“Remembering Connie”
Connie is gone. I can scarcely take it in.
Connie and I first met back in about 1980, when she and Kate Stimpson and several other feminist academics asked me to meet with them in NY to hear more about the sexual harassment charges brought by my Clark friend and colleague, the Chilean anthropologist Ximena Bunster, against her abusive Department chair. This was a time when all of us were just barely aware of the concept of sexual harassment. Connie and Ximena were students of Margaret Mead.
Connie was so engaged. She “got it.” Connie understood both the abuse that Ximena described to us that evening. Because of her years of experience exploring the lives of women outside the US, she also instantly saw the risk that Ximena was taking, given her dependence on a visa allowing her to escape Pinochet’s junta.
That, I think, was the start of our long friendly collaboration. She later asked me - during the first Gulf War - to take part in an AAA panel on feminism, nationalism, and militarism.
I think Connie’s edited book that grew out of that event was the first time that anthropologists had ever put those three topics in direct conversation with each other. She created an intellectual breakthrough.
Happy Leacock and Elsa Chaney and June Nash and Ximena and Connie .... what a truly remarkable feminist crew! Can’t you just imagine what Connie would have been saying during the Blasey Ford/Kavanaugh testimonies?? She would have nailed it!
Cynthia Enloe, Clark University