Conferencing on the Edge (A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation)

Rachel Corbman’s Conferencing on the Edge tells the story of how feminism and queer liberation became academic pursuits. Corbman centers five academic conferences with notable afterlives in feminist and queer studies, from the West Coast Women’s Studies conference at Sacramento State in 1973 to the 1989 Outside/Inside conference at Yale. Each of these conferences is cited for its role in bringing a conflict in the field—over race, sexuality, or professionalization—to a head. Corbman’s detailed oral and archival histories of these conferences, from their planning to the events themselves to their mythologizing in feminist and queer scholarship, expand a conventional narrative premised on turning points: from social movement to university discipline, from white to intersectional, from feminist to queer. Both a social movement history and a study of feminist and queer field formation, Conferencing on the Edge helps make sense of the profound entanglements of these fields and the administrative dangers they face today.