differences
Cover of the most recent differences issue
A CELJ Conversation with Elizabeth Weed and Elizabeth A. Wilson, differences editors
Eugenia Zuroski: It's so lovely to be here with the two of you. I was hoping, since this is the first time we're all meeting, we could start with a quick round of introductions.
Elizabeth A. Wilson: I'm a professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. I'm a recent addition to the editorial board of differences, but I have known the other editors for many years.
Elizabeth Weed: And I have been retired from teaching at Brown for a while. Joan Scott and I started the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women in 1981. And then Naomi Schor and I started differences in 1989.
Debra Rae Cohen: That actually gets us into the first question we were going to ask, which is about the history of the journal and how each of you got involved with it.
EWeed: Well, it started as an offshoot of the Pembroke Center. Naomi and I wanted to have a journal to continue the kind of work that the center was known for by that time. It was Naomi Schor who had the brilliant idea of naming it differences with the italicized s, which I still think she should have gotten a Nobel Prize for. It was first published in 1989, which, we didn't know at the time, turns out to be a very notable year—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the so-called victory of capitalism, the New World Order. The beginning of neoliberalism really taking off in the US and in the academy. The beginning of the turn away from post-structuralism, but of course that's something we only learned in retrospect.
The mission of the journal was similar to the mission of the Pembroke Center and was captured by this brilliant differences title. The italicized s was intended to mark what we called and still call the collision of theories of difference on the one hand with the politics of differences on the other—politics of differences being so evident in the politics of the US, which had been enlivened since the ’60s by the civil rights and feminist movements.
The theoretical focus referred primarily to French theories that rose out of linguistic theories—particularly the Saussurean insight that linguistic systems from phonetics to semantics operate through difference, that so-called positive terms (black, white, etc.) are produced through difference. Those linguistic insights, of course, took off into multiple theoretical developments from Lévi-Strauss to Derrida, among others.
But for feminists, there was an explosion of theory from this, exploring the endless plays of difference between female and male, women and men, and so forth, but also the way the suppression of difference works in the service of power, which is something that work on decolonialism is reviving today—what happens when you suppress difference.
The mission of the Pembroke Center and the journal was to think about the ways the play of difference works very broadly in systems of meaning, and how those plays of meaning interact with a social and political system like that of the US that is so grounded in differences. It's kind of an impossible task because these two things cancel each other out. But it’s a really important task.
It continues to be very challenging. Just to give an example: in the very early days of the Pembroke Center, the center was kind of an outlier because while other feminist research centers were exploring and celebrating everything to do with women, Pembroke was asking, what is a woman? So that's differences.
Naomi and I were the founding editors. And then around 1997 Ellen Rooney came on board. Naomi died unexpectedly in 2001. And from 2000 on Denise Davis has been our managing editor, and then recently, a full editor. And Elizabeth Wilson joined us in 2024.
Elizabeth Wilson: 1989 is also the year that I started graduate school, at the University of Sydney. My first contact with the journal was at a very good bookstore called Gleebooks, just a really nice walk from campus. And I remember walking into Gleebooks one day in 1989 and seeing it there, that beautiful yellow cover. I didn't really know what it was, but I knew that I wanted it. So I think it took some years for me to understand what you just said, Elizabeth, about the relationship between “differences” and “difference”—the necessity of it and the impossibility of it. And it's been a remarkable journal in that regard because I think a lot of journals tend to pick one side or the other. What differences has done very successfully as a journal is hold together these continental linguistic commitments on the one hand and these much more anglophone American commitments to differences politics on the other. And I think that's in all of the published work over the last 30 years.
EWeed: It’s not an easy thing to understand, and we're insisting on it as the necessary work of the academic. In order to understand what's going on with politics and particularly problems of feminism and racism and so forth, we have to keep asking those questions.
EWilson: I think, as someone who's ended up working in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, that the field has often taken up “differences” only in a very narrow sense. In these anglophone contexts, “women” is not really a question. “Women” is just presumed. And so it's quite hard, in terms of training students, for them to find a place that doesn't abandon those questions. It remains surprisingly hard.
EWeed: It's getting harder and harder to ask the questions, thanks to the current administration.
