Our Journal, and all the words that describe us
The cover photo is from Gender Journal’s 7th volume, published in 1992.
Image Description: Three feminine faces overlap one another. The face at the top left looks to the left, the face in the middle is turned halfway to the viewer, and the face at the bottom right looks directly out from the page.
“Why is it important not to forget the principles that the Journal has attempted to portray over the years? Perhaps it is because the emphasis on rationality, elevated above all else in traditional legal education, trains students away from compassion. And it is compassion – for those less fortunate or less free – that shapes a lawyer’s reasoning into an act of justice and mercy.” - Reflections on the Birth of the Journal: A Founders’ Roundtable Discussion, 20 Berkeley J. Gender L. & Just. 12 (2005).
Let me begin by introduction; I am a law student and member of the Editorial Board for the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice. I am transgender, nonbinary, disabled, and white; these identities have led much of my commitment to Gender Journal, as our membership colloquially calls the publication. Gender Journal drew me in with an ideal of being what much of law school is not: a caring and compassionate community, cognizant of our position in the legal ecosystem, of our power to choose the articles that become printed history.
As ecosystems do, the law has shifted and swayed since our founding in 1984, and so the Journal has too. I turned to our history - leafing through pages of decades of publications, talking with founders and former members – hoping to inform the Journal, now, of all we have been and could become. I revealed a past that embraced poetry, that called out the devaluation of non-patriarchal scholarship, and that centered marginalized subjects, authors, and members all along the way. Here, I share my findings and investigate the evolution of our Journal alongside the legal field.
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From the start, the Journal invested in flattening the hierarchies of law school, providing a space not just for literature, but also for lived experience. Today, we publish articles by group consensus, engaging our entire membership in the review process and voting democratically on each piece. While much else has changed, this is one thing about Gender Journal that remains constant: a critical valuing of every voice, a vision instilled by our founders. While that vision perseveres, a look into our past reveals that the way we talk about our vision has always been in flux. Digging into the origins of our Journal revealed respectful debates on the language we use to represent ourselves, consistently modifying our name and mandate to attend to questions like “Who is a woman?”, “What is gender?”, or “Is the law also justice?”. And each time the Journal shifted in perspective or identity, the passage of time ensured that language soon came to mean something else, and must be questioned, and shift, again.
The Women’s Center at Boalt Hall hosted the first volume of Gender Journal, then called the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, published in 1985. At the time, our founders endeavored "To give voice to the complex and varying perspectives reflecting the legal concerns of all women, especially the women of color, lesbians, disabled women and poor women whose voices have been severely underrepresented in existing literature." Legal language representing diverse women was in short supply then, four years shy of Kimberlè Crenshaw’s article Demarginalizing the Intersection, which catapulted “intersectionality” into the lexicon.
Though our founders lacked the language of the “intersection,” where overlapping legal identities challenge essentialized and monolithic identity groupings, the vision advanced in those interceding years carried a similar implication. The Journal was published each year to give voice to the women who, because of multiple marginalization, were not otherwise heard. “Intersection” first entered our publication in 1991, the same year that Crenshaw’s second article on the subject, Mapping the Margins, appeared. That year, the Journal hosted a symposium on issues “at the intersection” of race and gender, focusing on the experiences of Black women in the law. It wasn’t until our 11th volume, in 1996, that our mandate came to encompass this language as well That year, our present mandate first appeared in print: to publish feminist legal scholarship at “the intersection of gender with one or more other axes of subordination including, but not limited to race, class, sexual orientation, and disability.” In her note From The Editor that year, Laura Nielsen provides some explanation for the shift:
“[W]e thought it important that the mandate reflect the reality of changing social conditions… the membership wanted our publication mandate to read expansively rather than narrowly in defining what we mean by ‘underrepresented.’”
The Journal eventually made other changes, too. In Volume 20 (2005), the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal became the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice – our Gender Journal. The choice was publicized as attending to our founding purpose of “giving voice to the lives and struggles of underrepresented women” while also inviting an interrogation of gender assumptions beyond womanhood. The cover of our publication ceased to feature the faces of women and became instead, continual to now, minimalized text from the mandate, “intersection” central to the page.
Few changes to our Journal identity have come since Volume 20, though it was nearly half the Journal’s lifetime ago. Of course, our membership changes every year, and each new iteration brings new ideas of what our mandate means. And the world around us also shifts; conflicts over critical race theory have thrust “intersection” into the political lexicon, often far removed from the legal theory from which it spawned.
So what did my peek into the archives tell me? As a Journal, we care about listening to each voice, about consensus. My voice is only one, and though I cannot say whether we meet our mandate, or whether we fulfill the purpose at our origins, I can share the knowledge I have of that purpose and of those origins. In a married post, I look to the writing of Crenshaw and her subsequent comments on “intersectionality,” in hopes to begin filling the gap in meaning that our Journal reckons with each week. As we decide what to publish, and consider why, it is not just about remembering our purpose, but about coming to know that purpose more fully. In exchange for our power – to publish, to decide, to hold space for, to care – it is our responsibility to be informed.