Kristen Hogan: Book Woman Austin is home to one of only 30 feminist bookstores left in the U.S. BookWoman has served as a purveyor and supporter of women's literature for 30 years and is much beloved by Austin's feminist community, yet it constantly struggles to survive in an economy that squeezes out independent book sellers. Kristen Hogan, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate, believes that the survival of feminist spaces like BookWoman is crucial to the quality and diversity of women's literature. Her

“I want to remind people that feminist bookstores are political public spheres,” says Kris, “and show how the current book market threatens the diversity of women’s literature. I want to demonstrate the need for feminist bookstores in some form.”

The inspiration for Kris’s project came from her firsthand experience as a staff member at BookWoman. She began working at the store back in 1998 while she was a Plan 2 undergraduate at UT. She left her job there when she began graduate school, but continued to volunteer.

While in the graduate program in English, Kris has completed her master's report,“Light from A Dark Lantern: Toward a Complex Reading of Women’s Rest Cure Writing” and taught several WGL-related courses, including English 314L: Teaching Women’s Popular Genres: Romance, Sentimentality, and the Gothic and Rhetoric 309K: The Rhetoric of Feminist Spaces, for which she received the Outstanding Contributions in Service Learning Award from UT’s Volunteer and Service Learning Center. Kris is also a founding editor of Women’s and Gender Studies in Review across Disciplines, a graduate student publication started by the Women, Gender, and Literature interest group.

It was Kris’s coursework that led her back to the topic of feminist bookstores: “I began writing about women of color presses for a class, I began to think about our local women in print movement, and when I talked with women about feminist bookstores, I discovereed the history is much bigger than I realized. And I want everyone to know what I found out!”

To research the project Kris has traveled to San Francisco, New York City, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, collecting oral histories and interviewing women who have been central in the feminist bookstore movement. She believes her dissertation, directed by Ann Cvetkovich and Joanna Brooks, will be of interest to a general feminist audience as well as an academic women’s studies audience. “Feminist bookstores have actively advocated for women’s texts since 1970 when the first feminist bookstore was founded,” she says. “I want to show how they have supported the development of women’s studies and how we can use feminist bookstores to teach women’s literature.”

Recently, Kris has also started working at BookWoman again: “ I missed working here. The people who come into the store are a good reminder of why this space is important. And I find out a lot about what’s going on with women’s books. It’s energizing to me to be here in this women’s literary space.”

For more information on feminist bookstores and Kris's project, see her “Defining Our Own Context: The Past and Future of Feminist Bookstores,” published in ThirdSpace in March 2003, available at http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/hogan.htm.