Michelle Fine

"The challenge, then, is not to invent new victims or new scapegoats but to mobilize America for the future. What would it take to ensure that all of us can succeed at getting the job done, the problem solved, and the future more secure?" As a student at Yale Law School in 1974, Lani Guinier attended a class with a white male professor who addressed all the students, male and female, as "gentlemen." To him the greeting was a form of honorific, evoking the values of traditional legal education. To her it was profoundly alienating. Years later Guinier began a study of female law students with her colleagues, Michelle Fine and Jane Balin, to try to understand the frustrations of women law students in male-dominated schools. Women are now entering law schools in large numbers, but too often many still do not feel welcome. As one says, "I used to be very driven, competitive. Then I started to realize that all my effort was getting me nowhere. I just stopped caring. I am scarred forever." After interviewing hundreds of women with similar stories, the authors conclude that conventional one-size-fits-all approaches to legal education discourage many women who could otherwise succeed and, even more, fail to help all students realize their full potential as legal problem-solvers. In Becoming Gentlemen Guinier, Fine, and Balin dare us to question what it means to become qualified, what a fair goal in education might be, and what we can learn from the experience of women law students about teaching and evaluating students in general. Including the authors' original study and two essays and a personal afterword by Lani Guinier, the book challenges us to work toward a more just society, based on ideals of cooperation, the resources of diversity, and the values of teamwork.

Disruptive Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research charts the beginnings of a creative solution to emerging and hotly contested issues in feminist scholarship and feminist philosophy of science. In a range of powerful essays including “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” “Coping with Rape,” and “Beyond Pedestals: Revisiting the Lives of Women with Disabilities,” Michelle Fine probes the politics of research methods such as interviews and ethnography and examines issues such as the relationship between researchers and their subjects, the intimacies and betrayals of data collection, the politics of interpretation, and the serious dilemmas of public representation of research results. Moving beyond the feminist critique of traditional scientific method and epistemology, Fine identifies new research methods that, while still empirical, have the potential to disrupt and transform conventional practices. In drawing these alternative methodologies from the actual experiences of women’s lives, Fine imagines “what could be” for girls and women across lines of race, class, sexualities, and disabilities. As an introduction to the kinds of methodological, theoretical, and political possibilities that can be opened up by feminist scholarship, Disruptive Voices will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students across the disciplines.

Women with disabilities are women first, sharing the dreams and disappointments common to women in a male-dominated society. But because society persists in viewing disability as an emblem of passivity and incompetence, disabled women occupy a devalued status in the social hierarchy. This book represents the intersection of the feminist and disability rights perspectives; it analyzes the forces that push disabled women towards the margins of social life, and it considers the resources that enable these women to resist the stereotype. Drawing on law, social science, folklore, literature, psychoanalytic theory, and political activism, this book describes the experience of women with disabilities. The essays consider the impact of social class, race, the age at which disability occurs, and sexual orientation on the disabled woman's self esteem as well as on her life options. The contributors focus their inquiry on the self perceptions of disabled women and ask: From what sources do these women draw positive self images? How do they resist the culture's power to label them as deviant? The essays describe the ways in which disabled women face discrimination in the workplace and the failure of the mainstream women's movement to address their concerns. In the series Health, Society, and Policy, edited by Sheryl Ruzek and Irving Kenneth Zola.