An Interview with Charlotte Bunch

Alyssa Rorke: I want to start with the broad idea of passionate politics because in this issue of Films for the Feminist Classroom we’re going to have a review of the documentary Passionate Politics. So I wanted to unpack that a little bit, if you could start with the idea of passionate politics. I know you aren’t the only one to use that term and I’ve been thinking about what it means to me, and I’d love to hear what it means to someone like you, as you’ve used it in your work.

Charlotte Bunch: Well the term “passionate politics”—when I first named my collection of essays, 1968-1986,1 the term was something that I came to in talking with various people about how do we think about the relationship between being passionate about a subject and being passionate about making change, as well as having a political perspective and analysis. Also, for me at that time, the subtitle was equally important, which was “Feminist Theory in Action.” At that point, I had been much more self-consciously thinking about how to connect theory and activism. And so in a sense, passionate politics was a term—I know bell hooks has also used it later; bell and I had always felt very connected in our work. I don’t honestly know, I think she used it later, but I don’t have any interest in who follows what terms and how we inspire each other because I think that she has also, in her way, from her cultural political work, always been very inspired to think about what are the consequences politically of the ideas that we think about and to embrace passion as a positive term about caring, about being interested in and being determined to do something. So I don’t think there’s a technical definition, but that’s the way in which I’ve used the term. And when we went to do the film, again we went through the same process. We weren’t initially going to call it “Passionate Politics.” We were going to give it a new name, and we were playing around with different titles for the film, and I just kept coming back to feeling like “Passionate Politics” expressed it better than anything else we came up with. So we said, we’ll just use it again, in a new moment and, in that sense, still wanting to embrace the passion of connecting political ideas with political action.

AR I know when bell hooks used “passionate politics” it was in her book, Feminism is for Everybody,2 which was much later. But the connection that I saw was that she emphasizes the idea of feminist theory as doing, it’s the action, you do feminism. And something also that I noticed in her work is that it’s very accessible, when it comes to feminist scholarship, hers is very accessible, and I know you had mentioned in a 1996 interview3 the importance of feminist scholarship being accessible. Would you like to expand on that?

CB Absolutely. I think that I share, and she’s articulated it very well when she says that you “do feminism.” And for me, when I wrote about feminist theory in the 70s and early 80s, I was really trying to get people to understand that there were interpretations of the world, what I would call theory and analysis, behind the decisions they made on their strategies and their actions. At that time it was really more to get political activists to think about: how do we have a consistency between our “doing feminism,” as I think she said really well, and the ideas that we believe in? Today I think feminist theory has become much too abstract as a whole, and lost the fact that it’s supposed to be linked to how you interpret what it takes to change the world. So I would almost put the emphasis the other way around. In the 70s we were so busy doing, it was often hard to stop and think about our analysis behind what we’re doing. Today I think there’s such an emphasis on all the theoretical frameworks, that people often lose track of the fact that the reason you are interested in that is because you want to do something. So yes, passionate politics is about, as you said, the doing of feminism, and for everyone. And it’s not for me, writing about feminist ideas and thinking. I don’t even use the word “theory” very often anymore because I feel like it’s come to mean something very abstract and academic. But, good theory, to me, is something that helps make clear what your choices are, and what you’re doing, and what will be the impact of it.

AR So that kind of brings us to the classroom, and when feminist theory is brought into the classroom, that’s something I’m really interested in, when you talk about the different ways you brought it into the classroom and the way you taught. I know in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Carolyn Shrewsbury put it pretty broadly but I like the way she said it, that the members of the feminist classroom are “connected in a net of relationships with those who care about each other’s learning.”4 Do you think it’s more complicated than that?

CB Well I think that’s a wonderful description of part of it. I think it is more than that because I think that’s more of the feminist process part, which is that you are engaged in a process where you care about each other’s learning because you have something in common that you want to make happen in the world. And I would put more of the emphasis on the teaching, which is about helping [you] to think more clearly about what you want to do with your life in the world. And, yes, I think the engagement with each other is a process toward that. But my goal in teaching today, and what I’ve focused on in my courses at Rutgers is what gets called “public policy,” but that’s because I’m trying to show what feminism means to actually making political change at the policy level. And that’s the work I’ve done in human rights and advocacy around that. So whether it’s everyday life, whether it’s movement, whether it’s public policy, teaching is, to me, about making people better able to reflect on how they want to live their lives, and what actions they want to take for change in that process. It can be public policy, or it can be how you live in your family; it can be at all kinds of levels.

AR So do you think that’s what keeps feminist activism in the university environment? Is feminist activism still present in the university? How does the activism stay alive?

CB

AR I want to bring us back to the film, and discuss how you think your film contributes to the feminist pedagogy and how it serves as a pedagogical tool in the classroom.

CB Well, you know when they first approached me about doing a film, Joyce Warshow, who was the one who originated it, the one who ended up doing the final editing, I told her no. I wasn’t ready to do a film because I was too immersed in the work, and I was afraid that having a film about me would actually have an impact on how people saw my work, and I didn’t see that as useful at the time. She came back to me around the time of my 60th birthday and at that point, I felt that it did make sense to do a film because so much of what I saw in teaching was that the history of feminism in this wave (or this period if we don’t use waves anymore) since the 60s, 70s, and 80s was lost, that students really didn’t know what it was like. They might read a few pieces but they didn’t have a feeling for what it was like. And so I began to see the film as a way to convey through my life what those movements have been about, and how we also were affected by each other. The civil rights movement affected the women’s movement and the anti-war movement and the different layers of activity were not just separate things that now get studied often in isolation, but actually that the intersection of race and class and gender have always been present in the feminist movement. And we didn’t call it that in the beginning but it’s always been present and just knowing that would strengthen people’s ability to think about how they connect to that past. And I think a lot of writing about the movement doesn’t convey the dynamism of what was going on. So that was my motivation in deciding to, in essence, expose myself to a film, and I also think from teaching what I see: I use films in my own class, and I see the power of the films. I mean, I used to be in a tribunal, just now twenty years old. Still in every class, I see how people suddenly understand from the film what the struggle around women’s rights as human rights was, [this happens] in a way that could take me weeks of talking about in the classroom. And I see other films that Julie [Rajan] and I have used in teaching together, about the women’s movement in India or the women’s movement in some other part of the world, and it suddenly makes visible what I try to say when I say that there are women’s movements everywhere. We aren’t telling them to have a movement, they are making their own movements. And what we want to do is to learn from them. And in all these different ways I feel that film and video in the classroom is very important to bringing the ideas to life. So knowing that from teaching, and feeling like a lot of what I had seen in my life was now, if not misrepresented, was at least being lost and sometimes misrepresented. I thought well, okay, a video about a person’s life who has been publicly engaged for all these years is another way of showing and bringing to life for students the women’s movement in this country in an earlier period and how it naturally led to engagement with the global movement. People always ask me how could you go elsewhere and tell people what to do—well, I don’t go elsewhere and tell people what to do, I go elsewhere to find out what they’re doing and see what the connections are that we can make. And so I thought, well, a film was a good way to convey what that means.

AR And it seems that when film is used in the classroom it kind of breaks up the waves and makes [the history of feminisms] non-linear and that’s something I wanted to address, how theory is generational. But while it probably changes, the film kind of keeps it from being completely chronological and I guess that moves us into the final topic I wanted to get into, which is the state of feminist scholarship. This was something that was addressed in that 1996 interview, and I wanted to see if anything has changed since then, if your feelings toward it have changed, and how what we are doing here with Films for the Feminist Classroom might contribute to that change.

CB Well, I love what you’re doing with Films for the Feminist Classroom because I think that today, even more than twenty years ago, students in particular experience the world through a visual mode, and it’s therefore very important to have this connection between the films and the ideas that are being written about, because that is the mode of the world today. I think the issues continue to be the same, but they always have a different form at every moment because each era has its own flavor and particular ways that these issues occur. So as I mention the issue of feminism in relation to race and class, I mean this was a big debate for me in the 60s and 70s, it’s still a debate today, but we have different tools for that debate. We have learned different things, different things have happened. So on the one hand it’s the same issue, but one needs a constantly refreshed thinking about it. What I have found in working in feminist public policy is that there’s a real need to link the feminist theory to the actual outcomes in public policy. In the 70s I worked in a public policy institute and that made me think: what are the consequences of this. But we didn’t have very many feminists in government, or feminists that were already in power, to actually try out these ideas. And unfortunately I feel that there’s a big gap between the feminists in public policy and the feminist theory today. What little feminist theory we had in the 70s was much more connected to what we were trying to do in activism, and what we were trying to do—I lived in Washington—in government, because there weren’t as many of us. And in a funny way, although we weren’t as many, we had the public attention because it was new. I think there are many more feminists in the world today, actually, but it’s harder to get the attention because it’s not new. And I think we tend to work in more silos, in separate ways, so part of what I’m always trying to do with thinking about these issues is figure out how to connect them. But you can’t possibly read all the feminist theory that exists today in any field, and so I think it makes it harder somehow to keep that connection because in a way our very success makes it sometimes harder to keep up with how to relate them. So I think we need to think again about, it’s not in every area, but how do we link those silos and open that up. I probably read a lot about the application of feminist ideas and public policy but I don’t read very much feminist theory that isn’t connected to that anymore, because there’s simply so much out there. And if you look at what’s out there globally, and you’re trying to work globally, even more so. So I do feel that there’s a lot interesting happening, but it’s not as effective as it could be because it’s very siloed. And in a way, even though we strive for interdisciplinary, maybe occasionally some scholars who use the work across lines like Mary Hawkesworth does, most of the people are still in a silo that’s maybe a new combination of disciplines but not really connecting all of it. But it’s hard to connect all of it, there’s a lot. And that’s good, but it poses new challenges.