A message from Points Managing Editor Emeritus, Trysh Travis:
Longtime Points readers will know (and newcomers should find out about) my longstanding interest in feminist work on drug and alcohol issues. Now, at long last, I have the chance to hire someone to keep me company on that thankless research journey! The Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research at the University of Florida is hiring an entry-level assistant professor, and the field is WIDE OPEN! Now is the chance to build an absolute beach head of feminist substance abuse research in sunny (if slightly hurricane-ravaged) Florida. Points readers, come join me! And if you can’t join me yourself, please spread the word to those who might. The incredibly non-specific job ad (application deadline 10 Nov.) is below; the full (yet still quite vague) position description with all the bells and whistles can be found in the UF Job Portal.
Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies: The University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research (tenure home). We seek applicants with superior promise who combine rigorous scholarship with excellence in teaching and service. Applicants should be trained in and have a research program and teaching experience that centers feminist, women’s, gender, and/or sexualities studies. We are particularly interested in candidates whose research, teaching, and service takes a feminist intersectional approach to addressing disparities and/or (in)equities related to gender(s), gender identity and expression, sexualities, or women. The candidate is expected to contribute enthusiastically to the interdisciplinary research, teaching, and service mission of the unit by maintaining a productive program of scholarship, pursuing external funding, supervising undergraduate and graduate students, teaching both core required courses and needed electives in the women’s studies undergraduate and graduate curricula, and engaging actively in outreach, experiential learning, and the life and success of the Center and the College.
The “irony” that you mention in the paragraph below is an important observations of your excellent post of 5 1/2 years ago that you encourage readers here to review.
” A few movement women that I met while researching the rise of feminist recovery in the 1980s had suggested that, in their own cases, partying, drug seeking, hangovers, etc., had impaired their ability to “do politics.” That impairment was what had prompted them to seek recovery, which, ironically, was then blamed for “depoliticizing” the movement. Recovery, as I have argued elsewhere, can certainly be feminist. But it shies away from structural analysis and is incompatible with political economic critique; as a result, recovery discourse, no matter how woman-centered or empowering, is difficult to recuperate into the notions of radicalism that were the stock in trade of women’s liberation. More important for my interests here, recovery did not become visible or influential in the feminist community until the early 1980s.”
How can “recovery” be blamed for “”depoliticizing” the [feminist] movement? Doesn’t that force the obvious – recovery (12 step mutation of Buchman’s shaming people into Christianity) is extremely political itself. Why was it “difficult to recuperate into the notions of radicalism that were stock in trade of women’s liberation.”? Could it be something more fundamentally ingrained in the recovery group movement than it’s lack of inclusion of women and minorities at the time; something that still exists today; skewing the feminist community’s radicalism since the 1980s?