Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies

Catherine M. Orr, Ann Braithwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136482564
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies re-examines the field's foundational assumptions by identifying and critically analyzing eighteen of its key terms. Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women's and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women's and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women's and Gender Studies.

PART 1

FOUNDATIONAL ASSUMPTIONS

The chapters in this first section focus on key terms that have defined the intellectual premises of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) from its inception. “Feminism,” “Interdisciplinarity,” “Methods,” and “Pedagogy” speak to the earliest claims about WGS’ intention to stake out a different approach in U.S. and Canadian higher education. That WGS was feminist (as opposed to simply focusing on content about women or gender), that it was interdisciplinary (rather than working within a single traditional discipline), and that it had its own distinctive methodological and pedagogical approaches grounded in new epistemologies that asked new questions in both research and classroom contexts have all constituted the field’s core assumptions for more than forty years. Contributors in this section, then, take up the legacies of these foundational assumptions, mapping their functions in the field at the same time as raising concerns about them.

Each of the terms in this section will be familiar to practitioners of WGS as central to the way we understand the field, so central, in fact, that we seldom stop to think about them anymore. The authors here suggest, however, that simply accepting the current usage of these terms without raising questions about the consequences of that usage has meant WGS has shied away from difficult dialogues about how the discipline might fall short of its own goals. Is feminism the most effective philosophical and political position from which to attain the social justice goals WGS claims as its core mission? Does the claim of interdisciplinarity really enable WGS to accomplish its critiques of knowledge production in the academy? What alternate possibilities might be opened up by critiquing methods of other disciplines as androcentric or marginalizing already disenfranchised peoples beyond simply advancing an alternative set of methods exclusive to WGS? And what kinds of uninterrogated assumptions about the experiences and identities of WGS students go along with a pedagogical mission aimed at certain kinds of conversion experiences?

In addition, to say that there are unique and important characteristics of WGS—i.e., that we are interdisciplinary, or feminist, or that we have methods and pedagogy specific to this field alone—sets up how we think, and don’t think, about other terms and narratives in this book. As the authors here argue, to insist on feminism as central to WGS has often resulted in overlooking other structuring assumptions, such as the idea that WGS is “secular” (as is all of academia more broadly). Maintaining that we are interdisciplinary has too often meant that we don’t challenge what we assume “discipline” to be. Likewise, positing that we have methods and pedagogies that are unique to this field has worked to control who and what gets included in WGS as part of this “community” and to overlook some of the costs of “institutionalization” (thus also belying our claims that WGS is not disciplined).

All of the terms in this section could have been combined in another configuration, with other terms from other sections of this anthology, resulting in different conversations and different snapshots of a contemporary WGS. By bringing them together as we have here, though, we want to draw attention to the ways in which these kinds of foundational assumptions both open up possibilities for establishing parameters for this field as well as shut down alternatives for thinking more deeply and widely about what we do in WGS.

1

FEMINISM

Layli Maparyan

When the Women’s Studies¹ masters program at my university was launched in the mid-1990s by a group of women who had been working for this program at the university for over two decades, “History and Theory of European and U.S. Feminisms” became the first in a series of four required courses for the M.A. program; the others were “Globalization and Gender,” “New Directions in Feminism,” and “Feminist Methodologies.” These courses, intentionally or unintentionally, represented a bridge between second wave and post-second wave academic feminist approaches. The course in question, “History and Theory of European and U.S. Feminisms” (nicknamed “Western Feminisms”), reflected a feminist history of consciousness whose center of gravity was decidedly, if not unwittingly, Eurocentric. Because most of the theories that were discussed at that time in academic feminist textbooks (i.e., Alison Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg’s Feminist Frameworks [1978] or Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction [1989])— such as liberal, radical, Marxist, socialist, psychoanalytic, existentialist, and postmodern feminisms—were Euro-American in origin, it made a certain kind of sense to design a course with this focus. However, the mid-1990s was a time when “other feminisms”—such as black, Chicana, eco, and third wave feminisms, and even queer theory—were contesting this typology and positioning themselves for centrality within feminist histories of consciousness. Obviously, this process had begun much earlier, yet the mid-1990s was a time of the institutionalization of these shifts, often by women who had attained their feminist conscientization² in the 1960s or 1970s and had now gained enough institutional power to create Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) departments and programs. Students who had gained their conscientization during the 1990s were bringing a decidedly post-second wave mindset into the classroom, which influenced their expectations about the curriculum and put pressure on the “founding mothers” of WGS to make curricular updates and adjustments.

