Durba Mitra On Doing Feminist History Now

Kate Carpenter
Hey there! Welcome to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian about how they research and write history. We talk about writing craft, how to fit writing into busy lives, and the work of translating what we find in the archives onto the page. If you've been paying much attention to the state of higher education lately, especially in the humanities, you probably know that feminist history and women's and gender studies have been under attack, facing both political threats and decimated by funding cuts. As you'll hear in today's episode, this work is more important than ever. But what does it mean to be doing this history in the current moment, and how do you keep doing the work at all? For some answers, I'm delighted to be joined in this episode by Dr. Durba Mitra.

Durba Mitra
Thank you so much for having me.

Kate Carpenter
Durba is a celebrated historian of feminist political thought, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history. Her work has won many awards. She's also a beloved professor, and she's currently the Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Associate Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Her first book was Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Her second book, which came out earlier this year, is The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. I found this book deeply moving, and I was astonished by how she managed to write such a deep intellectual history with a light touch. It makes the book a pleasure to read, and that's a pretty rare feat. To my great pleasure, she talked in our interview about how she pulled it off. You'll also hear about the challenges and unexpected gifts of trying to write while caregiving for a loved one, and how her uncomfortable relationship with her writing turned into a joyful practice. Here's my conversation with Dr. Durba Mitra.

Durba Mitra
The framing of thinking of myself as a career, as a writer is unusual for me. I think of myself as a historian. I think of myself as a feminist theorist, but writer is not always the first category I use to describe myself. And I think that that has to do with the way that the craft of writing for me was always about how we convey very complex and often politically charged ideas, by, through text, but also speech, like all of these forms that we convey our ideas. So I, you know, when I was thinking about this, I thought, okay, well, I started as a writer from a young age because my parents were not native English speakers. I, I will just say, my, I grew up with a single mom. Writing was very important for me when I was young, in part because I had access to a language that my mom knew as a secondary language, actually tertiary language. So writing became a primary mode for me to communicate with the world and translate the world for my mom and for my family as well. And so writing for me is like a, is a domain through which I could communicate ideas, and eventually it became a space for me to show my command of being an American. So writing, you know, when I started, I have such distinct memories in elementary school of my teachers underestimating the idea that I would be good at language because I was one of a few minority students. Well, not even a few. There were basically none in the school that I went to. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. But I have a— early on in middle school, I wrote a report about my grandmother, and the report was multimedia. And I remember from that moment realizing how much that I liked looking at, I guess, what we would call archival materials. But at that time, I thought about the family photograph, the little remnant letters that I had received as a young person, listening to her on the phone, and being able to narrate that in text. So that was like, you know, when I think about the first project of writing, that was definitely my first project of history writing, and of course that project began with a history writing about a woman who otherwise would have never had her history written. Later, my writing, I think when I was an undergraduate, my writing turned very quickly to critical theory because that's really how I came into the domain of history writing because I was interested in history as a site of political debate and exchange, and so the question of how history functioned for someone like Frantz Fanon or for feminist thought, obviously Joan Scott or those frameworks became really critical for me thinking about how I'm a writer. So I first wanted to take on writing as a person who could do theory, and quickly I realized that there are different ways to be conceptually sophisticated in in text. So I guess I would say that I, that's why I was saying it was it's really interesting to be called a writer because I think of myself first as a theorist who writes or a historian who writes, and it's a great joy to imagine myself as a writer now because I take great pleasure in the practice.

Kate Carpenter
Well, let's talk about your practice. When and where do you like to write?

Durba Mitra
I write when and where it's possible. I don't have that much ritual around writing because of the complexities of life, which I think you know, many people would say the same, whether they're caregiving for family members or caregiving for children. But ideally, I do know that I love writing in the morning, and that is has to do with the clarity of the mind. You know, the ease with which you have not yet checked your email, not yet looked at your things to do list For me, that's really really important. So if I have, if I were in an ideal situation, I would walk first, walk to a coffee shop, and usually I work in places where there is ambient noise. I love listening to the same song or same music over and over and over again, where it creates like a sonic environment of music that's often related to the mood of what I'm writing. So I create a soundtrack for a lot of the text that I'm working on. So every book that I write, every chapter that I'm writing, I ask myself like, what is the mood of the text that I'm trying to portray? And so, you know, for the most recent book, I was reading, I was listening to a lot of, you know, Nina Simone, for example. There's a there's a melancholy and also a kind of fervor, revolutionary imaginary. All of that is in the in the music, and that helped me. So if I listened to, I would just listen to one song over and over and over again as I was writing. So I couldn't quite hear it after a while, but it helps me focus when I'm putting text on the page. I think the one thing that is absolutely essential for my writing practice is tea. Like I love like a delicious, this is how you know I'm from a former British colony. Like I need tea, and I need I need that ritual practice of having a warm drink with me to soothe me as I'm doing the work of writing.

