Living West As Feminists

Krista Comer is a professor of English at Rice University and director of the Institute for Women Surfers. She is the author of Surfer Girls in the New World Order and Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing.

"An introspective memoir full of love and meditation."-Kirkus Reviews "The power of this collection of wide-ranging conversations is in the storytelling. These women's responses reflect disparate walks of life, disparate ethnic and family her-stories. Yet the places that carry the most emotional freight with them all lie within a West we recognize and that calls to us."-Susan Cummins Miller, Roundup Magazine “This book is an innovative and forward-thinking project that pushes us to reimagine what a committed feminist book on the American West might look like in our current moment. It includes lively and informative interviews that emerged from insightful questions.”-Susan Kollin, author of Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West “Living West as Feminists is a book filled with illumination, inspiration, and intimacy. Each of Krista Comer’s in situ conversations casts a thoughtful and nuanced light on complex subject matter, cumulatively granting access to an enlarged (and still-growing) portrait of seriously engaged academic and personal investigations into the relationships between place, history, identity, and some movements (again both personal and collective) toward forms of restorative justice. A highly recommended text for academics and non-academics alike.”-Elizabeth Rosner, author of Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening “How many ways can we answer the question, ‘What is the where of here?’ For Comer and her contributors the question takes us to many worlds, many intricate and dense connections, to relations that trouble settler assumptions and open paths toward reparations, toward an ethic that attends to the care of where. This beautiful, intimate set of reflective conversations offers stories of feminist struggle, of gardens, and of hikes and friendships between surfers. It’s a joy to read and a promise that another world is possible.”-Mary Pat Brady, author of Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child “In Living West as Feminists Krista Comer leads readers on a road trip through the politics of place, engaging in a series of conversations with scholars, educators, activists, and feminists about the U.S. West, a region that is not only geographically vast but also a contested space and a contested term. As a passenger on this journey, I found myself thinking through Comer’s questions about how we live in specific places-and especially how we pay attention to the ways we live on specific lands. They feel like a challenge as well as an invitation: How can coalitional feminism inform our relations to place? How does rootedness in place call us to be in coalition with others and with land and home? These questions, and the ensuing conversations, will stay with me for a long, long time.”-Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings: Essays on Justice for the Twenty-First Century

• List of IllustrationsThe InvitationFeminist Road-Tripping and Other IntroductionsThe Blog Launches UsPart 1: Summer 2021The Relations Holding Us, with Priscilla Solis YbarraQuerencia across Generations, with Elena ValdezRemaking the Heart of AztlÁn, with Melina VizcaÍno-AlemÁnFeminist Homing and Unhoming, with Amy HamiltonRoad Finds: On Keeping CompanyOutside the Picture Window in Pueblo, with Krista ComerDeciding to Remember the Many Strands of Home, with Linda KarellLunch, with Clark WhitehornFor Me, the West Is Rural, with Randi TanglenRoad Finds: What Lingers in the AirFinding Community through Transcription, with Zainab Abdali (Guest Post)A Rendezvous, with Melody GraulichA Fighting Zapotec Feminism, with Lourdes “Lulu” AlbertoColville Women, Always in Charge, with Dina Gilio-WhitakerRoad Finds: Slowing Down for HomeRetracing the Western Black Family in Whitehouse, Texas, with Kalenda EatonPart 2: Summer 2022Launching in the Time of Family, with Krista ComerThe Archives of Gardens, with Audrey GoodmanThe Both/And, with Susan BernardinRoad Finds: Falling RocksReturning to Pueblo as Myself, with Krista ComerRoad Finds: El Pueblo MuseumTrue Confessions of a Settler Scholar, with Victoria LamontReconciling Feminism, with Margaret JacobsRoad Finds: Coming Full CircleConclusion: Relational Work AheadAcknowledgmentsInterview ProtocolNotesBibliographyContributorsIndex