EZ: That’s a perfect segue to the follow-up question I want to ask, which is how you understand the mission of differences in our current moment, however you want to define that. What are some of your present commitments? What are some of the things you want the journal to be doing in the world as we are facing the challenges of the new administration and everything else that comes with it?
EWeed: Well, we recently restructured our advisory board to bring in people who are working on real current issues. Our original advisory board was wonderful, but we needed the participation of some people working on more current issues. I think the collision of differences and difference has never been as striking or as disturbing as it is now.
On the one hand, you have right-wing MAGA politics that relies on the differences that have grounded US politics for so long, and mobilizes them to separate and divide people. The repudiation of DEI mobilizes people against one another. It mobilizes what Wendy Brown (one of our board members) analyzed long ago as the politics of resentment. So all of that is done with the promise of restoring a lost unity. And, of course, that lost unity is white male, right? Contaminated by race, gender, et cetera. So that’s an example of the closing off of difference that produces power.
On the other hand, I have been very excited by the work of young philosophers like Samo Tomšič. He articulates a counter-politics of difference, which I think is exactly what differences and the Pembroke Center are trying to work for. He argues for what he calls the trans-differentiated subject—for a politics that supports a unity that doesn't reject difference, but mobilizes it. And he calls for a coalition of differences similar to the Rainbow Coalition but different in the sense that no human being is ever contained by one identity and that identity itself is fluid and changing. When I read about this, Elizabeth knows, I said to our editors, oh my God, this is what differences is trying to do—trying to mobilize a difference that's not that rigid thing that MAGA is working with.
EWilson: I would add that one of my big commitments to this journal is also about the corporate nature of the modern U.S. university. Alongside current federal administration problems, we have significant problems with increasing corporatization, and this has been going on for a very long time. In one of our special issues, “Women's Studies on the Edge,” Vol. 9, No. 3 (1997), Joan Scott's got a great paper about the corporatization of the university. In the Derrida issue, “Notes from the Beehive,” Vol. 2, No. 3 (1990), the authors have, in their own way, written about what is happening to the university as it becomes more captured by capital, more captured by corporate ethics. Which is profoundly anti-intellectual, but in a particularly sinister way: they don't really care if you want to study women so long as you generate outputs that can be counted and reported.
Moreover, a lot of academic work in elite institutions has been captured by this kind of corporate ethos, even as it proclaims its own radicality. This was Barbara Johnson, right? At the very moment when you think you have removed yourself from power, you find yourself repeating it. So differences continues to produce a space where that problem can be elaborated, where it's not just critique of the world in general but also a critique of our own founding presumptions.
DRC: How do your own editorial processes work to support your ideals in this matter? I'm bringing it back to this because this is, after all, an interview that's going to be read by other editors who are concerned with very similar positionings vis-à-vis their own institutions’ corporate practice. How do you make your editorial processes push back against these power structures?
EWilson: One of the things I'm realizing as I'm sitting in on board meetings and getting the hang of how things work is that the journal requires that a proposal for a special issue say something to this question. A special issue isn’t simply a collection of papers on a particular topic, it must also have a question that it wants to put to the readers. Every proposal for a special issue needs to be able to clearly articulate in a paragraph or two what that question is—not how it's going to be answered, but how it's going to be elaborated.
EWeed: And we have the luxury of doing that—of publishing what we want because we are independent. I mean, Brown University has never stopped us from doing anything, nor has the Pembroke Center. We are completely independent, in the sense that we don't have to answer to anyone as long as we're selling enough journals that Duke University Press agrees it’s worth keeping us in business.
EWilson: My sense as a late arrival to the scene is that the philosophy of the journal is rigorously understood by everybody involved from the editors to the associate editors and the managing editor and the graduate assistant editors. The vision is very clear.
EZ: I have a follow up question about your relationship to the institution. I've been thinking a lot about the importance of managing editors, and the importance of having the resources to bring in the people like managing editors who do the administrative work of running the journal. Does Brown provide those resources while leaving the editors free to make your own decisions about how to use them? How does this shape the workflow?
EWeed: We certainly are beholden to Brown for helping to support the office. Denise Davis has been the brilliant managing editor since 2000. She has a very, very well-organized office of graduate students and other assistants. She really handles everything. And recently, when she decided to step down and become a full editor, the university agreed to replace her position, which is wonderful. Yay, Brown; yay, Pembroke Center for supporting this—because without it, there would be no journal.
