Womenâs and gender studies is an everâchanging field of academic inquiry that was born out of Womenâs Movement organizing within and outside of Western colleges and universities in the late 1960s and 1970s. While womenâs organizing on behalf of the vote and other significant social and economic issues has a long history, the challenge to the androcentric or male/masculineâcentric knowledge project of academia is more recent. The story surrounding the development of womenâs and gender studies is often told through a Westernâ or Northernâcentric 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. BeokuâBetts 2020; Mikell1996). This chapter presents an overview of shifts in naming, theoretical approaches, and topics covered in contemporary womenâs 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
Womenâs studies, as an institutionalized academic formation, began with the recognition of womenâs absence in canonical texts, research strategies, interpretation of findings, and many classrooms. With the support of students and womenâs 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 studentâled organizing, some of these courses were added to the curriculum and became the basis for womenâs 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 womenâs studies in the academy, feminist faculty engaged in oftenâheated 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 womenâs studies to womenâs 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 âfeminist studiesâ 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 crossâlisting 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 womenâs and gender studies. In time, interdisciplinary courses solely located within womenâs studies replaced the reliance on crossâlisting.
These new institutional formations provided more organizational stability for curriculum development that hastened the context for important debates, including those over which womenâs lives were chronicled and how to attend to the diversity of womenâs 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, middleâclass womenâs experiences and marginalized others (see, for example, Anthias and YuvalâDavis 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). âThird worldâ feminists or those influenced by postcolonial critiques contested the Westernâcentric angle of vision within womenâs 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: âTransnational feminism emerged as a critique of imperial modes of practicing feminism, and it was influenced by fieldâdefining scholarship on colonialism, race, and gender/sexuality in the 1990sâ (n.p.). Another significant epistemological intervention was offered by indigenous feminists who explain that:
Queer and trans scholars further challenged the binary approach to gender and sexuality that is still evident in certain approaches to womenâs and gender studies (Beemyn and Eliason 1996; Currah 2006; Johnson and Henderson 2005; MartĂnezâSan 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 peopleâs 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 womenâs and gender studies surfaced the limited constructions of feminism that centered a White and Euroâcentric 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 nonâWestern or Southern regions were particularly critical of Westernâcentric or Nothern constructions of feminism. For example, African women from colonial Englishâspeaking countries were drawn to the conceptualization of âwomanismâ offered by Alice Walker in her 1983 book, In Search of Our Mothersâ 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 womenâs issues and rights (Kolawole 1997). Mary Modupe Kolawole (1997) discusses how Walkerâs (1983)...
