Discussion

After considering the submissions for Harlot's special issue on family and analyzing the responses from the survey questions, we are still left with the question of why this issue came to forward such a strong feminist agenda. Clearly the stimuli may have come from many possible directions: the struggle with the "publish or perish" mentality, the history of Harlot and what sort of responses it invokes in readers and creators, the CFS as inviting particular interpretations and calls for action, a changing communications landscape that makes the possibility of informal scholarship exciting and attractive, the need for academic writers to reach out to the public as a service, and maybe even the desire for academics to produce a work with scholarly leanings that their friends and families can find accessible.

Rather than tackle all these possible directions for investigation, however, considering that most of the works came from academics, it is worth considering the history and ongoing relationship between feminism and scholarly publishing. In our mind, a number of changes in our techno-academic environment, including the expansion of print and electronic publishing opportunities, have resulted in physical and intellectual space for non-traditional forms of scholarly work. Cheryl Ball and Scott DeWitt's (2008) special issue in Kairos, for example, notes in the editors' letter that the journal is open to non-traditional modes of scholarly work. Today's academic publishing topics, they argued, are "locations of conflict because strong ideas acted on with passion don't typically follow the models for how knowledge gets conveyed and acculturated within our field." At the same time, scholars continue to shy away from online publishing in favor of well-established and respected print journals that follow traditional patterns of academic publishing. Since online publishing is still rather new, the valuation of webtexts continues to be a complicated matter, and higher education administration and committees have trouble gauging such content for purposes of tenure and promotion (Warner, 2007). For scholars who target Harlot for academic publishing, then, there must be more at play since the scholarly worth of such a publication continues to be difficult to pinpoint.

In doing research on feminist academic publishing, we came across a number of sources in journals, conferences, and blogs that deem the relationship an oxymoron. How is it, they ask, that a grassroots movement with the intention of encouraging change become part of that same community? This problem is well expressed by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres (1997), the former editor of Signs, a premier journal for feminist academic publishing. In reflecting on her time with the journal, she described her struggle

with the paradox of that journal: that is, given its initial aim to make feminism respectable in the academy, and given that it has in many ways succeeded beyond its wildest dreams by becoming perhaps the strongest and most respected voice of U.S. scholarly/academic feminism, how can I think of it as it once was conceived, namely, as something different, even insurgent, as an agent for change? For just being in the academy will transform and ultimately modify grassroots ideas. Moreover, academic journals, by their very nature, will tend to codify and legitimize particular ways of thinking. By definition, they cannot be or remain insurgent. At least not for very long.

Grappling with the same problem, Ellen Messer-Davidow (2002), in Disciplining Feminism, attempts to understand how it is that feminism came to be reshaped and by the very institutions it aimed to transform. Her belief is that feminism will have to operate in an increasingly conservative environment. In a positive spin, Judith Stacey (2001) concedes that feminism has become institutionalized, but that very occurrence allows feminists to lift their half-full, half-empty glasses in celebration of the movement's collective accomplishments.

Views on the success of feminism in academia range between a spectrum of positives and negatives. In 1992, Patricia Sullivan wrote that feminist studies and composition studies grew at the same time, but while feminism traveled throughout academic disciplines, it did not make the same inroads in writing studies as it had in others (p. 37). Fast forward to 2008, and Mary Sheridan-Rabideau (2008) believes the growth of sites and locations for gender and writing research show feminism has "made it." Her evidence is the number of national journals, anthologies, publications in academic presses, and presentations at FemRhet's biyearly conference that focus on the subject (2008, p. 321). Yet even this view of feminism is tempered by a study by Jeni Hart (2006), who found that even as there are more women than ever in higher education, both in terms of undergraduate demographics and even in number of doctoral degrees conferred, the rate of feminist scholarship has not kept pace (Hart 2006). Hart conducted this study on The Journal of Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, and Research in Higher Education and found that 9.8% of articles explicitly mentioned women or feminism. While this percentage is a considerable improvement over the 3.9% discovered by Barbara Townsend in her 1993 study, the growth in feminist publication does not correlate with the growth of women in higher education. In Hart's words, "This shows that the role of feminism and women has neither waxed nor waned. Thus, the marginal status of feminism in higher education scholarship that Townsend found has continued. A backlash against feminism is not evident, but a continued backgrounding of feminism is" (p. 50).

