From the “Matrix of Domination” to a “Matrix of Connection”: Funding Feminists’ Futures
Bailey Meyerhoff (MA, Wayne State University) and Kelly Plante (PhD, Wayne State University)
Lady’s Museum Project internships are not aligned with any one institution, but they do partner with institutions in the U.S. and Canada for funding and college credit for interns. This freedom from one parent-institution poses a financial constraint that is also a strength.[1] This essay illuminates potential future paths literary students could take to do what we feminist scholars, let’s just admit it, love: recovery work.[2] In what follows, one internship supervisor and intern reflect on our experience co-designing an editorial apprenticeship that prioritizes the intern’s interests and goals. Kelly outlines how and why—as a graduate student herself—she conceived of the internship to mentor other students. Then Bailey discusses how this work empowered her as an MA student even though she is not, and does not plan ever to be, an eighteenth-centuryist. We argue that practicing public-facing feminist-recovery work increases interns’ and supervisors’ agency through a shared purpose that infuses meaning into the impulse to professionalize (and “save”) literary studies.
We began with a theoretical focus on the “matrix of domination” as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins then applied to DH by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein to “begin to examine how power unfolds in and around data.”[3] We wanted to build a community of care by destabilizing the binaries of editor/intern, teacher/student through solidarity with Lennox and the feminist tradition.[4] What is the point of digital—or any—humanities work? The process, not (just) the product; relationships. Our work is both noun and verb.[5] That is why the homepage is subtitled “An In-progress Edition and Learning Community.” I now see we have been countering the “matrix of domination” through what Ross Gay has called a “matrix of connection, of care”: “. . . joining my labor to the labor by which it came to be—reminded me, or illuminated for me, a matrix of connection, of care, that exists not only in the here and now, but comes to us from the past and extends forward into the future.”[6] We are digitally cultivating our “mother’s gardens” by joining our labor to the labor that preceded—and will follow—us.[7]
Our internships would not have happened without the feminist foundation of those who preceded and will follow us: including Susan Carlile’s groundbreaking scholarship on Lennox and generous mentorship of us—graduate students outside her own institution.[8] We build on the Summer 2020 ABO: Interactive Journal for Women and the Arts (1640–1830) #writewithaphra program, continued by Bethany E. Qualls and Kirsten T. Saxton, who describe the writing group where Kelly and Karenza met as calling in:
. . . our communities, our whole selves, to create academic spaces that offer opportunities for writing, reading and thinking, not despite but through, loss and grief, wry humor, dissociation tactics, material support, and affectionate delight. And frankly? We’ll take moments of shared delight and actual mutual aid over academic messages that rehash the fraught and fragile nature of ‘these uncertain times,’ while offering no actual support, any day of the week.[9]
Simultaneously at Wayne State, the urban, R1 public university in Detroit that Bailey and Kelly met at, Professors Lisa Maruca, Simone Chess, and Jaime Goodrich modeled generous mentorship in the fields of feminist DH studies on which we build, through how we empower our students.[10] Maruca managed the English Department’s internship program, cultivating the soil in which Internship Coordinator Jared Grogan has continued empowering students to “work 6 hours per week gaining experience in alternatives to academic careers, typically as writers, editors, researchers in publishing firms, business, government, and community organizations.”[11] Grogan advocated successfully for College of Liberal Arts and Sciences funding for Bailey’s Lady’s Museum internship. These are not just citations. They document our lived experience: the relationships and meaningful work that are the “why” of our project.
In Spring/Summer semester 2023, I (Bailey) connected to the Lady’s Museum Project by an internship practicum course through Wayne State University’s English Department. Candidly, my initial interest in the practicum came from a place of financial necessity—because I would not be teaching over the summer, I needed paid work. The course offered students the opportunity to make money while also developing professionalization skills that would help shape them into more marketable postgraduate citizens. Through my work with the Lady’s Museum Project, I achieved these inceptive goals—and more. Indeed, the project served practical purposes while enabling me to participate in feminist work in theory and in praxis.
Over my three-month internship, I published three critical introductions, recorded a poem on LibriVox for the project’s audiobook edition, and published a final reflective piece that explored the development of my professionalization skills throughout the semester. As such, the majority of my time involved researching for and writing critical introductions aimed at contextualizing the Lady’s Museum for a wide audience of scholars, undergraduate students, and the general public. Coincidentally, I began my internship having already published a critical introduction for one of the digital social editions that was a major inspiration for the Lady’s Museum Project, The Poetry of Gertrude More, to which I contributed as an upper-level undergraduate student in Jaime Goodrich’s 2019 Topics in Women’s Studies course. I was already familiar, then, with the genre conventions for composing critical introductions for the Lady’s Museum Project: at 1,000 words, the goal of each critical introduction was to briefly (and accessibly) synthesize scholarship on the topic and to analyze Lennox’s periodical in relation to relevant academic discourse.