Kate Carpenter
I love that, a playlist and some tea. That's a pretty good, pretty good ritual. Are you a person who tries to write every day, or or how does your routine work out for writing?

Durba Mitra
I would love to write every day. I mean, if I'm in a project, I'm almost writing every day, and sometimes it's that I'm writing it in the interstices between teaching classes or meeting students. But if I'm in the midst of of a writing project, I'm writing no matter what. In my mind, I'm writing when I'm walking, I'm writing when I'm reading other things. You know, even as when I'm teaching and I'm teaching a text, we'll see something that I recognize in the work that I'm doing in the text that I'm teaching often, and will begin writing even there. I take notes everywhere in a very sometimes haphazard and scattered way, and I compile those notes into documents that are like notes towards the introduction, key conceptual frameworks, like you know, so many people. And so I am writing every day. If I am in the middle of writing projects, I'm reading. So I've begun writing a book now and begin the writing process by starting from primary sources, moving out. Right now, I'm in the position, in the process of just immersing myself in text and in oral history and in situating myself in the context to to let my imagination play out in the context of the world that I am trying to build in the book that I'm writing.

Kate Carpenter
How do you organize your research and your notes. Are there tools that you use?

Durba Mitra
I am a bucket person in the sense that I am just making folders and making additional folders. This goes back to the writing process question. I am always writing on primary sources as I'm getting them. You know, one of the things that was very interesting when I was writing my first book, Indian Sex Life, in the British Library, you could take a laptop. You certainly couldn't take photographs. In Indian archives, particularly in rural or in you know semi-urban, not often used archives, I wasn't allowed to take a laptop, and I wasn't allowed to take photographs. And at that time, you know there was very few phones that had good photo, you know, cameras on them, and so I was handwriting all materials on notepads, and that made me have a very different relationship to the work of trying to compile materials because there's only so much you can take down when you're in an archive trip, and London is very expensive, and so you go for four days, and you desperately try to take as much information down as possible. And so, when that would happen, I would then come home and write archive reports. Those reports then go into file folders where I've organized materials. I often organize my chapters not traditionally chronologically. So my books, thus far, have been particularly like, The Future That Was is organized around genres and forms, not around just chronology. But arranging my materials chronologically is very very important. So my file folders will start chronologically, and then I'll begin to move into other folders where I'm moving materials into the things that I think are linked and will likely become a chapter. But then, inside those folders, then are also the reports about the primary materials that I'm seeing, where I'm pulling out key concepts and terms that are in those materials and beginning to map it. And I should just mention the main thing for my writing and organizing the writing is I use either a giant whiteboard or a blackboard, and I concept map my chapters. I concept map the book. I concept map the introduction over and over and over again, and I take photos of the concept maps that I make, which helps me visualize the narrative structure of the book. I think it's particularly important for the kind of work that I do as an as an intellectual historian, where it's not driven by biographical narrative. It's not driven only by chronology, and in doing so, to be able to write with clarity for a reader so that they can follow the concept through a time, you know, change over time, and so those concept maps. I mean, I do it also with my students as soon as they come back from field work. For first of all, with my graduate students, I ask them to write fieldwork reports, and then I ask them, and then we do lots of concept mapping. It helps me visualize it, and that's the visual that I hold in my head when I'm walking and trying to think through a chapter. But I don't use, you know, citation tools. I don't use other formal tools, which I know can be really, really helpful for many people. But I think it's because I began, particularly my first book, was all handwritten source material, and so because I started from the from the notepad with the pen or pencil, because we were in an archive, those pages were translated into digital material, but I've never done anything except formally organize it myself. I also think that the experience of organizing material is so much a part of the process that I don't want a program to do it for me because I need to do the labor of that work of organizing in the making. It helps me with the writing process.

Kate Carpenter
Is there a point where you think of yourself as starting the writing?

Durba Mitra
Well, as I said, I always write out all of my primary sources, and so not in that way. But I, I think that there is never a moment for me that I feel okay, well, I'm ready to start writing now. So there's never a moment where I'm like I'm done with the research part. Let me turn to the writing part, and because of that, writing out the primary source becomes the first step in writing. And sometimes, for The Future That Was, staging what I imagined to be the beginning of the chapter, where I was, you know, telling a vignette to set the stage for what I was opening up into a set of texts and a set of ideas, was really important for me to begin the process of writing. So part of it was that compilation process of me saying, what material is going through this chapter, what is the most compelling way to enter into these ideas, and then starting from there into the practice of writing. But I'm always writing and find it excruciating until I am writing because I'm finding materials, I don't yet know. I'm living in a world of chaos in terms of the concepts and materials that are around me, the archives. And there's that moment in that chaos where you begin to find some order that you're going to tell that story, and it is an amazing experience.