DRC: And it's rare, actually, to be supported to that extent.
EWeed: Absolutely. From my perspective, I get to do all the fun stuff. I don't have to worry about the processing of essays. Everything is done out of Denise's office and by the graduate assistants.
EWilson: My understanding of the workflow is that when papers are submitted they go first to the managing editor, who vets them with input from the graduate assistant editors. We all meet once a month to discuss new submissions, deciding together what to decline and what to send out for peer review. Once a table of contents is set and revisions are completed, the editorial office takes over manuscript preparation, copy editing, and so on. Pembroke and Brown have been able to provide the journal with what we at Emory would call research assistants, but at Brown they're called graduate proctors. So there is, in fact, that infrastructure that Pembroke and Brown have been supporting for quite some time. We’re training these graduate students in the art of editorial work. And when I came on at Emory, my dean gave me a teaching release, and I got money from the graduate school to pay for student labor here at Emory to help contribute.
We've been remarkably lucky to have Brown support Denise in a part-time editorial position these last 25 years. And the fact that they have been prepared in this day and age to support a full-time managing editor as of July 1 I think speaks to the esteem within which both the journal and the longstanding editors are held by administration at the university.
EZ: Can you tell us about the newer online part of the journal? We’re interested in that.
EWilson: About two years ago we started an online presence for the journal as a way of expanding the audience and the reach of the journal. We've only just started, but we publish on much more immediately topical issues that readers can access easily and readily. We’re very indebted to our current Web Editor, Scott Jackshaw, for this project. We've been influenced by Critical Inquiry, which has a great website, as does Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. We have found that the online presence brings in more readers and dovetails with social media efforts to gain visibility; it's being widely accessed nationally and internationally. And it allows for short-form, timely commentary which is really very nice.
DRC: Do you have forms that are unique to the digital platform? Do they go through the same kind of peer review?
EWilson: It's still in its infancy at this point, so content is reviewed in-house rather than sent out for formal peer review. But we've published, for example, the introduction to a co-authored book that has already gone through peer review processes elsewhere. We published a forum of collected papers that were given at the MLA. So they have been vetted. Will we be innovating in terms of imagining a photo essay or other kinds of modalities that the digital platform allows? Possibly. We'll see what happens.
EWeed: I think the one thing that we all agreed on when we were talking with Scott Jackshaw, the person who has the job of making this interesting, is that we wanted it to cause trouble. We want it to be a place where people can look to see arguments and challenging ideas.
EZ: We always make a point in these conversations of asking the editors if there are particular issues, whether special issues or regular issues, that you want people to know about—as a way into the journal for new readers, or as a way of seeing something that you're particularly proud of the journal doing.
With differences, because it's been in production for so long, there's no one issue that I (as a longtime reader) can imagine would capture the essence. We don't believe in the unified identity of the journal. So there's no one issue that can capture it.
EWeed: Exactly.
EZ: But if you wanted to take a journey through the story of differences, are there particular touch points—moments in time or specific issues—that you would draw attention to as a way of getting a sense of what the journal has been and where it's come?
EWilson: I think there are a bunch of different overlapping stories. So let me just suggest one or two and, Elizabeth, you can suggest more. The origin story for me is my graduate career and my training. The journal was really important for the early years of queer theory. So I would pick out the special issue “Queer Theory, Lesbian and Gay Sexuality,” Vol. 3, No. 2 (1991). That is the collection of papers that came out of the Santa Cruz conference organized by Teresa de Lauretis, which, if you wanted to tell an origin story, you would say is one of the starting points for queer theory in the academy. I teach this special issue a lot, in particular de Lauretis’s introduction, because what she thought queer theory was and what it then became are not the same. It's very helpful, I think, for students in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies to see the field as something that moves, right? Some of the questions that de Lauretis deals with here remain crucial and some of them have drifted away as questions of urgency, and it's important for students to see that.
When I look at the first decade of the journal, I see absolutely crucial queer and feminist questions being published—in “Queer Theory,” Vol. 3, No. 2; in “Women's Studies on the Edge,” Vol. 9, No. 3 (1997); and in “Notes on the Beehive,” Vol. 2, No. 3 (1990). And the very first issue—I've never heard the story about the first issue and how it came together, but it includes Donna Haraway and other really important work on what would later be called feminist science studies. It laid down some paving stones that would remain crucial in the field 20, 30 years later.
