Companion to Women's and Gender Studies

Nancy A. Naples

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781119315018, 9781119315087
• eBook ISBN: 9781119315094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of Women's and Gender Studies, featuring original contributions from leading experts from around the world

The Companion to Women's and Gender Studies is a comprehensive resource for students and scholars alike, exploring the central concepts, theories, themes, debates, and events in this dynamic field. Contributions from leading scholars and researchers cover a wide range of topics while providing diverse international, postcolonial, intersectional, and interdisciplinary insights. In-depth yet accessible chapters discuss the social construction and reproduction of gender and inequalities in various cultural, social-economic, and political contexts.

Thematically-organized chapters explore the development of Women's and Gender Studies as an academic discipline, changes in the field, research directions, and significant scholarship in specific, interrelated disciplines such as science, health, psychology, and economics. Original essays offer fresh perspectives on the mechanisms by which gender intersects with other systems of power and privilege, the relation of androcentric approaches to science and gender bias in research, how feminist activists use media to challenge misrepresentations and inequalities, disparity between men and women in the labor market, how social movements continue to change Women's and Gender Studies, and more. Filling a significant gap in contemporary literature in the field, this volume:

• Features a broad interdisciplinary and international range of essays
• Engages with both individual and collective approaches to agency and resistance
• Addresses topics of intense current interest and debate such as transgender movements, gender-based violence, and gender discrimination policy
• Includes an overview of shifts in naming, theoretical approaches, and central topics in contemporary Women's and Gender Studies

Companion to Women's and Gender Studies is an ideal text for instructors teaching courses in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, or related disciplines such as psychology, history, education, political science, sociology, and cultural studies, as well as practitioners and policy makers working on issues related to gender and sexuality.

Part I
Introduction

1
The Changing Field of Women’s and Gender Studies

Nancy A. Naples

Part I Introduction

Women’s and gender studies is an ever‐changing field of academic inquiry that was born out of Women’s Movement organizing within and outside of Western colleges and universities in the late 1960s and 1970s. While women’s organizing on behalf of the vote and other significant social and economic issues has a long history, the challenge to the androcentric or male/masculine‐centric knowledge project of academia is more recent. The story surrounding the development of women’s and gender studies is often told through a Western‐ or Northern‐centric lens; but it is incomplete or, even misguided, without acknowledging the diversity of sites outside the West or North that helped shape the field both within and outside of the academy (see e.g. Beoku‐Betts 2020; Mikell1996). This chapter presents an overview of shifts in naming, theoretical approaches, and topics covered in contemporary women’s and gender studies. I introduce the Companion and highlight some of the key contributions of the authors as they variously discuss the construction of inequality, reproduction of the gender, as well as individual and collective modes of agency and resistance.

Politics of naming

Women’s studies, as an institutionalized academic formation, began with the recognition of women’s absence in canonical texts, research strategies, interpretation of findings, and many classrooms. With the support of students and women’s movement activists and organizations, women faculty and students in different disciplines created independent studies and courses that were often informally taught on women writers, artists, and philosophers who were little known or appreciated. Since there were few publications available, feminist faculty shared mimeographed essays and other materials that formed the basis of these early courses. In response to student‐led organizing, some of these courses were added to the curriculum and became the basis for women’s studies programs. Many programs eventually became departments and developed minors, majors, graduate certificates and, more recently, Masters and PhD degrees (see, for example, Berger and Radeloff 2011).

With the move to institutionalize women’s studies in the academy, feminist faculty engaged in often‐heated debates about the politics of naming (see, for example, Jackson 2016; LaDuke 2005). As a result of a socially constructed understanding of women and gender, many programs across the US changed their names from women’s studies to women’s and gender studies, or to gender studies (Scott 1986). A large number of programs and departments also added sexuality studies to capture the intersectional understanding of power, experience, and culture. Feminist faculty in some universities and colleges dropped these constructs altogether, opting for “feminist studies” to center the epistemological approach rather than the object of study, as was the decision made at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when it became a department in 2008.