Kate Carpenter
How about revision? How do you approach the revision process?

Durba Mitra
Oh, I think revision is really essential for me. I write, write, write, and then I revise, and then I revise. And I, I should say, you know, when I was mentioning that I love walking and thinking about the about the work of writing, I like ride a walking to the coffee shop in order to begin writing. I think the experience of feeling like I'm going to work is so important. But the other thing that I love doing on walks is being in dialog with someone. So my favorite thing to do is to walk with someone and talk about how I think the chapter is organized and what the argument is, and the dialogic nature of writing is really essential for me in the revision. So there's a moment that I feel something is betaed, and then I share it with like the treasured, incredible, dear friends and colleagues who are willing to read. And you know, over time, I've had the ability to discern, you know, who are the right readers for what I need at a particular moment. And so, from in that moment, it becomes an editorial process of sharing, getting comments, and revising, and sharing. So, how does it look? It looks like taking very long sentences and making them much much shorter because I tend to be, I am not an like an organized thinker I'm an associative thinker and so how do you take those associative things that are in my mind and play it on the page. I tend to be very dense as a writer and then much of my work of editing is actually lightening and you know creating a marshmallow-like atmosphere for the sentences that are deeply theoretical, deeply conceptual, and then letting them breathe a little bit in the process of writing.

Kate Carpenter
That's really interesting to hear because I was really struck that that The Future That Was, especially, is so smart. I mean, there's there it's so it's so deep intellectually, but so easy to read, you know that it's it's lightness is exactly how I describe it. So it's fascinating to hear that you start with that density and then pull back from there.

Durba Mitra
I will just say I think for the future that was I say this at the end of the book. I wrote that I wrote this book for my students, and I think one of the great pleasures for me as a writer is learning how to love writing as I become a better teacher, and I know that I've become a better writer because I'm a better teacher, or as I get better at being a teacher, because portraying or conveying the the complexity of ideas is so significant, so important to me. So as I said, you know, I found myself as a writer in critical theory, in the work of reading critical theory, and in finding the complexity of ideas. It's like recognizing the way that my brain was thinking about ideas and politics and questions of power in conceptual text, and what I tried to do in The Future That Was was convey those relationships of power and questions of subjection and the paradoxes of what it means to do the kind of work that the feminists who animate the text did. How do I let a reader sit in those paradoxes? And what I tried to do in the writing was use narrative and to use very simple sentences to convey theoretical ideas. That only happened because I revised and revised and revised. Because exactly like you said, it can be, you know, part of it has to do with our traditions and historiographies. I come from a historiography that is very, I mean, as a person who's trained in South Asia and postcolonial studies and feminist studies, all of which are deeply invested in the work of theoretical writing, because theoretical writing requires a practice of slow thinking, of meditating on an idea and thinking about the political and ethical stakes of those ideas, and so part of the work in writing this book has been trying to help my students or my readers eventually slow down and walk through those ideas with me.

Kate Carpenter
I want to talk a little bit about archives because your first book, Indian Sex Life, had a very fragmentary archive that you had to sort of pull together and and fill in gaps, but The Future That Was, on the other hand, like there's too much information, right? It's an archive of of bureaucracy, and so there's tons of paper. How did those archival experiences shape how you wrote the different books?

Durba Mitra
You know, the interesting thing for both of the books is that my first book, in Indian Sex Life, is an archive that starts in the 1830s and goes through the kind of height of British colonialism in India, and because of that, it did have an abundant archive, or I should say, excessive archive, in that there are colonial reports and colonial bureaucratic texts that overwhelm the archive, but the actual archive of women was, as you said, sparse and fragmentary. And is that, those questions of how to read such an archive, the archive of fragments, animated feminist history writing for for a long time. Whether working on histories of enslavement and black feminist approaches to thinking about the history of slavery to people doing subaltern histories around the world, trying to think, how do we write minoritized people into being from archives that are constructed to obscure and disappear those people in the first instance, or objectify them on behalf of the colonial or project of slavery, and so my, in turning to this archive, my goal was— I should say first I went from an archive that was profoundly violent, that was about women who committed botched abortions and unfortunately died as a result of extraordinary social violence, social and political violence that was enacted upon them, who experienced violence from the state in terms of carceral regimes that you know labeled them as prostitutes and then regulated them through regulatory systems that forced them to undergo genital examinations and to be, you know, trafficked on behalf of the state and new state regulations into sexuality. So I thought, if I move forward in time to a time when women took up the project of knowledge production, where the colonial state was not the kind of primary mode of knowledge production about women, but you know, women themselves began to produce knowledge, then I could tell a much happier history. What I found is that some of those colonial modes of knowledge were all were also in the archives or the excessive archives of the post colonial, of UN internationalism, of the rise of you know massive bureaucratic reports written about the status of women. And at first, it was overwhelming for me. So when I began this book, I started with the what became Chapter Two, which is called The Report or Whatever Happened to Third World Feminist Theory, and I began with an archive of status of women reports. And my question was, in some ways, became an epistemological question rather than a content question, so of course I read all of these major status of women reports, which from the 1960s on. The genre of the status of women for different nation states expands very very rapidly and proliferates because of new international mandates that are asking different nation states to produce these reports, and foundations are asking not only nation states but local organizations to produce reports on the status of women. So everyone gets into the game of writing status reports on women. And initially, I thought to myself, "Well, I have no idea how to use these texts because if you look at them, as you said, you know they're often sterile. They're often abundant in material, but actually not really about the lives or the textures of the lives of people. So, you know, one of the things you see from the 1960s on is the rise of population studies and demography. And so, the question is, as a historian, how do you use you know data points and descriptive materials that treat people in terms of population, and how do you write history from such text? I then realized that what I needed to account for was why was this genre proliferating in the first place.

