Genevieve Vaughan (born November 21, 1939) is an American expatriate semiotician, peace activist, feminist, and philanthropist, whose ideas and work have been influential in the intellectual movements around the Gift Economy and Matriarchal Studies. Her support also contributed heavily to the development of the global women’s movement.Women and the Gift Economy, ed. Genevieve Vaughan, Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education, Inc., 2007, pp. 1-37.
Background Vaughan was born and grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. During her childhood, her family became wealthy through oil, and she developed a consciousness of the great disparity of wealth between her family and others'. She completed a B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1961, and subsequently enrolled as a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. There she met Italian philosopher (1921–1985), whom she married in 1963, moving with him to Italy. They had three daughters together, and eventually divorced, in 1978.
Inspiration and early writings Rossi-Landi is credited as a founder of the SocioSemiotics movement, which stresses the "sociality" of sign use. In 1964, he was asked to help start a new philosophical journal applying Marx’s analysis of the commodity and money to language. Vaughan writes that while the journal did not materialize, her husband wrote several books about this topic, and she found herself in disagreement with his framing of language as a form of exchange.Vaughan, Genevieve, For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, 2002 edition, Anomaly Press and Plain View Press, p. 13. Her own experience as a mother of small children who were learning to talk suggested that language is a form of gift-giving. Alongside Rossi-Landi, Vaughan attended the first meeting of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Milan in 1974. She began her own research and in 1977 completed two essays, "Saussure and Vigotsky via Marx",Vaughan, Genevieve, "Saussure and Vygotsky vis Marx," ars semiotica1981, where she gives a Marxist interpretation of Saussure's comparison of linguistic and economic value and looks at Vygotskyan concept development as the forming of a general equivalent structure and "Communication and Exchange""Communication and exchange", Semiotica 1980 In the latter, she introduces the ideas of "communicative need", exchange as an aberrant form of communication, and money as a one-word language.For-Giving(op cit.) pp. 13-14
Feminism 1978 was a watershed year for Vaughan. She divorced, entered psychoanalysis, and began to attend a feminist consciousness-raising group in Rome. Many of the women in the group worked at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and the group became a connection point for women from around the world to discuss important issues about women and development, environment, and peace.
In the early 1980s, Vaughan began to study, write, and teach in Italy. During these years she was developing a gender analysis around exchange and gift-giving. In 1981, she was at the Virginia Woolf Cultural Centre in Rome, an independent women’s university started by feminist philosopher Alessandra Bocchetti. After attending summer semiotics institutes at the University of Urbino for several years, she introduced a feminist element in 1982, organizing a women's group and presenting a paper about care as non-sign human communication.For-Giving(op cit.), p 14
By starting with gifting as communication, Vaughan arrived at a different take on the Gift Economy than other philosophers. She took issue with Belgian Luce Irigaray on the subject of exchange of women, instead taking the gift nature of women’s free labour in the home as the starting point for a generalized theory. Of Marcel Mauss, Vaughan writes "The insistence upon reciprocity hides the communicative character of simple giving and receiving without reciprocity and does not allow [Mauss's followers] to make a clear distinction between giftgiving and exchange as two opposing paradigms."For-Giving, 2002, p. 54 In 1983, when The Gift by Lewis Hyde was published, Vaughan was not in accord with his emphasis on obligation, reciprocation, and gratitude, instead emphasizing the role of needs as a coequal component. Where Hyde defines "a true gift" as based on "gratitude",Gift economy#Hyde Vaughan describes a true gift as one that satisfies a need.For-Giving(op cit.) pp. 56, 156, 338
In 1987, Vaughan began writing her first book, which would be titled For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange. It would be a decade before it was finished and published, as other activities came increasingly to the fore.
Practice of Gift Economy In 1980, Vaughan hired her cousin Frances Farenthold, a former Texas legislator, gubernatorial candidate and president of Wells College, to help her embark on a course of socially effective giving from her personal fortune. Returning to the US in 1983, Vaughan began to acquaint herself with a wide range of women’s and feminist activities related to peace, culture, and economics. She developed supportive and collaborative relationships with many women activists, both unknown and well known.
Peace Activism In 1984, Vaughan, Farenthold and Sonia Johnson started organizing the Feminist International for Peace and Food. In collaboration with the venerable Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), FIPF developed a Peace Tent to be held at the United Nations third World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya."More than a Parley," by Kathleen Mahoney," in Community Development Journal, vol. 21, issue 1, pp. 56-58 Vaughan convened and funded preparatory meetings for this project in Texas and in Rome. Among those in attendance were Bella Abzug, Robin Morgan, and Marilyn Waring. Video of the Peace Tent shows the process in which women from enemy countries were brought together to hold face to face conversation, while other women stood in support and sang to calm them, so that the discussions could proceed. Vaughan would be involved with other peace projects over the next decades, including European and US women’s peace caravans, a Moscow women’s peace meeting in 1987, meetings in Mexico between US and Salvadoran women, and a multilateral meeting of Colombian women on a Japanese peace boat, in 2001.WINGS #05-02 Colombian Women on the Peace Boat, audio, Women’s International News Gathering Service, Feb. 2002 In 1987, she became involved in Women for Meaningful SummitsSlavin, Sarah, U.S. women's interest groups: institutional profiles, pp. 517-518 and began a series of fact-finding trips with Farenthold to Latin America. Vaughan also visited the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in England.