This generationally inflected “culture clash” is what led to my inheritance of this course in 2003. A white senior colleague nearing retirement—someone who had helped establish our masters program and who had been teaching the course since its inception—had experienced a “mutiny” of sorts in the classroom when a group of largely, but not exclusively, women of color students took issue with the Eurocentric focus of the course. Course title aside, these women contended that a Eurocentric platform was neither an accurate reflection of where feminism was at that time nor an appropriate introductory survey of feminist thought for a student body as diverse as that of my university. My colleague sympathetically agreed with the students, but did not feel prepared to overhaul the course so close to the time of her retirement. So, in an exhausted eleventh hour phone call, she asked if I would consider taking over the course, and I did, viewing it as an exciting opportunity to establish a completely different imprimatur for this course, if not our department’s core curriculum as a whole. An important part of my strategy was to introduce an interrogation of the very “feminism” that these students had found so cognitively and socially dissonant.

Feminism is a foundational concept in WGS, so much so that it is treated as a sine qua non of the discipline. Yet the purpose of this chapter is to highlight and question assumptions about feminism. Why is “feminism” important, and how does it function for and in WGS? What have been the consequences of its use? What are the tensions generated by and/or manifested through the use of the term “feminism” in this field? How does temporal, spatial, or psychic context affect the ways in which this term and its related narratives might be understood or practiced? What is at stake when we normalize and naturalize feminism as the central organizing principle of WGS? And are there alternatives?

In this chapter, I interrogate a number of basic assumptions about the relationship between this field and feminism: (1) that WGS is (or should be) about feminism; (2) that WGS is (or should be) feminism-centered; (3) that women/people in WGS are (or should be) feminists; and (4) that WGS as a field, via feminism, directly impacts women’s well-being worldwide. Ultimately, I argue that what’s important is not feminism or WGS per se, but rather the transformative, liberatory impulse for which both feminism and WGS are two of many vehicles. Insofar as the nature of scholarly disciplines, or political communities, or ideological identities sometimes hamper the full and effective expression of this transformative, liberatory impulse, then what’s at stake when we fail to question the centrality of feminism in WGS (or the field itself) is humanity’s very survival and well-being. In these times of great threat—social, medical, ecological, spiritual—these questions are not moot.

Women’s and Gender Studies as a Site of Convenience

From my vantage point, Women’s and Gender Studies at this particular historical moment appears as a multivalent, poly-vocal site of convenience for multiple overlapping and at times contradictory conversations about social change, social justice, human empowerment, environmental restoration, and, increasingly, spirituality. By “site of convenience,” I mean that people “show up” to WGS, as students and as faculty members, because they desire to talk about these things writ large, not simply because they desire to “study women” or “are feminists,” and because they sense it is safe or even possible to do so there in ways that is it not in other sites. Thus, there is so much “going on” that WGS, like feminism, is very close to becoming an empty signifier, or at least one whose meaning can only be situational and constantly negotiated. This is the view from a global or national perch, however, and is not nearly as visible at the level of individual departments, or within the conferences, journals, or textbooks associated with WGS, all of which very often adopt some particular “feminist stance” with which they become identified, like a form of branding.

U.S. Women’s and Gender Studies still idolizes particular versions of feminism to such an extent that it sometimes seems to limit the discipline’s own consciousness of and self-realization about its necessarily polyform and dynamic attributes, which could be transformational and liberatory if they were better encompassed.³ These versions are inarguably Western, highly secular, usually quite theoretical and/or ideological, and reflect the economic privilege of theoretical indulgence available to critical thinkers in economically developed nations, as compared with their counterparts in developing nations where feminists must, out of necessity, put a great deal of energy into intervening in dehumanizing social engineering projects (that usually originate in the West). Even though we discuss culture, globality, and the transnational⁴ in U.S. WGS—in our classes, at our conferences, in our journals and books—our discussions typically remain highly academic and lack the inflections of a discourse built on close friendships with people who are radically different from ourselves. If our discourse were doing its job, I contend, not only would those close friendships be common and evident, intellectually as well as socially, but our discipline would actually embody a level of social equality and cultural plurality (whether racial, national, sexual, religious, class-based, or otherwise) much closer to what is idealized in our literatures and much less like what prevails in the mainstream (inside or outside academia). Since it does not, I can only reason that feminism isn’t necessarily helping WGS, or WGS isn’t necessarily helping feminism, even if both are, on their own terms, good and even necessary.

To be clear, I believe that feminism is the single most important cause of “shifting the center” in a progressive direction with regard to women’s issues—equality, rights, ending violence, critiquing representations, questioning norms and standards for women, even destabilizing the notion of “woman” itself and making room for other liberatory possibilities of being, especially those that are related to sexual orientation and gender expression—over the last 60 years, if not the last 200+ years, in the United States and globally. However, I think that feminism has not been nearly as successful at transforming the engines of social inequality, violence, conflict, or hatred, which are rooted at a level of consciousness beyond the intellectual or political. Stated differently, feminism has contributed to a lot of important outer changes but not nearly as many essential inner changes. The reasons for this could consume another treatise.⁵ Ever the optimist, however, it remains my desire that WGS, such as it continues to exist, lives up to its originating spirit and potential as an agent of positive change in the world—including the world of academia. Crucial to the realization of this potential may be the ability of both feminism and WGS to harmonize and coordinate with other social movements, as well as to welcome spiritually-based perspectives into its official discourse. My perspective on these questions is influenced by womanism (Phillips 2006; Maparyan 2012), an evolving set of notions arguably quite distinct from feminism, which has been the central organizing principle of my scholarly work since the mid-1990s. However, my understandings have also been influenced by other self-identified feminist thinkers, particularly those with a spiritual orientation.⁶