Durba Mitra
So in some ways, the chapter went from being trying to understand, you know, what was the content of such a report to thinking why does such a report in the first place, a report exist in the first place, and what is the history that we can tell about the rise of this genre, and what does that tell us about what it means to write women into being in the later part of the 20th, and so I found myself in those circumstances again and again that the rise of photocopying and the rise of type technologies and the rise of fact technologies, and then eventually email leads to just a massive proliferation of material for people who study the later part of the 20th century, and so we all, I think, have to reckon with what that means for us as history writers. And I think you know, feminist historiography has, by and large, had debates about the question of the archive through those questions of fragments and reading against the grain and the practices of reading, and I think the hope is that this book is, you know, one of many entries that are happening now into thinking about what happens when we enter an archive that is both abundant and the people who we are writing about remain absent in that abundance.

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, I, I mean, I do want to ask you in this question of how do you write a history out of those materials. You know, this book it it's not a narrative history, but the people, the women that you write about, are drawn so beautifully. You know, that they really, they really come to life. They're not two dimensional figures, but that seems challenging from from the sources that were available to you. How do you do that? How do you how do you tell that kind of story?

Durba Mitra
There's so many ways to tell the kind of history that I describe, and so many of the women that I write about do not have any historical account of their lives, except for maybe the memoirs that they have themselves written in the aftermath of being part of major feminist movements. And one of the major challenges this goes back to the question of abundant archives or excessive archives is that while there are archives of excess in terms of the bureaucratic reports or reports on research into women or UN international conferences about what happened at the conference, almost none of the women that I write about have personal archives that are preserved in libraries or archives, and so to get to you know to your question about how do you write about women when the object, for example, each of the chapters of my books are organized around genre, was that, me trying to find as much biographical information as I could, you know. So again, this goes back to the concept mapping. So on one side, I was concept mapping in terms of how my chapters would be chronologically organized, but also conceptually organized to follow a set of ideas, and then I was also mapping the networks of women who I was talking about because there is very little historical scholarship about this period of the 1970s and 80s, except by the women who themselves are recounting their experience of being in feminist movements. Not to mention the fact that this is a book about third world women or women from Africa and Asia and from the Caribbean and women of color in the U.S. Many of whom, as I said, are not accounted for. There's very few histories of of these women written, even though they wrote prolifically themselves. And so, for me, it was a balance between ensuring that I was describing a major concept, like I was mentioning around the report, but then taking the figures who were writing that report and thinking about the paradoxes and challenges that they faced in doing the work of producing that report. So someone like Vina Mazumdar, who's like a force of nature, and if you talk to anyone who knew her, the incredible influence and importance of her in the field of women's studies in India, cannot be overstated. She's just such a significant person in the making of not only Indian feminism but internationalist feminism. So I tried to surround myself with materials, whether it was obituaries or memories about a person who had passed or their own memoirs to get a sense of who they were as I was writing them into texts that was, you know, into chapters that were not just about them. However, I will say I have a dream, not a dream. It's coming into reality. One of the projects that I'm writing on now is actually taking on you know four or five of these women, and writing a YA version of my book, which will follow the lives of you know five of these women as they went on the journey of doing the work of feminist knowledge production. Because as I said, there's so many ways you can tell this story.