The dependence on cross‐listing courses from different departments and the unpaid labor of feminist faculty continued as a feature of these programs long after their initial development. Drawing on feminist praxis and critiques of androcentric approaches in the traditional disciplines, feminist scholars located in these new units also developed new approaches and courses in feminist theories, feminist methodologies, and feminist pedagogies, which are among the central courses that shaped the interdisciplinary field of women’s and gender studies. In time, interdisciplinary courses solely located within women’s studies replaced the reliance on cross‐listing.

These new institutional formations provided more organizational stability for curriculum development that hastened the context for important debates, including those over which women’s lives were chronicled and how to attend to the diversity of women’s lives and contributions in the courses (see, for example, Moallem 2002). The moves to incorporate women of color and to internationalize the curriculum were first addressed by the creation of separate courses that marginalized these foci within the curriculum and often contributed to a reductive approach to both themes (see, for example, Lee 2000; Lugones and Spelman 1983; Mani 1998; McDermott 1998; Moghadam 2001; Moallem 2002).

African American, Latina, Native, Asian American, and other feminist scholars and students contested the totalizing construction of women that centered on white, middle‐class women’s experiences and marginalized others (see, for example, Anthias and Yuval‐Davis 1983). Lesbian, bisexual and queer women challenged the presumption of heterosexuality that ran through early feminist work (see, for example, Butler 1994; Weed and Shor 1997). “Third world” feminists or those influenced by postcolonial critiques contested the Western‐centric angle of vision within women’s studies (Mohanty 1984; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1992; Alexander and Mohanty 1997). Furthermore, as Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer (in preparation) note in their edited book, The Many Destinations of Transnational Feminism: “Transnational feminism emerged as a critique of imperial modes of practicing feminism, and it was influenced by field‐defining scholarship on colonialism, race, and gender/sexuality in the 1990s” (n.p.). Another significant epistemological intervention was offered by indigenous feminists who explain that:

Indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies … are predicated on the polity of the Indigenous – the unique governance, territory, and culture of Indigenous peoples in unique and related systems of (non)‐human relationships and responsibilities to one another.

[Barker 2017, p. 7; also see Connell 2007; Green 2007; Moreton‐Robinson 2002; A. Smith 2005, L.T. Smith 2012].

Queer and trans scholars further challenged the binary approach to gender and sexuality that is still evident in certain approaches to women’s and gender studies (Beemyn and Eliason 1996; Currah 2006; Johnson and Henderson 2005; Martínez‐San Miguel and Tobias 2016). Feminist scholars working in these new areas who drew on intersectional theories posed significant interventions that fostered the development of new theories, research strategies, and courses that addressed the diversity of people’s lives as shaped by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, citizenship status, colonial status, ability, and national context (see, for example, Berger and Guidroz 2010; Godfrey and Torres 2016; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Hancock 2016; Kolawole 1997; Naples, Mauldin, and Dillaway 2019).

Debates over the subject of inquiry in women’s and gender studies surfaced the limited constructions of feminism that centered a White and Euro‐centric point of view which had also become dominant in the popular imaginary (see, for example, Motlafi 2015). Critics of this limited construction debated the possibility of reenvisioning, reclaiming feminism or rejecting it outright in favor of more relevant frameworks. Women from non‐Western or Southern regions were particularly critical of Western‐centric or Nothern constructions of feminism. For example, African women from colonial English‐speaking countries were drawn to the conceptualization of “womanism” offered by Alice Walker in her 1983 book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, as a framework to express their political activism as a consequence of, among other things, a mistrust of Western definitions of feminism, especially more radical definitions that focused their activism solely on women’s issues and rights (Kolawole 1997). Mary Modupe Kolawole (1997) discusses how Walker’s (1983)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Diversity of Academic Fields and Institutional Formations
• Part III: Science, Health, and Psychology
• Part IV: Culture
• Part V: Politics, Economics, and the Environment
• Part VI: Social Movements
• Index
• End User License Agreement