The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia

The Feminist Alliance
Project in Appalachia

Minoritized Experiences of
Women Faculty and Administrators
in Higher Education

Edited by Alicia Chavira-Prado

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2018008008

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-1-4331-4717-3 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5612-0 (ebook pdf)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5613-7 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5614-4 (mobi)

DOI 10.3726/b13460

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

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All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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About the editor

Alicia Chavira-Prado is Special Assistant to the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion at Ohio University. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from UCLA and was a professor of cultural anthropology and Latino/a studies prior to becoming an administrator. Her interest in Appalachian women’s minoritization grew from her work in higher education in the region.

About the book

The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia: Minoritized Experiences of Women Faculty and Administrators in Higher Education illustrates the minoritized experiences of women faculty and administrators in higher education and highlights Appalachia as a geographic and cultural region, a sector in academia that still remains relatively ignored in mainstream feminist studies. This book is based on autobiographical and autoethnographic narratives of diverse women who discuss their similar and unique forms of oppression as students and as professionals in the academic workplace within Appalachia. Their minoritized experiences exemplify women’s relational ties and the need for what the volume editor Alicia Chavira-Prado names the Feminist Alliance Project. Chavira-Prado calls for feminists to develop and enact an allied feminism that transcends class, race, or other artificially constructed borders and identities, as well as the specific subjectivities that have separated feminist groups. The narratives in The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia support the claim that white and nonwhite women experience similar minoritization within specific junctures of space, gender, and other identities. They thus show the need to be allies in recognizing and opposing all women’s minoritization in order to end women’s oppression. The book is of interest to women’s studies, Appalachian studies, Latina/x studies, regional studies, American studies, critical theory, cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, autoethnography courses, sociology, philosophy, diversity and inclusion and human resources professionals in higher education, and the general public.

Advance Praise for

The Feminist Alliance Project in Appalachia

“Alicia Chavira-Prado lays the groundwork for the long-overdue alliance of all women in the academy by shedding light on how ‘traditional’ feminist approaches, as well as higher education history and development, work to oppress and exclude them by silencing their voices, limiting opportunities for success, and ignoring their contributions. Through powerful narratives, the contributors make clear the ways in which social class and race intersect without dismissing the existence of white privilege.”

—Karen L. Dace, Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and author of Unlikely Allies in the Academy: Women of Color and White Women in Conversation

“Alicia Chavira-Prado has organized an important intervention into transformative feminist alliances that span racial lines. This collection of essays lays important groundwork to naming and theorizing the interstitial spaces and unnamed possibilities that exist in alliances between white Appalachian women and women of color. The volume takes challenging our limited understanding of Appalachian culture as a point of departure to explore the intersections that align women of color and white Appalachian women, taking care to attend to the intersections of power that enable and constrain those affinities.”

—Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge, and author of Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Dedication

To John: Babe, thank you for your unwavering, loving, kind, patient, understanding, and constant encouragement and support, for letting me wake you in your sleep so many nights to hear me ramble about the challenges of working on this book, and for more than anyone else, sharing the excitement of its completion with me. Dios te bendiga y la Virgen de Guadalupe te proteja. With All My Love. ←v | vi→ ←vi | vii→

Foreword: Feminism, Higher Education, and Appalachia

Naomi Zack

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: A Transracial Feminist Alliance in Appalachia?

Alicia Chavira-Prado