Kate Carpenter
I know you you interviewed some of the subjects of the book, as well as people who knew them. How did you think about those oral histories and sort of how they interacted with your other sources? And how, I mean, what was it like to speak with them about their experiences? One thing I'm particularly wondering, not to interrupt my own question, is that it just feels like we're in such different circumstances today, and the possibilities that they imagined then feel in some cases somehow farther away than they did then. What was it like for them to sort of try to place themselves back in that moment?

Durba Mitra
So many of the women who I write about had passed by the time I was writing the book, and I should say the book is was largely written during COVID, and so here's this book about how women traveled the world and went to convenings and conferences and came together across geographies to try to imagine a world that reorganized the world order and allowed women from most of the world to have a voice in the political possibilities of the future, and I was writing in the time of total lockdown, and that knowledge that 40 years ago and 30 years ago, women had this ability to travel in a way that was certainly, you know, on decline in the aftermath of 9/11 because of border regimes and because of new immigration regimes and immigration policing, and then to have that be even more so, writing in the time of the first Trump administration and then now the second time Trump administration, I I could feel a stark difference between the lives that they led and the type of writing that I was doing or the accounting that they were, I was doing in a very different time. So when I was doing the oral histories, many of the oral histories that I did happened on Zoom. So Zoom technology emerged exactly in the moment when I began to do oral histories. I did do Skypes before. I will say Zoom was an easier technology to work with for many of these much much older women, and the one thing I will say from my from my experience as a person who was a 19th century historian and worked on dead people and worked only in text primarily was that I found oral histories to be the genesis of a relationship. That the work of oral history is about creating, in some ways, an intellectual solidarity to create a space for people again who are largely not accounted for, whose histories have not been written, to have the space to tell me their stories. And the interesting thing is that oral histories were not like a primary source necessarily always for me. In that I was quoting extensively from oral historical research in the book, but they were the way that I could understand what was happening on the ground, or who was in relationships with whom, or what networks were emerging, or what conflicts were emerging. Because of those sterile archives, because the archives was you know were you know a population study. None of that can be inflected within those texts, and so the way I could read those texts differently was by having a conversation with someone who was involved in the production of such a text. And I feel so grateful I had the opportunity to do those oral histories because of that. Because I could feel exactly, you said, a sense of mood, a sense of melancholy, or hope, or persistence. You know, these are some of the hardest working people I have ever known. They organized feminists in their 20s. They organized and produced, you know, research on women. They created institutes and centers for the research on the study of women, gender, and sexuality, they built universities, and in their 70s and 80s, they're still doing the work. And so I can, you know, talk, for example, about an oral history that I did with an extraordinary West Indian Black feminist Peggy Antrobus, who was an incredibly important leader for Caribbean feminisms, but also transnational feminisms. Had gone to women's conferences, UN Women's conferences from Mexico City onward. Was the first head of the Jamaican Women's Bureau, and I spoke to her in her early 90s over the course of multiple interviews. In that process, we first worked together to make sure that her archives, her personal papers, were preserved, which are now held at the Princeton University Library Archives. Second, we talked extensively about her work, and as I said, it's a relationship. So when I I just, you know, when the book was published, I was able to send her a copy of the book this year, and I think of the work as a dialog with those people.

Kate Carpenter
I'm curious about the way that you organized this book, which I quite liked. It's organized, for those who haven't read it, by maybe sort of like sites or genres of the production of knowledge and the intellectual work, so you mentioned there's a chapter on the report earlier. There's the conference, the organization, the book, the protest. How did you settle on that organizational structure?

