Conferencing on the edge: a queer history of feminist field formation

"Conferencing on the Edge tells the story of five academic conferences with notable citational afterlives in feminist and queer studies, beginning with the West Coast Women's Studies conference at Sacramento State in 1973 and ending with the Outside/Inside conference at Yale University in 1989. Each of these conferences are cited for their role as a flashpoint or climax of a particular conflict within women's studies, such as those over race, sexuality, and academicization, but as Rachel Corbman shows, these tidy divisions belie deeply intertwined histories. The book uses anxiety as a metaphor to track how feminist scholars came to be collectively concerned about race, sexuality, and feminism transit in universities in the early 1970s and how these concerns congealed over the course of the next two decades. Both a social movement history and a study of feminist and queer field formation, Conferencing on the Edge brings together archival research and oral histories to track a specific set of anxieties that are repeated in various forms across the 1970s and 1980s and persisting to the present moment"--