Rather, the aim of the Indiana conference was to provided a working environment in which a number of feminists could continue some of the conversations from the anthology but also take up new topics that the book failed to address. The speakers were thus not only contributors to the anthology but also new voices who offered differing perspectives, different avenues for discussion. Speakers presented short position papers, followed by panel discussions that then opened into audience forums. The essays that follow are adaptations of a selection of those position papers. If anything, what the alignment of the conference, the book, and the Surfaces essays points to is the impossibility of a comprehensive and completely representative feminism.
Feminism is itself an ongoing conversation.
It is this sense of ongoing conversation and reflection that could be said to be one of the driving forces behind a desire to look at feminism beside itself. With success also came a recognition of certain failures, worries about whether feminism's success could continue at the same pace. This is, of course, not such a bad problem to have, insofar as feminism's success is something to be celebrated rather than mourned. More precisely and more significantly the problem for feminism lies in the difficulty it seems now to be having in the wake of those successes. Feminism is, as it were, going through a sort of mid-life crisis, perhaps fighting but also succumbing to the stereotypic conventions associated with such a phase.