it into a site where people can come together through artistic expression. Both ENACT’s vision and its arts programming resist tendencies to homogenize the Syracuse community and instead highlight its diversity. Art then becomes a site of dialogue and exchange, a forum through which a broad community can share ideas and explore interests and issues of concern to us. ENACT’s mission statement reads, “[t]hrough the integration of art in the daily life of the neighborhood, ENACT realizes a vision of community as a collective act of creative expression.”[7] By opening a diverse, inclusive, and creative space for the Eastside Syracuse community to produce art, ENACT also creates spaces for community dialogue. This exchange, I would argue, is an endeavor that is integral to both feminism and American Studies, particularly the emphasis on a collaborative project built from the ground up by residents of the Eastside area, rather than by outside “experts.” As it takes shape, ENACT has drawn on the vast talents and ideas of the neighborhood--which includes people from nearby universities and members of the broader community. In doing so, ENACT reflects the kind of “applied humanities” for which scholar Patricia Nelson Limerick called at last year’s American Studies Association conference in Montréal.[8]

This collective act of community, and the diversity that makes it possible, is precisely what makes ENACT a strong example of Feminist American Studies. ENACT is not “obviously” feminist in the more conventional sense of the word; it does not usually deal directly or exclusively with traditional gender issues nor with sexism. Indeed, while many of the group’s founding members would identify as feminist, they probably differ in the forms of feminism they embrace, while other members of the group might view this conventional conception of feminism with some degree of skepticism. Instead, I argue that ENACT is feminist on a more abstract level: in its commitment to diversity and in its process, in its vision and its structure. ENACT’s commitment to inclusivity and accessibility is informed by a strong awareness and analysis of the multiple issues that tend to make art inaccessible: the lack of affordability, the sense that art is an “extra” element that comes after daily survival issues, the different and often culturally-based notions of what counts as art, and the concern over whether arts spaces will be diverse, inclusive and safe spaces. This analysis, I argue, is feminist. In ENACT, we have worked to address these concerns and continue to outreach into the community to learn more about what the concerns are. For instance, we have implemented a sliding scale and the option of trading volunteer hours for membership in ENACT so that people with low income can participate. And we have forged alliances with other area organizations that address the needs of various segments of the Eastside community.

When I say that ENACT’s process is feminist, I mean that we have always been aware that the process we “enact” will shape where we can get; in the words of the great Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[9] Probably more than any other organization I have been a part of, ENACT has always consciously and critically examined its own process and has worked to insure that it is consistent with our vision. It is based on strong coalition work: area youth groups and community development groups coming together with artists, residents, and so on to create a space that enriches and empowers our community. It is in this sense, I argue, that ENACT reflects the kind of broad-based and multi-faceted movement that third wave U.S. feminists propose. Many third wave feminists insist that to be truly effective, feminist theory and practice must address the interlocking sets of oppressions which women experience simultaneously. For instance, writer Gloria Anzaldúa profoundly describes the borderlands which mark her queer, Chicana, working class body, critiquing white U.S. feminism for erasing this complexity by projecting its own notion of “difference” onto her. (xxi). Theory, especially in academia, she argues, has too often been the realm of white women; it is thus crucial for women of color to occupy theorizing spaces, which will alter what counts as theory and “rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders” (xxv). Similarly, bell hooks has also noted that classism and sexism are “inextricably bound to the struggle to end racism” (3). Feminism, then, cannot focus exclusively on gender because it will never be able to account for the particular ways that gender oppression affects poor women, women of color, or queer women, until gender is addressed in its relationship with other systems of oppression. The form of feminism that I am advocating in this paper, then, is one that addresses this intersectionality.

hooks argues that “[t]he formation of a liberatory feminist theory and praxis is a collective responsibility, one that must be shared” (15); such collectivity often depends on coalition work. But as Bernice Johnson Reagon points out, coalition work is not easy or comfortable; it is about leaving the security of “home” to work across differences and respect the ways people define themselves.[10] As we interrogate the implications of those various definitions for both theory and practice, we have to resist mono-issue tendencies. Truly working in coalitions means building on the ways multiple issues inflect each other. In ENACT, this means that community-based arts entails complex issues of access and the relevance of art to the community. Through coalitions of area groups, ENACT addresses issues important to area residents, such as low-income housing and relations between area youth and local police, issues which inevitably hinge on intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality. ENACT’s interdisciplinary nature, its coalition work, and its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility make it a strong example of Feminist American Studies.

But ENACT has also faced some of the challenges that come with doing broad-based feminist cultural work. Because I believe that feminism--and a Feminist American Studies--must address the concerns articulated by hooks, Anzaldúa, and Reagon, I’d like to explore some of those challenges here. As we work to develop a process that is congruent with our theory/vision, difficult questions arise for me. How, for instance, does one do feminist work in an organization that is not exclusively or even predominantly feminist, in the more conventional nature of the term? How can a not-for-profit organization with limited resources and energies effectively negotiate the different and sometimes competing sets of political and personal priorities of its diverse membership? U.S. feminism has long struggled (too often unsuccessfully) with the dangers of sacrificing one issue to another, while feminists who experience multiple issues simultaneously have decried such mono-issue emphasis. In ENACT, these challenges once again arise as we try to negotiate the different priorities of our membership in a way that recognizes their interdependencies.

This negotiation will ultimately require that both feminist theory and practice are transformed. Here I’d like to share an example which reveals for me the complexity and the promise of doing Feminist American Studies work. This past summer, members of ENACT had a series of discussions about the formation of our leadership and organizational structure. These conversations seemed crucial to me and to many others in the group precisely because of the process points I mentioned earlier. We believe that the organizational and leadership structure ENACT implements will determine the flow of power in the organization, which in turn will dramatically shape how fully we can achieve our vision. As many feminists have pointed out, activist processes have to be feminist if the ends are to be feminist.[11] Its important to note that theory in these conversations came from a variety of different sources and in many forms--it wasn’t just academic feminist theory, but also the knowledge and history of social movements set forth by community organizers and the personal experiences of community members and activists in various local organizations. These discussions once again made clear that “theory” is not the exclusive purview of academic feminists.

