What made the conference work was of the course the networking, which is the primary reason for a conference, presentations notwithstanding. I met people who do what I do—teach mostly, research some, and carry out all the professional duties that academics carry out. It was fun to compare notes and institutions, and I must admit that coming from the University of Guam gave me a certain cachet—that and the fact that I didn’t have to go out and buy myself an aloha shirt to attend the conference in.
Incidentally, most male academics started out the conference in the usual long-sleeved, open collared shirt and often a jacket, as if they were unaware that they were on Waikiki. One would’ve thought that the large ocean-like object due south fifty paces would’ve clued them in. But by Saturday morning of the conference, aloha shirts, shorts, and Tevas were the order of the day. The women for the part dressed for the climate, and it is one of the pleasures of the tropics that women can actually dress more sensibly than men here.
The most successful sessions at the conference were the panels, in which a session was organized around a topic rather than a disparate set of papers that didn’t tie together. (See previous entry.) I attended two terrific sessions. One was on integrating library instruction into composition courses and run by two women from the University of South Dakota who have, to a greater extent than anybody else I’ve met, Figured It Out. The second was on multiculturalism in the classroom, which was a really fun workshop in which we all essentially compared notes and strategies, again run by two very cool women, this time from Central Connecticut State. I again had a lot of unintentional cachet, teaching at a school that 80% Pacific Islanders and where multiculturalism is pretty much a given. But the interesting thing that came up is how multicult plays out elsewhere: one woman from western Massachusetts reported that economic diversity was the issue in her school, where most of the student body is seriously working class, and another reported on how the issue isn’t really even framed and how she, as a woman scholar, is sort of ignored on the issue in the United Arab Emirates, where she teaches. It was just plain fascinating, and the participants in the group were among the most interesting I’ve met—people I would love to have as colleagues.
I’d never attended a poster session before, and I really like the whole concept. In a poster session, an individual sets up her presentation in a visual form on a tri-fold poster (hence the name) and meets with wandering scholars individually, who mill about the tables in the big ballroom. It’s a lot like elementary school science fair, though the topics are considerably more esoteric. Poster sessions are fun because you talk to folks up close and personal and you have their undivided attention, unlike in a present-your-paper session, where other people can ask off-the-mark and occasionally stupid questions that don’t get at the scholarship at all.
A lot of the presentations looked awfully boring—interesting as scholars and their topics may be, visuals matter in a poster session, a point lost on many of the presenters—but then I met the woman dealing with female cross-dressing in early modern England, a sub-sub-subfield I know nothing about, being neither a woman nor a cross-dresser. (Early modern England I know a few things about.) Even more fun was all the stuff from Jacobean material print culture featuring, you guessed it, cross-dressing women: women pirates, actors (-resses?), soldiers. I’ll be darned. To sum it up fast, generally women cross-dressed in order to gain access to power the culture only afforded men. This didn’t come as a great surprise to me, but I simply had no context for this, or even a context to think about this. I’d better read Marjorie Garber’s study Vested Interests, and if you want to talk to me about this, you better too!
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