Two "colored" women's conversation about the relevance of feminist law journals in the twenty-first century.

• Author: Banks, Taunya Lovell
• Position: Why a Feminist Law Journal?

INTRODUCTION

The invitation to participate in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law symposium on the relevance of feminist law journals provided an ideal opportunity for us to reassess our collective endeavors as teachers, scholars, and advocates committed to social justice. Feminist methodology and epistemology have been instrumental in shaping our conceptual frameworks. So, too, have other theories of law that seek to unearth the structural impediments, hidden biases, and methodological limitations of the law in redressing injustice.

As black women (one from the United States and the other from South Africa), the concerns of race have been central to our analysis of the world and in our decisions to be lawyers. It is through the prism of racial discrimination that we confronted injustice, and our early endeavors, both academic and practical, used law as an instrument to eliminate injustice. Feminism came into our lives later, but it served to enrich our analysis about overcoming all impediments to equality. This was particularly important as the focus of equality both in the United States and South Africa served to privilege racial equality while ignoring the intersection of race and gender on the status of women. Feminist law journals have been an indispensable part of our intellectual journeys one that we plan to continue on as the nature and forms of discrimination alter.

We embarked on the conversation that follows in an attempt to assess the influence of feminist law journals on our lives and scholarship, and where we would like to see feminist law journals go in the future.

The conversation begins:

Taunya: One of the initial questions posed by the conveners of this symposium was: "What is the historical meaning of feminist law journals? What resonance do they have for law students, professors, and lawyers today and at their inception?" Perhaps one answer is that almost twenty years ago, feminist law journals were established to create safe spaces for students and professors interested in gender issues, considered soft scholarship.

Twenty years later many of the subjects embraced in the early years of feminist journals, like reproductive freedom, equal employment opportunities, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, have become mainstream, and are as likely to appear in traditional law journals as they are to appear in feminist law journals. (1) Articles by women legal scholars on a wide variety of legal topics appear with regularity in all types of law journals. So, do you agree with my starting premise about the reason for feminist law journals, or is that premise also contested?

Penny: I agree with your first premise. However, one could argue about whether contemporary feminist legal scholarship, although still treated with some skepticism in traditional legal circles, is no longer regarded as "soft" scholarship. But your premise about the origins of feminist law journals is correct.

Taunya: On second thought, however, our premise that feminist scholarship has been accepted in mainstream law reviews may be illusory since an article by Laura Rosenbury that also appears in this issue of the journal, looking at the content of law journals between 1978 and 2002, found that only 189 out of 1,637 "feminist" articles were published in mainstream law journals. (2) On the other hand, your definition of what constitutes feminist scholarship may differ from Professor Rosenbury's. Thus, the difference between perception and reality may depend on the feminist issue presented and whether the argument being advanced in the article is consistent with or at odds with what we call mainstream legal scholarship. Some issues, usually involving formal equality, are clearly mainstream, while other issues are not. (3)

Penny: I do not know if I would accept at face value this clear demarcation between "mainstream" and "other." I am not sure that this binary takes account of the contextualized and fluid nature of these concepts. I think that these definitions need to be problematized somewhat, since what is mainstream is often contingent on a whole host of extra-legal factors, including timing. If one, for example, looks at the development of the law regarding sexual harassment, you notice that the issues moved from the margins to the mainstream fairly rapidly. Most of these developments occur not so much in a linear fashion, but rather as a consequence of extra-legal processes which impact on the perception of the issue, that is, mainstream or other.

Taunya: Perhaps a more accurate statement is that some forms of contemporary feminist legal scholarship have become mainstream, but not others, and then ask whether these "less conventional" feminist theories are more likely to be found in feminist journals than in mainstream journals. Perhaps feminist journals need to exist to help feminists push the envelope to provide a space to discuss "less conventional" feminist subjects and theories and promote more honest intra-feminist critiques. We are in need of a new coherent, all-inclusive vision of feminism to replace the mainstream American model. Thus, the goals of feminist law journals must be reworked to provide a forum for non-white women and less powerful women globally.

Penny: But have feminists succeeded in pushing the envelope? I think, as a general proposition, that one can think of mainstream feminist journals as succeeding on many levels, and possibly even with respect to inclusivity. I want to return to the original point about the raison d'etre for feminist law journals, that is, t he production o f knowledge from a feminist perspective and access to knowledge for women and other scholars committed to principles of gender equality. One can argue that the feminist legal project in this regard has been successful. In other words, feminist law journals have provided an indispensable context for the development of alternative approaches to legal knowledge which place women's concerns at the center. (4)

What has been essential in the reproduction of a feminist epistemology has been the challenge to concepts such as "objectivity" and "neutrality." Here feminist legal scholars have been fellow travelers with other critical legal scholars (especially those who focus on questions of racial discrimination and wider questions about justice). In other words, the challenge to the "natural order" of racial hierarchies in this country also...