In a follow-up article, Hart and Metcalfe (2010) measure the citation statistics of the feminist articles Hart discovered in her original research in order to better map out the post-publication life of these articles. Their findings regarding academic research databases were not positive. They concluded that the respectable database, Web of Knowledge, failed to extract data from feminist journals, and while Google Scholar did a more commendable job of counting citations, in the end neither source was accurate, which ultimately meant that neither made it possible to understand what sort of impact feminist scholarship has in gender studies or higher education scholarship in terms of citation statistics. In short, even when feminist scholarship is recognized by the community, our database technologies fail to document those instances.

Considering the history of feminist scholarship -- the difficulty in getting published, the difficulty in getting noticed, and the necessary adjustments to research and writing methods in order to work toward publication -- it would seem that feminist work most easily resides in publications that are open to and even celebrate non-traditional forms of scholarly argument. Ironically, because digital scholarship has created problems for tenure and promotion committees in terms of gauging the value of such work, it becomes an ideal venue for feminist scholarship. Allison Warner's (2007) research on digital publishing inadvertently explains why:

A review of the relevant literature on hypertext composing reveals a consensus among scholars that web-based texts are new forms of rhetorical presentation that require revised assessment criteria to account for the ways in which they extend the boundaries of traditional scholarship. Assessing this relatively new and unique form of online text is challenging due to a general lack of established criteria for determining their scholarly value. While scholarly assessment criteria for print-based texts is widely (if somewhat intuitively) known, criteria for assessing web-based texts has not yet been explicitly articulated. Rather, these texts exemplify new standards of scholarship that are, as yet, merely implied in the publishing decisions of specialists in the field, namely online journal editors and editorial board members. (Warner, 2007)

But beyond the opportunities afforded by online publishing, also worth recognizing is the larger atmosphere of the Web, particularly social media and the opportunities it creates for self expression and self publication. The blogosphere is one area in particular that we can take into account. As Rachel Loew (2010) writes,

academic bloggers face and face down a myriad of ethical, professional, and personal difficulties in maintaining high academic writing standards and conducting themselves with dignity and civility online. Despite the lack of institutional support, the lack of peer review, and the wide-ranging nature of their public, in each case it seems clear that these and other academic bloggers have to, and do, handle themselves. The future of online academic publishing may come to depend on the experiences of these early trailblazers. (Loew, p. 238)academic bloggers face and face down a myriad of ethical, professional, and personal difficulties in maintaining high academic writing standards and conducting themselves with dignity and civility online. Despite the lack of institutional support, the lack of peer review, and the wide-ranging nature of their public, in each case it seems clear that these and other academic bloggers have to, and do, handle themselves. The future of online academic publishing may come to depend on the experiences of these early trailblazers. (Loew, p. 238)

Blogging has opened up what we think is acceptable content for consumption. We can say the same of listservs and other informal social media venues. With more opportunities for scholars to interact informally, these easy interactions bleed into more stringent contexts. Further, as Loew explains, "the blogosphere offers new opportunities for fulfilling one of the more elusive standards of academic productivity: successful engagement with the public" (p. 235).

These findings help bring to the fore reasons why Harlot's general call for submissions on family almost exclusively centered around the role of motherhood. First, feminist scholarship continues to struggle to find a home. Second, online publishing offers new opportunities for argumentation that break the mold of traditional scholarly expectations and create a space where it is (somewhat?) acceptable for scholarly work to be conducted according to varied methods. Third, the surrounding social media landscape of blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, and the like creates an environment where new and emerging genres are embraced and informal writing styles are the norm. In all, these three points converge to raise Harlot as one of many ideal locations for feminist agency.

Harlot offers a space for academic scholarship, but it follows a non-traditional peer-review process and requires works be written with a lay readership in mind. This means that Harlot is a location between academic publishing and less-formal social media interactions: On the one hand it allows interaction with the public; on the other, it attempts to ensure ethical and sound researched and analytical work by pushing each work through a peer-review process that includes both academics and lay readers. Basically, Harlot has become a safe haven where much needed feminist research can reside and satisfy some aspects of academic requirements for faculty and perhaps offer some personal satisfaction considering that academics can offer scholarly interpretations of phenomena (in this case of familial life) and publish it in a site and form accessible to the public.