EWeed: To me, the double issue “More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory,” Vol. 6, Nos. 2–3 (1994), was absolutely crucial because that's where queer theory moved away from feminism. And “Women's Studies on the Edge,” Vol. 9, No. 3 (1997), which was talking about how Women's Studies was an impossible field.
And then as we move through the years, in issues like “Sexual politics,” Vol.15, No. 2 (2004), and in the issues of Volumes 22, 23, 24 (2011–2013), that's when the attack on post-structuralism was coming, so there was a lot of attention to theoretical questions of what it means to read and what it means to evaluate.
There are a couple of more recent special issues that I think are really important. In 2023, “Social Bonds and Catastrophic Acts,” Vol. 34, No. 3, a special issue guest edited by Elizabeth Stewart, who's a professor of English at Yeshiva. The issue is framed around the really strange behavior of a lot of people during the onslaught of COVID-19, and how to think about that behavior: the embrace of wild conspiracy theories; the disgust and loathing of government, which continues; bizarre behavior like people coughing on babies, coughing on produce in the supermarket; and almost suicidal attacks on vaccines. It’s a really interesting issue, with perspectives ranging from psychoanalytic to legal to sociological to philosophical.
And in 2014, “In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities,” Vol. 25, No. 1, was guest edited by Wendy Chun, who used to be at Brown, and Lisa Marie Rhody. It's an important reflection on the relationship between digital humanities and critical thinking. And, of course, that question is even more pressing now. I’ve been wanting in the near future to do something on AI and the digital humanities with regard to critical thinking, and I had forgotten about the 2014 issue until recently, so it would be nice to look back at it.
EWilson: Can I add that I think the “-30-” issue, the 30th anniversary issue (Vol. 30, No. 3, 2019), is also really good because it includes a lot of really talented junior scholars.
EWeed: That was a wacky title because I discovered—I said to my friend Joan Scott, Oh, hell, it's the 30th anniversary. I can't stand anniversaries. What are we going to do? You know, it always calls up such… sort of trite nostalgia. And I was just Googling around and I found out that -30- was the shorthand that journalists used to indicate the end of the story. So I said, okay, we're going to call it “-30- The End of the Story.” There was the critical sense that we’re turning a corner, where we can no longer do the kind of critical theory that we were doing. It’s about the shifting of politics, the shifting of the neoliberal order, the corporatization of the academy. I mean, it was around the time when I was just wondering if we should even continue the journal, because the commodification of intellectual work was so extreme.
So over 30 years, it's a lot of special issues. It begins with very focused issues around gender and sexuality. And it has become much broader in terms of the kinds of content that could count as feminist. The question of capital, the question of the neoliberal order, all of these questions are now very visible.
EWilson: Oh, absolutely.
EWeed: And we adamantly assert that these are feminist questions.
EZ: Elizabeth, you mentioned hopes for an upcoming issue at some point on AI, which I would love to see differences do. Are there any other specific things on your radar that you are hoping the journal will address in the near future? Or even more broadly than that, any hopes for the journal going forward?
EWeed: We have a new series that we started last year which is called “Limits of Legibility.” Last year's program had to do with sexuality and blackness. And this year's program has to do with climate change. These programs are colloquia moderated brilliantly by Elizabeth Wilson, where four people give papers challenging the accepted truths, the dogma. This will continue every year. We hope to attack other questions because that's the way the university sells its commodities, by making them legible, right? How many graduate students have said to me recently, I am so sick of hearing what I already know.
EWilson: Yeah, I think that's right—it's the orthodoxies, not only of a conservative outside world, but also a certain kind of thinking of politics and thinking of theory inside the university that can be quite conventional. This legibility is not just coming from the dean's office, it's also coming from inside the house. So, for example, in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, there are lot of orthodoxies.
EWeed: And these colloquia are available on YouTube. That's another way that we're trying to disseminate the work. These are programs sponsored by differences, and again, we're very lucky we're associated with the Pembroke Center because the Pembroke Center is supplying the honoraria and travel expenses and so forth.
EZ: This is really wonderful. Thank you both for bringing so much to this conversation and sharing it with us.
Elizabeth Weed
differences co-editor
Elizabeth Wilson
differences co-editor