Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
33. (nesbitt & thomas--"beyond feminism: an intercultural challenge for transforming the academy"): "authentic collaboration is 'chronologically messy'; mutual respect and trust must develop before the fruits of collaboration can be harvested for publication. requisite openness by the partner with a greater stake in the dominant paradigm is needed for her to radically question how she constructs her assumptions and conclusions. while transformative, this can wreak havoc on a tight research schedule."
37. collaborators originate in different places & bring these places with them, always; "doing collaborative research is likely to be more costly to the woman of color than the white woman. but, the woman of color has the advantage of knowing subjectively and emotively about categories of knowing and meaning from her experience of being marginalized. this is critical information for those interested in transforming the academy"
39. "part of any collaboration involves doing one's own work. in my case and in that of my european american colleagues, it involves doing my 'white' work. naming this represents an embarrassment, a recognition that what i've percieved as scholarship in general is in fact a very particular perspective through the lens of racial dominance"
41. "it is important to understand what the dominant system establishes as authoritative. as a black woman living in the united states, i must understand the structures of the dominant culture and decide what expectations i will fulfill and which ones i will not....there are times when i must take my own authority and move out into the deep."
66. (singley & sweeny--"in league with each other: the theory and practice of feminist collaboration") term/title from a previous work they co-edited: "anxious power" = "both the ambivalence women feel about claiming their rights to language and the ways in which they express this ambivalence through their work....[since] throughout history, women have been discouraged from expressing themselves in written discourse" and, when they did it anyway, "reviled by others or [led to] judge [themselves] as either coldly masculine or uncontrollably hysterical"
71. van pelt & gillam "identify four kinds of conversation in collaborative composition: procedural talk, substantive talk, talk about the writing process, and social talk. we find that we engage in all four modes, shifting easily and instinctively from one to the other. we now conceive of the writer not as an isolated figure in a garret but as two people--each holding a telephone receiver to her ear."
73. "we switch back and forth easily between the roles of dictator and recorder. when one of us comes up with a good idea or an effectively worded phrase, the other instinctively writes it down. we discover or invent meaning in the process of negotiating"; "so far we have described the collaborative process as if it involves relatively little conflict. that is not the case. indeed, conflict is an important, volatile, but often ignored issue in feminist interaction in general. collaborators must face differences in moods, methods, schedules, and energies....[they] may also find that assumptions about women and competition--which many women internalize--make feminist collaboration even more difficult. as adrienne rich puts it:
'women have always lied to each other.'
'women have always been in secret collusion.'
both of these axioms are true. ('women' 189)
74. "these essentialist notions....ignore women's actual differences as well as their ability to overcome them. indeed, they say more about a hostile patriarchal climate than about women"; helena michie...coins the term sororaphobia to describe the ambivalence, even hostility, that women may feel toward their literal and figurative sisters."
174-5. (leiby & henson--"common ground, difficult terrain: confronting difference through feminist collaboration") "the 'common ground' of feminist collaboration--with its 'distinctive pleasure'--exists simultaneously with feminist collisions; common ground is also difficult terrain." back when women in the academy were fewer & so female collaborators "thus were more isolated," "their 'pleasure' of collaboration came, in part, from the greater sense of security and belonging it afforded them"--in today's academy the external pressures are different & so have different effects on collaborations.
179. "in the academy, collaborative ground is not merely difficult terrain, but virtually uninhabitable....does the academy see those who collaborate as 'collaborationists,' enemies of the academy itself? it is clear to use that this resistance to collaboration is also resistance to a pedagogy of and for difference"
181. students' & evaluators' read on classroom appropriateness & authority for these women as coteachers revealed prejudices & distorted impressions left by expectations--the lesbian in the duo was critiqued for spending too much time talking about "women's issues" when most of this content had actually been led by the other member.
220-1. (o'meara & mackenzie--"reflections on scholarly collaboration") "collaborating scholars not only share the research, writing, and meaning-making processes but also serve as an audience for each other; when one is collaborating there is always at least one other person who is willing and interested in reading and talking about one's work. collaborating...doesn't make outside readers unnecessary, however. we found that after producing a text we sometimes lacked the necessary distance and objectivity to evaluate its clarity and emphasis, in much the same way as we did when we wrote single-authored texts" (although or maybe and other pairs have reported feeling less possessive of & so more flexible regarding proposed changes to collaboratively-authored texts).

249. (karls & weedman) & this one's just for mommy: "we share an office smaller than most federal prison cells, and with less light, located in the basement--excuse us--the 'lower level' of the fine arts building on our campus."