(Dis-)Locating Feminism

The term “feminism” has been deployed and defined more than it has been questioned in Women’s and Gender Studies. While some practitioners have wondered what “feminism” is without really questioning its existence or importance, others, both inside and outside the field, have contested its level of inclusivity in ways that hint at the problematic nature of placing it at the center of WGS. Yet to reject feminism as central and foundational to the discipline has largely been a method of ejecting oneself from WGS. This is one way that feminism has functioned socially and politically in the field. More than serving the function of unifying and connecting feminists, the project of definition has tended to separate feminists, create conflict, and divert energy into semantic and ideological debates and away from concerted social change action. While terminological clarification has its place, in the United States at least, these tendencies have caused, or at minimum paralleled, the now well-established split between “feminism in the academy” and “feminism in the streets.”⁷ Globally, they now map onto a split that separates U.S. feminism from feminism in developing countries. Furthermore, the material realities and inequalities of the academy—everything from the split between tenured/tenure-track and non-tenure track positions to the differences in prestige and capital between elite, top-tier, midtier, and lower-tier institutions, and even the subtle differences in treatment between faculty members or students who self-present as radical vs. mainstream in terms of identity or appearance—continue to reproduce themselves within WGS and among feminists. These larger contexts of power relations separate us, too.

My understanding of and relationship to feminism arose from what I had read on my own (not in school), beginning while I was an undergraduate student, and continuing until through my current position as a professor in WGS.⁸ As a self-taught WGS scholar whose own entre into the field had been through black feminist and womanist texts from the early 1980s to about 1990, I had not really been exposed to high theory academically, except when I sat in on a colleague’s lesbian and gay studies course during the early 1990s. A brief period of fascination notwithstanding, I had never really grown to love high theory, strongly preferring the grittier, more personal, and more accessible style of writing out of which my own feminist conscientization had been birthed. However, I developed a new relationship with high theory when I read Chela Sandoval’s captivating and provocative text, Methodology of the Oppressed (2000) in early 2001. Sandoval’s book was the text that made all those literatures come into conversation for me, and I wanted to share that with my students, many of whom were struggling with high theory themselves but who at the same time had keenly developed theoretical sensibilities that had evolved out of simply living in and navigating post-modern society. Sandoval’s text was the ultimate outsider-within trick, using high theory language to tell “homegirl” truths to an audience that would not otherwise listen or pay attention. For ten years, Methodology of the Oppressed served as the core text in a course I taught called “New Directions in Feminism,” a required graduate seminar serving as the capstone of our M.A. program.

Even though I had to read the book (including its copious footnotes) twice to “get it,” these readings eventuated in a set of epiphanies that would guide my navigation of feminism as well as my WGS teaching from there forward, even as my own womanist sensibilities expanded and solidified. Although Sandoval’s theoretical scheme has not gone uncontested as a way of positioning women of color discourses in various liberatory movements (see, for example, Paula Moya’s compelling critique⁹), Sandoval’s useful construct of “the differential” (2000) (a coordinating mechanism that allows one to shift between gears) offered a new, non-linear way of cognizing both critical theories (feminism being just one) and social movements (feminism being just one) that superseded more prevalent histories of feminist consciousness that focused on temporal linearity (this came before this, and so on), and reflected entrenched geo-ethnic hierarchies privileging narratives and politico-economic objectives of the white and wealthy. Even schools of thought within feminism (such as liberal, radical, Marxist, postmodern, etc.) could be viewed in terms of the differential, relating not as temporal successors to one another but rather as different gears in the same gearbox or different tools in the same toolbox, each best suited to a particular terrain or task.¹⁰ Sandoval’s identification and contrast of two distinct strands of human social evolution, namely, “neocolonizing postmodern globalization” and “democratic decolonized globalization” (also known as “alternative dissident globalization”) (2000), clarified the stakes associated with continued unchecked capitulation to the politics of domination and privilege (in feminism or elsewhere) vs. individual and collective liberation of the psyche from these organizing principles (within all critical theories and across all social movements). By appealing to “democratics” (a type of ethical compass) and “love” (the spiritual or energetic movidas of all liberating social change), Sandoval set the stage for a new understandin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Rethink Women’s and Gender Studies
• Part 1: Foundational Assumptions
• Part 2: Ubiquitous Descriptions
• Part 3: Epistemologies Rethought
• Part 4: Silences and Disavowals
• Part 5: Establishment Challenges
• Web Resources
• References
• About the Contributors
• Subject Index