Writer and professor Chris Belcher was one of four recipients of the 2023-24 Barnard Library Research Awards. Research Awards support scholars, artists, organizers, and other researchers using the Barnard Archives and Zine Library, particularly those working on projects that highlight equity, inclusion, and social justice. Here, Belcher reflects on her research into the April 1982 Barnard Center for Research on Women's The Scholar and the Feminist IX conference, officially titled "Towards a Politics of Sexuality" but often referred to simply as the Barnard Sex Conference. For an overview of the controversy surrounding the conference and some of the items held in the Barnard Archives related to it, readers can consult Barnard Zine Library Director Jenna Freedman's research guide.
The magical thing about archival research is that you go in thinking you’re asking one question or pursuing one project, and you often come out the other side with something else entirely. With the research award, I visited the Barnard Library Archives in December 2023 to look at the institutional-historical documents of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. I was interested in the tensions that arose between the feminist student body (and their professors) and College administrators as they planned the infamous 1982 (“Towards a Politics of Sexuality”) edition of the annual “The Scholar and the Feminist” conference. In an academic year and national political landscape marked by greater tensions between university administrations and student bodies than any other through which I’ve taught, it has been interesting to reflect on the real tensions between those figures—the scholar and the feminist—that are present in the archival correspondences I was able to pour over, and which largely remain with us today.
At the end of 2023, I had begun writing a family novel about two sisters coming into their very different feminist consciousnesses in the early 1980s. I thought I would use the research as a jumping off point for character and scene development. 2024 has turned my writing practice more sharply toward the screen; I am working with a co-writer on an adaptation of my memoir, Pretty Baby (2022), as a television pilot. Because I’m not great at genre-jumping, I’ve begun plotting out a dramatic pilot script based on the “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” material instead, with the same two sisters at its heart, set in 1982 New York. The show’s world has expanded beyond a fictionalized “Barnard-inspired” college setting. My archival research inspired this creative expansion, as I encountered the actions of Women Against Pornography, an activist organization that took aim at the porno theaters of Times Square. I showed up thinking about feminist campus activists, and left thinking as well about those feminist activists doing work in very different physical and ideological spaces.
In addition, I have designed an upper-level undergraduate course—which I aim to offer Gender and Sexuality Studies majors at USC—with the conference zine, “Diary of a Conference on Sexuality,” as its primary text material. We will use this document and historical juncture to think not only about the cleaving of sexuality studies (and later queer theory) from feminism in the 1980s and onward, but also about the roles and potentials of feminist and queer activism in institutional spaces.
Chris Belcher is a writer, professor, and former sex worker. She completed a PhD in English at the University of Southern California, where she is now assistant professor of writing and gender studies. Under her working name, Natalie West, she edited the acclaimed anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival. Her latest book, Pretty Baby: A Memoir, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2023.