On Shoes and Committee Meetings: Some Thoughts on the Erasure of Women

Abstract

triangles of green and grey; only as one gazes at these geometriOn Shoes and Committee Meetings . 97 cal shapes do they slowly resolve themselves into marked concrete and trimmed grass so familiar to summer in city. As viewers, paintings and sculptures of this remarkable contemporary artist remind us to attend carefully to details of daily life whether they be roughened surface of concrete on which we walk, deep red streak near stem of a Spartan apple, or shaping of canvas and rubber in running shoes we wear. Falk's career and strategies of her artworks uncannily mirror many of issues which have been foregrounded in work of feminist scholars during past three decades. Women have not only taken up questions and problems in canonical authors, but they have also retrieved and revived marginalized sites of women's writing: diaries, journals, lifewriting, letters and so on. Building on well-known slogan, the personal is political, feminist scholars have also drawn attention to effects of a wide range of institutional practices in sustaining and reproducing modes of domination and hierarchies within universities. It is intriguing and somewhat puzzling, then, to ask why, in context of such accomplishments, that women continue to feel invisible, to feel under erasure. Still more puzzling, an increase in visibility would seem to be born out by substantial changes in women's presence in universities. The number of women enrolled in full time studies has risen significantly from 1970 on until women now make up more than 50 percent of undergraduates. While increase in women graduate students and faculty is less, it nevertheless represents steady growth. I want to address problem of women's invisibility within universities from two perspectives, one negative, one positive. Listen to these reflections, from Women ofAcademe: Outsiders in Sacred Grove, by an anonymous woman scholar, a senior professor who also had administrative experience of chairing her department: I constantly find myself running against a set of expectations that I'm not quite meeting. The odd man out again. And I have found that to be very much case in administration as well, in that I was very aware of extent to which competition is at heart of way people interact with one another. Always sizing one another up ... I mean if you take a look at a committee that's been brought together to work on a particular task and if you look at group of people who come together for first time and sort of listen to what's going on,