Because Kelly and Karenza encouraged me to follow my own academic interests and needs in the work that I produced for them, I was able to craft critical introductions for the project based on subjects that appealed to me. My first two critical introductions—“Lennox and ‘Female Education’” and “Women’s Educational Politics in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals”—were based on topics that I chose from a list of suggested options for critical introductions on the project’s website.[12] Since Kelly and Karenza knew I was interested in ecocriticism and in working within that field as a doctoral student, they proposed that my third critical introduction focus on the representation of the environment in Lennox’s periodical, thereby providing me the chance to explore the academic discourse surrounding ecocriticism and to publish work in what is now my field. In my final critical introduction, “Charlotte Lennox: Eco-Feminist?,” I explored the eco-feminist implications of Lennox’s interest in the Lady’s Museum on entomology.[13] The process enabled me to survey ecocriticism as manifest in eighteenth-century studies, and—even though my interest in ecocriticism pertains to American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—I gathered a baseline knowledge that will empower my future work. For example, my application materials for the doctoral programs I applied to include a writing sample on the ecofeminist posthumanism of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), work that I was in some ways preparing for when I wrote “Charlotte Lennox: Eco-Feminist?” I incorporated all published pieces from the Lady’s Museum Project internship into my curriculum vitae, plus a paragraph-length entry on my time with the project in my personal statements. Thus, this internship enabled me to achieve my initial objective for seeking a summer internship—financial security and further development of my professionalization skills—while also providing an opportunity to explore my academic curiosities and gain foundational understandings of scholarly conversations that I then contributed to in work published on the project’s website.
By recovering the proto-feminist public-facing work of Lennox (for money, for credit, and for experience), we hope that internships such as Bailey’s can demonstrate how crucial historical feminist-recovery projects and methods actually are for connecting the past, present, and future of literary studies and professionalization opportunities for students. The compulsion to professionalize literary studies is really the attempt to hold onto power—financial and political—in and for “the field.” However, as Sophia Prado Huggins and Susannah Sanford put it: “At this point, we do not have the energy for painstakingly niche discussions of what interdisciplinary methodology or hermeneutic will ‘save the humanities.’ We ARE the future of the field. Save US.”[14] Those in positions to assist students within the academy can leverage DH and feminist-recovery projects in tandem with departmental programs to co-create “small data” internships that honor students’ interests over “the field.” Funnel resources to students so they can enjoy “making a living” writing about what they love—if only while in school. And let’s counteract the matrix of domination by holding each other in the matrix of connection that extends from the eighteenth century to now and into our future, wherever that may be.
[1] Amy E. Earhart, “Can We Trust the University? Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 329–390, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv9hj9r9.23. The Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies 2021 D.W. Smith Research Fellowship has funded 20 years of site-hosting fees.
[2] On how “love of literature,” and the requirement for professors to demonstrate requisite passion for their subject, is embedded in the history of literature—specifically eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reading and publishing practices—see Deidre Lynch, Loving Literature: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
[3] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2008), 21. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, “The Power Chapter,” in Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/vi8obxh7/release/4
[4] Kelly J. Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, “‘A Numerous and Powerful Generation of Triflers’: The Social Edition as Counterpublic in Charlotte Lennox’s the Lady’s Museum (1760–61) and the Lady’s Museum Project (2021–),” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 2 (April 2023): 287–301, https://doi.org/10.3138/ecf.35.2.287. Kelly J. Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, “‘The present therefore seems improbable, the future most uncertain’: Transcending Academia through Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–61),” in Twenty-First Century Digital Editing & Publishing, ed. James O’Sullivan (Edinburgh: Scottish Universities Press, 2024).
[5] Kathryn Holland and Susan Brown, “Project | Process | Product: Feminist Digital Subjectivity in a Shifting Scholarly Field,” in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 409–33, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv9hj9r9.25.
[6] Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2022), 110–11.
[7] Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective, ed. Letty M. Russell, Pui-lan Kwok, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Katie Geneva Cannon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988).
[8] “Without a substantial biography that shows the scope of Lennox’s mind, her significant corpus, and her interventions in literary history and current events through publishing, this talented and popular author would not have had the opportunity to be fully taken seriously.” Susan Carlile, “‘Before I am Quite Forgot’: Women’s Critical Literary Biography and the Future,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 13, no. 1 (Summer 2023) article 5, https://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.13.1.1320.
[9] Kirsten T. Saxton and Bethany E. Qualls, “Writing with Aphra: Solidarity, Generosity, and Fight Club Rules Beyond Summer 2020,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 11, no. 1, article 17, https://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.11.1.1266.
[10] The Warrior Women Project, ed. Simone Chess, accessed April 4, 2024, s.wayne.edu/warriorwomen. The Poetry of Gertrude More: Piety and Politics in a Benedictine Convent, ed. Jaime Goodrich and Kelly J. Plante, accessed April 4, 2024, s.wayne.edu/gertrudemore.
[11] “WSU Course Bulletin,” Wayne State University, accessed April 4, 2024, https://bulletins.wayne.edu/courses/eng/
[12] Bailey Meyerhoff, “Lennox and ‘Female Education,’ The Lady’s Museum Project, ed. Kelly J. Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, accessed April 4, 2024, https://ladysmuseum.com/about-the-ladys-museum/lennox-and-female-education/. Bailey Meyerhoff, “Women’s Educational Politics in Eighteenth-century Periodicals,” The Lady’s Museum Project, ed. Kelly J. Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, accessed April 4, 20244, https://ladysmuseum.com/about-the-ladys-museum/womens-educational-politics-in-the-eighteenth-century-periodical/.
[13] Bailey Meyerhoff, “Charlotte Lennox: Eco-feminist?” The Lady’s Museum Project, ed. Kelly J. Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, accessed April 4, 2024, https://ladysmuseum.com/about-the-ladys-museum/charlotte-lennox-eco-feminist/.
[14] Sofia Prado Huggins and Susannah B. Sanford, “The Future of the Field: Notes from Lockdown,” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 11, no. 1 (Summer 2021), article 13, https://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.11.1.1264.