As one might expect and hope from a group as diverse as ENACT, we differed on the type of organizational model we supported. Some members of the group were strongly in favor of a collective model of organization, arguing that distributing power evenly was the model most congruent with ENACT’s vision. Others wanted a functional hierarchy, arguing that while collectives were strong in theory, in practice they rarely work in the way a project of ENACT’s size will need to. Others wanted a Director, insisting that it was essential that one person ultimately take responsibility for things and fearing that accountability could be too easily shirked in the collective model. Still others favored some version on the continuum of hierarchy and collectivity. Some of the divisions occurred along racial lines. Many of the people advocating the collective model were white, though they differed in class, religion, and sexuality, so we cannot say that they were all part of the “dominant” group. But there was a difference in position, at least on the surface, between whites holding progressive politics and African American community members who argued that the collective model was not going to be effective nor would it be recognized and embraced by area residents--the very people integral to ENACT. Here was a moment when theory and practice met a tension point (one with historical precedent).[12] Feminism, I have always believed, in its ideal form embraced collectivity and resisted hierarchical power structures, so I had been advocating the collective model over more hierarchical ones. But these discussions revealed that perhaps this collective model was not going to be effective for ENACT, and may in fact be an “academic”` importation that needed to be challenged. On the other hand, power hierarchies rarely ensure that marginalized voices are heard and recognized, so establishing even a muted version of a hierarchy could prove counter to ENACT’s vision of inclusivity and accessibility.

These discussions challenged everyone present to interrogate our own positions in productive ways, and to more carefully examine the assumptions, power relations, and sets of knowledges that informed our various positions. All participants were drawing on a combination of theory and personal experience (something integral to feminism and American Studies), but at moments it became unclear how to value everyone’s experience without discounting others. It also became unclear how we could honor positions that at least initially seemed so diametrically opposed, or how we could work through the differences--and the intersections of issues that were at stake in them--without more “theorizing.” This sense that talking through issues and theorizing is desirable and necessary may be a place for revision of my own expectations as an academic feminist; on the other hand, I am also a community member and activist who values ENACT precisely because it creates a space for this kind of dialogue through art. Another contradiction revealed.

I want to emphasize that I do not see these issues as anomalies, nor do I raise them in order to problem-solve the specifics; rather, I see them as central and even common concerns in attempts to negotiate theory and practice within Feminist American Studies. These discussions in ENACT were moments when everyone in the group was challenged to push against recognizable models and interrogate our own positions. They also required us to more fully define our language, especially terms like leadership, responsibility, and power. Here again is the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies, which often demands that we communicate across different sets of experiences and diverse bodies of knowledge. Coalition work demands a similar kind of hybridity. ENACT is a wonderfully ambitious project that absolutely depends on multiple sets of knowledges and experiences: we draw on community organizers, artists of various kinds, computer experts, construction managers, area youth, fundraisers, and activists; we also depend on the voices of racially, economically, and gender diverse members of the local community. In learning to communicate across differences, members of ENACT have had to recognize the multiplicity of positions from which we speak, in much the way that Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Biddy Martin call for in their essay “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?”[13] In their analysis of Minnie Bruce Pratt’s essay “Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart,” they argue that Pratt constantly unsettles her own privilege and home place by analyzing what is excluded in order to make that security possible; in doing so, she constantly positions herself in relation to others. Like Pratt’s narrative, in ENACT “[t]here is an irreconcilable tension between the search for a secure space from which to speak, within which to act, and the awareness of the price at which secure spaces are bought, the awareness of exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on which they are predicated” (Martin and Mohanty 179). As ENACT members work together to create a process that is consistent with our vision, secure positions are unsettled and we are constantly brought up against the multiplicity of our positions: academics are also community members, artists are also activists. This multiplicity brings with it a kind of de-contextualization at some moments and a hybridity at others. As I participate in these discussions about organizational structure, for instance, I learn to understand my position as an academic feminist from the perspective of my position as a community member, and vice versa, and I learn that I always occupy both these positions. The dialectic has broadened and the “inside/outside” binary of the academy is problematized. ENACT illustrates that “[c]ommunity...is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political priorities” (183). While members of ENACT share a common vision, there are significant differences within that vision which continually test our construction of community in productive ways, and which challenge us each to constantly interrogate our own language, assumptions, and positions as they relate to others in the group. This is incredibly valuable--both for ENACT and for a Feminist American Studies--because it denies static categories of “academic” or “activist,” “theory” or “practice,” and invites us to be more creative in the ways we address interlocking oppressions, which, for many of us, is not just a theoretical luxury but a practical necessity.

I share the example of our discussions over organizational structure not because I think it is a weakness of ENACT, but precisely because I believe it illustrates our strengths, which include our sincere struggles with the very real difficulties of doing broad-based feminist work. I am confident that ENACT will arrive at a decision in this issue that members of the group can be invested in, as we have in the past. And I believe that the process we have engaged in is crucial to doing so; indeed, I argue that our feminist process is precisely what enables us to be creative about the hybrid leadership model we are likely to ultimately choose. These discussions reveal the very rich possibilities--and the very real complexities--of doing Feminist American Studies work. Indeed, only by addressing these tension points can we avoid the historical pitfalls of both feminism and American Studies to instead create a partnership that builds on their strengths, a Feminist American Studies that enables a productive dialectic between academic and activist, theory and practice.

Notes