Durba Mitra
The joy of writing a second book was I could avoid some of the pitfalls when I was writing my first book, which is that I had so many materials and I had no idea how to organize it. For this book, I had taught multiple versions of a course on global feminisms, where I was organizing the material differently every time I taught. And over the course of teaching that class, I came to realize that the story I wanted to tell was a kind of setting the stage story. What was it that was happening in the second half of the 20th century, that allowed for the explosion of international feminist thinking and writing, and that created new genres and forms where women kind of explosively began to write in in a way that had never happened before in human history. Like the 1980s and the rise of feminist publishing created a platform for the possibility of women writers in every form and every genre in a way that just never existed because literacy was largely not available to most of the world's women until that moment. And so, how do we account as historians for the explosion of that world of ideas? And for me, it became about accounting for the things that I saw happening in the in the second half of the 20th century. So the first chapter on the rise of the conference to do with the proliferation of women's conference. So there are women's conferences from the early 20th century, and as other historians, wonderful historians like Stephen Legg, among others, have argued, the rise of international conferences, the conference becomes such a critical genre for the new domain of internationalism, of UN internationalism, League internationalism from the early 20th century. And so women begin to take up that project. And so from the 1940s, particularly from the 1950s on, we see a massive expansion of transnational conferences. Women are coming together across Asia, Asia and Africa, and beyond. And by the 70s and 80s, particularly with the UN Year of Women or the International Women's Year in 1975, and the decade between 1975 and 1985, there's not just the main conferences for the UN decade, which happened at Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi, but there were, it was literally a massive proliferation of conferences around those those main UN conferences that were planning conferences and research conferences and conferences in protest, and so I wanted to be able to explain how we see the rise of this form, and over the course of writing the book, I found myself doing the same again and again in genres and form. So the third chapter, which is on the rise of the women's organization, is basically in some ways answering or not answering, but asking a simple question, which is, how do we see the rapid expansion of nonprofit or non-governmental organizations that transformed civil society as we understand it? Because they really began to moderate and shape civil society as we know it, particularly by the 1990s through NGOs, through nonprofit, shaping how welfare was distributed to people, how states related to communities that were increasingly gaining access to democratic citizenship or being denied access to democratic citizenship, and so I follow that organizational form. I mentioned feminist publishing, which is the subject of my fourth chapter, which I call The Book, but it's really about the rise of feminist publishing in every form and genre, and then the fifth chapter is the one that I struggled with the most because my book is a history of knowledge production and it is a history of feminist writing and thinking. I didn't quite know how to fit in the work of social movements and political movements, where the action wasn't, you know, a text. It wasn't the publication of a book, or it wasn't necessarily the first, the first thing when we think about when we think about a feminist protest is not necessarily the project of writing and research. And what I knew though was that when we think about the protests against rape in India in the early 1980s, and protests against draconian family laws in places like Algeria and in Pakistan, that there was massive research production around those protests.

Durba Mitra
That the protest was a key catalyst for research, and that the work of research or finding out what was happening with women was a key catalyst for protest, and so a genre that you don't necessarily think would be part of a genre, or thinking about like what genres and forms are emerging. Yeah, the conference, yes, the report, yes, the organization, sure, but the protest maybe doesn't seem like it would fit, but it is actually one of the most essential sites of feminist knowledge production, and that was kind of the key argument that shaped that chapter.

Kate Carpenter
I mentioned to you ahead of this that I found these women's work and and their stories moving, sort of astounding. Just I mean, the possibilities that they imagined and the work that they were doing to to try to bring these ideas about so remarkable and and radical, truly. And then I started to also get so frustrated reading, not because of your book, but because knowing the attacks on women's and gender and sexuality studies in our country now and and across the world for that matter, and that these are subjects under attack from the highest levels. What does it mean to you to be doing feminist history now?

Durba Mitra
You know, it is exactly 40 years since the publication of Joan Wallach Scott's Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis. And I think your question is really critical, which is, what does it mean to do gender history, women, gender, and feminist history in the time of gender ideology, and in Joan Scott's essay, she begins with this line, and this is the first line of the essay: "Those who would codify the meaning of words fight a losing battle, for words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history." And when she says those who codify the meaning of words, you know, I was thinking about that battle over the fixity of the category and how gender is critical to a battle over fixity right now in the world that we live, and how much the authoritarian project of delimiting the meaning of words, how much the forced imposition of binary sex right now, the legally sanctioned ideas of man and woman, have reached new levels of institutional and power under the second Trump administration that never existed before, at least in law, to the extent that it had. That analogy of a battle, a fixity, of a conflict being waged is something that I think is profound for us to think about in terms of the work of of history writing. You know, when I started thinking about that first question you asked me, tell me about the journey of what it means to be a writer. As I mentioned, to me, the work of history writing is a work of political imagination, and I mean that in both the most positive sense and in its negative connotations. And right now, I think we live in a world of a battle over the work of fixity around history writing, and I cannot think of anything more important than doing feminist history now, because, because of that, because of the contention, because gender has been demonized as an idea, because gender, when you Google it, you know that Google will make the suggestion of ideology after you put gender into that into a Google, you know, search like that. To me, the fact that gender has been attached to the category of ideology in this, you know, right-wing attempt to essentially create the fixity of binary gender and to take away the possibility of conducting research into the pluralities and the multiple possibilities of what gender allows us to reimagine in terms of structures of power, that tells me what we should be doing as historian that the work of feminist history now is more important than ever, and one of the things that I find most striking is I think fewer and fewer people are being trained in the domain of gender history. So you know when we tell the story of, particularly in the U.S. academy, of gender history in the rise of I, you know, we use words like cultural history, and though even though I would say it's always been political and social and economic history as well. You know the heyday supposedly of gender history happens after the publication of Scott's essay. You know the 1990s, where we see a proliferation of texts about women's history, about the history of gender as a conceptual category, and there are rich and amazing histories happening now related to thinking about cisgender as a complex imposition of ideas in the 19th and 20th century, of trans history as a site of imagining traversal and dissent across minoritized peoples over many many centuries. So I think there's there's extensive and important work in history writing that's happening now. But it is, the institutional resources that are available are fewer and fewer. That has to do with the shutting down, of course, of women and gender studies departments and programs. That also has to do with the defunding of these ideas under new strictures related to DEI and gender ideology that are being passed by state legislatures that target state institutions, but private institutions, private universities and colleges have followed suit even without being mandatorily required to by federal law and or state law. And the attacks on DEI, I think, have some of the most significant ramifications or consequences for the work of doing feminist scholarship and or feminist queer and trans scholarship.

Durba Mitra
And I feel that there is, sometimes I look around and I think there is a crisis happening around us that I cannot think of anything more important right now than the work of doing feminist history, and yet the resources and material support to do so, whether we're talking about the NEH or private research money, it's less available than ever. And so that's, you know, who is training people in gender history? How many of the top history departments, as we know in terms of history PhDs, there's, you know, a number of history departments that have that place our PhDs into the professorate. It how many of them have a robust field of research in gender history? You know, it's far less than it was even a few years ago, and that has to do with a turn away from, or the idea that maybe we thought that we were done with gender history, certain that we're not. There is, I can't think of anything more contentious, that, I'm thinking about the work of a feminist theorist, extraordinary feminist scholar Robyn Wiegman, who powerfully diagnosed the present that we live in by saying, "Something is happening now to gender as an object of desire. Everyone wants something from it, even those who want to abolish it. But its definition, its political purchase, its historical resonances have become the scene of an enormous political fight." So I think the question for historians is how are we going to engage in that political fight? And I will just say, at the, to end this kind of rant, I believe that we engage that political fight by reclaiming the category of gender. We should be writing more and more gender history. We should be training more students in it because, to me, it's more critical than ever. We need to say that this category is a conceptual category that promised proliferative possibility, not ideological imposition.

Kate Carpenter
I want to shift gears a little, although perhaps less than it seems, if we're talking about sort of the forces that affect our work. I know you were writing this book while you were caregiving for your mother, and that kind of dual role, dual responsibility is something I think a lot of people can relate to in different forms. How did you do both of those things at the same time?

Durba Mitra
I think— so my mom had this massive catastrophic health event happen, and I both had the privilege and responsibility to take care of her after she was hospitalized multiple times. And what I found was, you know, you ask the question of, you know, what my routine is for writing, and what I found was, of course, there was no way to have a routine in writing when someone is hospitalized. And the the thing about caregiving and doing reproductive labor and doing unpaid care labor because that's so much of what so many minoritized and feminized subjects do. So many of us as women do. What I found was, I used to have a relationship to writing that was, one that was painful. Like I would punish myself for not doing it in time. I would feel shame if I had procrastinated and not started the work of writing, and I think that this is something I see in a lot of my students and a lot of women of color around me. The feeling of guilt around the experience of writing. And with my mom because she was hospitalized, because I was in these contexts where there was actually a lot of times when there was nothing for me to do except sit with her while she was resting or undergoing, you know, various procedures. There was nothing for me to do except wait, and so that duration of time suddenly I found myself using writing as a kind of therapeutic practice. Now, mind you, I was writing about women largely, maybe one generation before my mom, and women like my mom, and so I was channeling a lot of the affective experience of my deep compassion for my mother and the incredible hardships that she faced, which is why she has such major medical issues, and how those hardships, how I could reflect the feeling of those hardships and those challenges in the type of writing that I was doing about other women from a different generation who also faced the hardship of caregiving and being mothers and trying to be researchers and trying to be knowledge producers when no one would allow them to be so. So I guess I changed my relationship from, you know, the relationship to writing of one where writing was something that I found to be difficult to do, that I questioned myself, that I felt insecure about, that I, as I said, felt shame when I didn't do it on time, or that I wasn't doing it correctly, and I started to use it as a practice of having something that was my own in a time when very little was my own because I was a caregiver for someone else, and I think that that has transformed my relationship to writing overall. That writing is not an escape. Writing is a practice that has allowed me some refuge from the incredible pain and difficulty of everyday banal caregiving of watching someone else suffer. And one of the great joys for me is, luckily, I had my mother survive her catastrophic health event. She's still not well necessarily, but the fact that I was then able to give her a book, which had my name, which is dedicated to her and women like her, is something that I will always be grateful for, because for me, writing was not only a refuge, but then it could be an object and a gift, you know, a gift, and it is a gift. And as a teacher and advisor, and now as a person who likes the promise of writing, my hope is to help people, particularly those of us who treat writing as an experience of something to be insecure about, to be concerned, you know that, or ashamed of that, I can change those relationships in having conversations with people about taking away those negative affective experiences of writing, and allowing writing to be a place where you get to be with yourself for just a moment, even when the world demands so much around you.

