Katie King
Short Biographical Description with Publications
Women's Studies Department and Program
University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742
office tel. 301.405.7294; fax 301.314.9190
email: katking@umd.edu
home page: www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/

Swept up into the passions of interdisciplinary engagements by stirring mentors from my undergraduate and graduate days, I have gratefully emulated them by investing my professional commitments in the creation of new interdisciplinary formations. Between 1975 and 1987 I prepared for two interdisciplinary degrees in three interdisciplinary programs (B.A. 1975 Literature & Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz; graduate work 1975-1978 with the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; Ph.D. 1987, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz). The trajectory begun in my undergraduate years when I took some of the very first Women's Studies courses offered in the U.S., and which continued through my graduate career teaching and assisting in such courses and writing my dissertation in feminist theory ("Canons Without Innocence: Academic Practices and Feminist Practices Making the Poem in the Work of Emily Dickinson and Audre Lorde"; director: Donna Haraway), led in 1986 to an offer of a tenure-track faculty appointment entirely in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. College Park has one of the oldest Women's Studies programs in the country (now a department) and today is one of a handful of programs offering a Ph.D. in Women's Studies. 1988-1990 I participated in a post-doctoral Mellon Fellowship in Women's Studies at Cornell University.

Women's Studies, specifically Feminist Theory, is one of the three interdisciplinary formations in which I work. My earliest publications were in Lesbian and Gay Studies. My first summer as an assistant professor at UMCP (1988) a Graduate Research Board summer grant allowed me to work on an article ("Audre Lorde's Lacquered Layerings") which has since been reprinted twice. Since 1993 a team of people has worked to create a certificate in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at UMCP; I taught our first introductory course to the field in 1994. Along with Women's Studies and LGBT Studies, the third interdisciplinary formation in which I work is the one I call "Feminism and Writing Technologies." It combines feminist analysis of technosciences, historical and cross-cultural studies on orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the study of cybercultures or new media. My courses in this area, 1986 UCSC, 1988 Cornell, and since 1990 UMCP, were among the earliest in the country dealing with the "new technologies," and are still among the very few that put these new technologies into historical and cross-cultural perspective. At each stage in my career (graduate student, assistant professor, associate professor) I have received teaching awards or fellowships.

My first book-Theory in Its Feminist Travels (1994)-drew upon on all three interdisciplinary formations, as will my current book An Introduction to Feminism and Writing Technologies. During the Mellon Fellowship period I had at Cornell I wrote the writing technologies chapter in my first book, from which this new book developed. In the summer of 1994, in an Institute on "The Graphic Revolution in Early Modern Europe" at the Folger Library, I conceptualized my historical case study on seventeenth century Quaker women and gendered histories of print culture and of sexuality. Fall 1995 I had the opportunity to follow up that work at the Huntington Library and to converse with scholars concerned with feminist epistemology and technosciences and with the history of the book at the University of California Humanities Research Institute at Irvine. Summer 1997 I was able to continue my case study on global television and circulations and receptions of sexual images while participating in the Curriculum Transformation Project / Women's Studies Summer Institute, "Thinking About Women and Gender in Contemporary International Contexts." That resulted in a chapter for a 2002 book on feminists teaching about globalization processes, Encompassing Gender. And I began putting together a research web site on writing technologies while a fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, UMCP, Spring 2000. Because of what I have learned from engaging in interdisciplinary training and scholarship I strongly believe we need new intellectual and educational institutionalizations that foster our apprehension of the urgent connections (rather than divisions) among the natural and social sciences and the humanities, and that we need feminist analysis to do this wisely. To be educated and to educate others to learn comparisons, social and historic, that illuminate what sorts of powers are shifting, embodied in the technologies of arts, science and culture altering before us, requires the kind of intellectual accountability that feminism and feminist theory at its best offers us.

Publications:

Book:
Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women's Movements. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994

Essays:
"Women in the Web: teaching technology narratives." Chapter in The Informatics of Resistance. Edited by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills. Forthcoming, Alt-X, 2003.

"Globalization, TV Technologies, and the Re-production of Sexual Identities: Researching and Teaching Layers of Locals and Globals in Highlander and Xena." Chapter in Encompassing Gender: Integrating International Studies and Women's Studies. Edited by Mary M. Lay, Janice Monk, and Deborah S. Rosenfelt. The Feminist Press, 2002.

"'There are No Lesbians Here': Feminisms, Lesbianisms and Global Gay Formations." Chapter in Queer Globalization/Local Homosexualities: Citizenship, Sexualities and the Afterlife of Colonialism. Edited by Analdo Cruz-Malave and Martin Manalansen IV. SUNY, 2002.

"Productive agencies of feminist theory: the work it does." Feminist Theory 2/1 (2001): 94-98

"Global Gay Formations and Local Homosexualities." Chapter in Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Edited by Sangeeta Ray. Blackwell, 2000.

"Local and Global: AIDS Activism and Feminist Theory." Chapter in Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice. Edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner. University of Illinois Press, 1995

"Feminism and Writing Technologies: Teaching Queerish Travels through Maps, Territories, and Pattern." Configurations 2 (Winter 1994): 89-106

"Producing Sex, Theory and Culture: Gay/Straight ReMappings in Contemporary Feminism." Chapter in Conflicts in Feminism. Edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. Routledge, 1990

"Local and Global: AIDS Activism and Feminist Theory." In Imaging Technologies, Inscribing Science. Special issue of camera obscura 28 (January 1992): 78-99

"Audre Lorde's Lacquered Layerings: The Lesbian Bar as a Site of Literary Production." Chapter in New Lesbian Criticism. Edited by Sally Munt. Simon & Schuster, 1992. Reprinted in Feminist Cultural Studies. Edited by Terry Lovell. Edward Elgar, 1997

"Bibliography and a Feminist Apparatus of Literary Production." TEXT 5: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship (1991): 91-103

"Audre Lorde's Lacquered Layerings: The Lesbian Bar as a Site of Literary Production." Cultural Studies 2 (October 1988): 321-342

"The Situation of Lesbianism as Feminism's Magical Sign: Contests for Meaning and the U.S. Women's Movement, 1968-1972." In Feminist Critiques of Popular Culture. Special issue of Communication 9 (Fall 1985): 65-91
Katie King / Career Narrative and Publications 3