The Foundation for a Compassionate Society
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In 1988, Vaughan incorporated her numerous projects into a nonprofit organization, the Foundation for a Compassionate Society. The foundation lasted for ten years and supported hundreds of projects. At its height, it had 27 employees. Major events produced by the Foundation include a Feminist Family Values Forum, including Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis;Foundation for a Compassionate Society, Feminist Family Values Forum, Austin: Plain View Press, 1996, 130 pp. and a conference on Radiation and Breast Cancer, featuring Bella Abzug and Vladimir Chernosenko, the physicist in charge of the Chernobyl cleanup. Many of the projects responded to specific needs: Technomama for example, trained women from around the world in computer technology and also sent women to visit feminist NGOs around the world, give them computers and teach them to use email. The Museum to End the Nuclear Age traveled the highways of Texas to help successfully stop an illegal nuclear waste dump being situated on the Texas-Mexico border. For another project, Vaughan funded a survey designed by epidemiologist Rosalie Bertell, to study health effects of pollution on military bases in Texas and the Philippines.The Texas Legacy Project: Stories of Courage and Conservation, by Carter Smith, David A. Todd and David Weisman, p. 88. Two of her major gifts restored land to indigenous people in the US"Alma de Mujer, the Gift, Restoring Land to Indigenous People," in Indigenous Woman Magazine 2001 one of which is at Cactus Springs, Nevada, as a donation to the original inhabitants the Western Shoshone, and the site of The Temple of Goddess Spirituality Dedicated to Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess, built in 1993, "founded on the principles of peace, goddess spirituality & the gift economy". The annual interfaith Sacred Peace Walk, conducted and organized by the Nevada Desert Experience, is supported, in part, by the temple on the peacewalk's way to the Nevada Test Site's southern gate in opposition to the existence of the Nevada Test Site and nuclear weapons testing. She helped the successful campaign by Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva to block the patenting of basmati rice. She is credited by Florence Howe with financially rescuing The Feminist Press, and serves as an honorary member of its board of directors. When the Foundation closed, Vaughan ceased considering funding proposals, and turned full-time to analyzing and explaining the Gift Economy.For-Giving (op. cit.) Ch. 23
Communicating the Gift Economy In 1991, Vaughan published "The Gift Economy", an essay in Ms."The Gift Economy," by Genevieve Vaughan, Ms. Magazine, May/June 1991 She began to give talks and workshops on the Gift Economy; but it was not until 1997 that the first edition of her first major work came out, titled For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange.For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, Austin: Plainview Press, 1997, 427 pages The book draws primarily upon semiotic concepts but also on psychological and economic ideas. A revised and expanded edition was issued in 2002.Vaughan, Genevieve, For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, 2002 edition, Anomaly Press and Plain View Press, 432 pp. The book has been translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, and Albanian.
Since closing her foundation, Vaughan has returned to live part-time in Italy. Both there and in Texas, she has written steadily, publishing in academic journals and popular magazines, and delivering papers at academic conferences on semiotics, gift economics, and women's studies.Academic papers include "Communication and mothering," at the Semiotic Society of America, San Antonio, 2002; "Mothering, Co-muni-cation, and the gifts of language," in The Enigma of the Gift and Sacrifice, J.J. Goux and E. Wyschogrod eds., Fordham University Press. New York. 2002; "The Gift of the Gift", in Susan Petrilli and Patrizia Calefato eds. Logica, dilaogica, ideologica. I segni gra funzionalità ed eccedenza, Milano, Mimesis, 2003; and "Language as Gift and Community".in Lavoro immateriale. Athanor. Semiotica, Filosofia, Arte, Letteratura, anno XIV ns. n. 7, ed. Susan Petrilli 2003-4. She has been an active proponent of two scholarly fields that have emerged from Women's Studies: Motherhood Studies, and Modern Matriarchal Studies.Heide Göttner-Abendroth#Matriarchal Studies Since For-Giving, her major works include Women and the Gift Economy: A radically different worldview is possible (2007) (edited), and Homo Donans (web book). With the term homo donans, she posits that humans are not primarily the wise species (homo sapiens) nor the exchange species (homo economicus) but the unilaterally gift-giving species, which has been distorted by the practice of exchange, money and the market.