Kate Carpenter
How do you advise students to do that?

Durba Mitra
You know, it's easy to say, harder to do. I think I will just say, for me, particularly for my students, students who are women of color, women students in general, they did once love writing, and something in the process of education, in in the work of pursuing the promise of the PhD so hard, it became more and more painful for them, just the same way it had become for me. And so, part of what I try to do with students is offer them lower stakes ways of doing the work, which is, you know, like I said, when you write that archive report for me, that's just your opportunity to sit with the stuff. Tell me what you see. What are you imagining when you're seeing it? When I'm at a whiteboard and mapping with a, you know, doing a concept map of the chapter, all we're doing is blurting out ideas and just throwing those ideas on the board. So I try to become, I guess I would say, promiscuous in the way that we're talking about about the ideas, so that the work is not just that you owe me a draft, I have a draft, and then I'm going to offer offer you critique on that draft, and you get that draft back. And so, if you allow the ideas to be a walk and a dialog, and to be a map on the wall, and to be a song that you're listening to over and over again. Suddenly, the ideas get to live with you, rather than they are something that is due at a certain time and are subject to scrutiny and negative, you know, critique. I think that's part of it. Is that like we have to treat these ideas as places that we get to live, rather than as something that is required of us, and so therefore we have a non-consensual relationship to them. My goal in general is to create an experience not only of consent but of joy around the possibility of writing. It's easier said than done. But I do think that we start to have a punishing relationship to writing when because we don't do enough joyous things around it.

Kate Carpenter
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Durba Mitra
You know, I was thinking about. I love listening to your podcast because I love listening to people talk about process. My favorite thing to do is to listen to you know old Terry Gross interviews with people with movie directors and producers who are talking about the work of trying to imagine a project. I love dialogs with people talking about their process, and one of the things that I found most striking is I realized I don't know how much writing advice I've ever received in my my life, and I would say some of that to do with the idea that I think women of color are not treated as writers. You know, I don't know if I was often treated as another person who was a writer alongside another writer, and so I would get advice about the type of ideas that I was supposed to convey, but about writing, I don't know how much I received advice. But I love reading Toni Morrison on writing. You know, Toni Morrison says a lot about writing. So in some ways, I seek out advice about writing, and I seek out advice from from people who I know have done the hard work of writing while living complicated and difficult lives, and so what's the best advice that I've received? I think that doing the hard work and sitting down and doing it, but that's not advice that someone formally gave me. That's the advice that I've convey, I've experienced in in reading about other people's experience of writing.

Kate Carpenter
Who do you recommend? Are there people that you read for inspiration that you recommend to others?

Durba Mitra
There's so many people that I read. I will just say, recently I was reading Barbara Ransby, amazing Black feminist historian biographer, and I was rereading her biography of Ella Baker, who I just, a book that I just recommended to a colleague of mine, which was republished in a second edition in I think 2024, but I think it was originally published in the early 2003. And the reason that I recommended Barbara Ransby is the way that she talked about the work of history writing and what it meant to be a historian who loved the person, who loved and admired the historical subject that she was writing about. That the work of biography, as she was, just as she describes it in the introduction to the Ella Baker book, that the work of biography is not to force a person's life into the picture or the image that we need it to be, but to allow yourself to be in their world and imagine the promises, possibilities, and limits were part of that world. And one of the things she says in that introduction is, "I will not apologize for admiring Ella Baker. She was extraordinary." Does that make me write a hagiography? No, but it allows me to explore the life of a person who was both extraordinary and often forgotten from history. And I love the way that she talks about admiration as method of history writing. And I think about that for the book that I've just written, you know, admiration, frustration, critical rejection, the emotional experience of what it means to emerge and to immerse ourselves. Sorry, in these archives is so profound to me, and I love the idea that historical method, yes, is about the types of ways that we read a text, or the types of materials we put together, or the archives that we engage with, but historical method is also being about the mood that shaped a moment, the affect that made a world possible, the promises of a dream, the feeling that can be conveyed in the work of history writing, which is, I think, the unique joy of being a historian.

Kate Carpenter
Well, that feels like a pretty good note to end on. So, Dr. Durba Mitra, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for talking about your writing and your research process.

Durba Mitra
Thank you so much for having me. I cannot tell you how much I love listening to process, so I just look forward to continuing to learn about the work of history writing from your work.

Kate Carpenter
Thanks again to Dr. Durba Mitra for joining me for this episode of the Drafting the Past podcast. You'll find links to her books in the show notes, where you can also sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter. As a free subscriber, you'll get our book reviews straight to your inbox. And if you like what we're doing and want to help us continue to tell people about great history writing? Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Until next time, friends don't let friends write boring history.