Conferencing on the Edge

“A bold and creative work that uses empathy, intellectual rigor, and gossip to show how division, projection, grandstanding, emotional outburst, high stakes, and exclusions both shockingly real and alarmingly imagined produce influence.  Rarely does a book open so many doors, not only to the history of ideas, but to the human frailties that produce both the mythologized histories and the actual ideas they sometimes overlook.” - Sarah Schulman, author of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity

"Conferencing at the Edge is a magisterial account of the dynamic worlds of feminist and queer conferences in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. Corbman offers no easy resolution or romantic retelling of this history of feminism, brilliantly challenging scholars to interrogate how our anxieties about difference have shaped and, at points, undermined the difficult labor of activism and knowledge production." - Durba Mitra, author of The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism