Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change / Edition 1

by Robyn Wiegman

Overview

"We thought the study of women would be a temporary phase; eventually we would all go back to our disciplines."-Gloria Bowles, From the Afterword

Since the 1970s, Women's Studies has grown from a volunteerist political project to a full-scale academic enterprise. Women's Studies on Its Own assesses the present and future of the field, demonstrating how institutionalization has extended a vital, ongoing intellectual project for a new generation of scholars and students.

Women's Studies on Its Own considers the history, pedagogy, and curricula of Women's Studies programs, as well as the field's relation to the managed university. Both theoretically and institutionally grounded, the essays examine the pedagogical implications of various divisions of knowledge-racial, sexual, disciplinary, geopolitical, and economic. They look at the institutional practices that challenge and enable Women's Studies-including interdisciplinarity, governance, administration, faculty review, professionalism, corporatism, fiscal autonomy, and fiscal constraint. Whether thinking about issues of academic labor, the impact of postcolonialism on Women's Studies curricula, or the relation between education and the state, the contributors bring insight and wit to their theoretical deliberations on the shape of a transforming field.

Contributors. Dale M. Bauer, Kathleen M. Blee, Gloria Bowles, Denise Cuthbert, Maryanne Dever, Anne Donadey, Laura Donaldson, Diane Elam, Susan Stanford Friedman, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Inderpal Grewal, Sneja Gunew, Miranda Joseph, Caren Kaplan, Rachel Lee, Devoney Looser, Jeanette McVicker, Minoo Moallem, Nancy A. Naples, Jane O. Newman, Lindsey Pollak, Jean C. Robinson, Sabina Sawhney, Jael Silliman, Sivagami Subbaraman, Robyn Warhol, Marcia Westkott, Robyn Wiegman, Bonnie Zimmerman

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822329862
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/13/2002
Series:	Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	514
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.03(d)

About the Author

Robyn Wiegman is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and the Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is the author of American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender and coeditor of The Futures of American Studies, both published by Duke University Press.

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WOMEN'S STUDIES ON ITS OWN

A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change

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Duke University

Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0822329867

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HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

SNEJA GUNEW

Feminist Cultural Literacy: Translating Differences, Cannibal Options

In trying to write this chapter over several months, I've been mystified by my internal resistance to the project. After all, feminism and Women's Studies have been part of my life for more than two decades. As part of the process of deferral, as though waiting for a sign, I was musing about this paper while in Budapest at the end of May 1999 when the war in Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia, seemed to escalate daily. The occasion was a feminist conference being held at the Central European University (an institution set up by the Soros Foundation as part of its grand plan to facilitate the creation of "open societies"). The conference's title was "Pleasure and Power," and the ironies were manifold-not least of which the knowledge that we were engaging in an "open society" project on the threshold of war. How could we come to terms with the disaster on our doorstep-war as the most extreme fracturing of the social, the ultimate symbol of a closed society? What could feminism offer here?

The participants were drawn in the main from other parts of Eastern and Central Europe, although to my knowledge no Albanians were present. At the conference, the dominant theoretical paradigm was that of psychoanalysisin the particular versions in which it is applied to cultural analyses. I pondered this. Discussions concerning race and ethnicity or references to multiculturalism were conspicuous by their absence, particularly for those of us from the so-called First World who are used to such interrogations in the conferences we attend. Psychoanalysis can after all be used as a way to analyze individual relationships without ever having to embed them in a sociopolitical context, despite the fact that it is precisely in Eastern Europe that theorists such as Slavoj Zizek and Renata Salecl have brilliantly attempted to change this. We conference delegates represented our nations in a broad sense, but we were not segmented into any further subgroups. Indeed, it was difficult to raise the issue of subgroups or ethnicity or of processes of racialization or multiculturalism. The proximity of Kosovo was palpable and ultimately unspeakable both in its own right and in the ways in which it made certain conversations impossible, particularly public ones. Yet in spite of our many differences and the ensuing silences I've tried to indicate, a tenuous sense of a shared project prevailed, and that project continues to be named as feminist. That feeling of commonality riven by differences was to me an enigmatic and fragile, but nonetheless palpable, image of continuity, and I was able to place it alongside the frustrations that have marked my teaching in Women's Studies over the past few years.

But what also struck me about this experience was the salience of translation in its most profound and structuring form. The assumption that the common project of feminism implied a common language or even common "cultural literacy" was certainly not reinforced by this event. Rather, we were plunged, in both productive and unproductive ways, into those incommensurabilities that are at the heart of the translation element present in all communication and that in postcolonial studies is perceived to be inherent in all articulations of cultural difference (Bhabha 1994). But just as translations proceed in spite of the conceptual impossibilities of the task, so might Women's Studies prevail in spite its own impossibilities, as flagged, for example, by Wendy Brown's controversial essay (Brown 1997). Was it possible to conceive of trying to translate the cultural differences permeating global feminisms or to find a kind of common cultural literacy for a Women's Studies prepared to engage with international feminisms and its own incommensurabilities?

I have taught Women's Studies in Australia and Canada and have been involved in it since the late 1970s-those heady early days that we later came to characterize rather more severely (and interrogatively) as the institutionalization and professionalization of Women's Studies. I find myself both reluctant and impelled to analyze the malaise that appears to have descended on the area, at least in some parts of the world (Clark et al. 1996; Stanley 1997). It is difficult at times to disentangle what is particular to Women's Studies and to what extent we are dealing with the implications of university corporatization (Evans 1997; Threadgold 1998), which has had a profound impact on the humanities and social sciences in general (Nussbaum 1997). The appearance of special issues of relevant journals (differences, Atlantis, etc.) and of anthologies such as Knowing Feminisms (Stanley 1997), Anti-Feminism in the Academy (Clark et al. 1996), and Generations (Looser and Kaplan 1997) help us focus on the problems specific to Women's Studies.

Restructuring: Marginality as Institutional Advantage

There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a huge restructuring of knowledge that questions the monopoly universities have traditionally enjoyed as privileged purveyors of knowledge. Within this, Women's Studies has things both to offer and to learn. What it has to offer is, to my mind, particularly related to interdisciplinarity-a way of reorganizing knowledge that is being acclaimed (sometimes for wrong, cost-cutting reasons) by university administrators everywhere. Women's Studies has the kind of track record in interdisciplinarity (in all its permutations) that can offer cautions as well as insights. Paradoxically, the precarious institutional history of much Women's Studies (see, e.g., Threadgold 1998) could turn out to be its strength. Being marginal means that one can respond more quickly and have less to lose by risking greater pedagogical experimentation. I think it is true that, for a while now, Women's Studies has represented in various ways a continuing experiment in interdisciplinarity, as the interdisciplinary model, for good and bad reasons, is increasingly being explored by universities. Women's Studies is able to offer a tradition of experimentation in interdisciplinarity in areas ranging from curriculum design to pedagogical principles, team-teaching, and, at least, course articulation. This does not always mean that Women's Studies has been able to pursue these experiments systematically or to theorize them clearly, but as in cultural studies, for example, one can point to its grappling with interdisciplinarity in ways that traditional disciplines have found more difficult to pursue. In some ways I feel, at least from the programs with which I have been associated, that we in Women's Studies need to learn more about integrated interdisciplinarity-that is, we have ourselves been guilty at times of taking it for granted merely because we assumed we had the common focus of women. Much of what I've experienced has been a putting of disciplines side by side in a multidisciplinary way rather than working for an integrated model. Indeed, one can support a nonintegrated model as long as the mix of courses and methods is overtly addressed rather than simply allowed to exist in haphazard fashion, with no guidance for students. And, as I elaborate later, both models involve us in the task of translating among the disciplines. Having taken part in many interdisciplinary projects, I learned very quickly that concepts as well as terminology do not mean the same things across the disciplines. For example, what counts as evidence in sociology as distinct from literary studies? What is meant by politics? What is assumed about identity as distinct from a more dispersed poststructuralist subjectivity?

Initially, for the first two decades, one could describe Women's Studies relatively unproblematically as a field that functioned as a critique of masculinist knowledge structures. This is where it gained its impetus and gradually a kind of idiosyncratic legitimacy. However, now, as many have pointed out, when we are faced with declining numbers in both students and faculty, we are also confronted with the need to rethink the curriculum. For me, this was clearly delineated as a problem when I transposed a feminist theory in the humanities course that I had been teaching for several years in Women's Studies to my cross-appointed field of English. The modifications I needed to make, and the assumptions about what I expected my students to know, in each case clarified some dilemmas for me. The experience reminded me that feminist work is vigorously being generated within the disciplines but that this work does not always have a self-evident relationship with programs in Women's Studies.

The feminist work within disciplinary areas is intrinsically embedded in a larger framework of accreditation and professionalization associated with specific disciplinary training. And it is not as though this ceases to function, albeit in a semi-conscious manner, within Women's Studies courses themselves. Because many programs use cross-appointed or cross-listed faculty and courses-in part as a matter of principle and otherwise for economic efficiency-few programs are staffed entirely by those trained only in Women's Studies. In other words, the skills that faculty bring to the programs are thoroughly informed by their own disciplinary training. This can be at odds with the rhetoric that Women's Studies offers genuine interdisciplinarity. Often, the reality is a smorgasbord that is structured along the disciplinary lines familiar to the faculty teaching in the program. In practice, this can, for example, lead to a split between humanities and social sciences and certainly to a further distancing from the sciences, medicine, and so on. That is, because of the institutional history of Women's Studies as primarily occurring in faculties of humanities and the social sciences, as well as its being subjected to a legacy of underfunding and marginalization, there has often not been either the time or the resources to articulate fully an interdisciplinarity that has been thought through and translated in terms of finding a common language of pedagogy.

In relation to Women's Studies, the question therefore arises as to what exactly we are trying to achieve in such programs. Echoing Brown (1997), what do we want our students to know? It is clear that we cannot simply or exclusively remain with the concept of Women's Studies as the place from which to critique the rest. Although this may be a continuing element and a legacy of Women's Studies in its first stage, it cannot remain its primary identification. This dilemma was addressed by the graduate student Renea Henry when she stated: "There is the question of which kind of training a student receives. What are you prepared to teach? What have you learned? If you turn these programs into a sort of center to critique power, what is it that you are prepared to address substantively and how?" (Cook et al. 1997:142). What kind of "disciplining" are we providing, and what therefore authorizes us-what legitimizes our pedagogy? One assumption is that we are training agents for social change, but if this stays at an inchoate level, it invites the kind of charge that leads long-time opponents to accuse Women's Studies of being staffed simply by ideologues who contaminate the objectivity of university-generated knowledge. Among ourselves, the rhetoric that surrounds the idea that we are engendering a kind of activism often is not thought through in terms of what has been described as the uneasy history of the relationship between politics and theory or, more simply, intellectual knowledge.

Capitalizing on my good fortune in having taught in several different contexts, I will introduce some Canadian reflections at this point. A special issue of the Canadian Women's Studies journal Atlantis published about a decade ago, in 1990, dealt with the findings of a very interesting project called the Canadian Women's Studies Project. As described by one of the coordinators, Margaret Eichler, the project consisted of widespread interviews with women teaching in Women's Studies across the country and charted how and by whom such programs were instituted. Eichler herself has examined the relationship between Women's Studies and feminism, calling the first a subject area and the second an approach. She argues that we cannot take the relationship between the two for granted, just as, increasingly, we cannot make the two synonymous. It is therefore important that we label our work "feminist" in order to signal its distinction from Women's Studies courses that do not have a feminist approach (Eichler 1990). In the same issue, Rhonda Lenton looks at the relationship between academic Women's Studies and the wider women's community and concludes that the incorporation of Women's Studies within the academy has rendered it more conservative, particularly among younger scholars. She concludes: "If feminist scholars are to retain a critical position toward the discipline and if they are to provide leadership within the feminist movement, they will need to maintain ties with political activists outside of academia" (Lenton 1990: 67). Although statements such as this one allow us to point to Women's Studies as a model to offer the restructuring agents in the university at large who are looking for ways to bring the community and university together (for reasons of sheer survival), we also need to consider carefully our own ties with community groups and to think about this in relation to the academic project in general. Does entry into the academy automatically uncouple Women's Studies from a supposedly self-evident feminist politics? Why is theoretical and intellectual work so often perceived as non- or a-political?

The urgency is compounded by another institutional "success story" for Women's Studies that relates to the growth of practicum programs. Part of the call for accountability that has been linked with the increasing intervention of local political concerns into the funding and business of universities has resulted in greater attempts to bring the community and university into proximity with each other. Women's Studies has had a long record, once again, in doing this through its ties to the women's movement. Although academic feminism has often been accused of severing this link (as exemplified by Lenton's statement quoted earlier), it is certainly the case that Women's Studies programs have generally preserved a much closer liaison with varieties of community women's groups than have other disciplines in the university. This has now been consolidated into practicum programs.

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Excerpted from WOMEN'S STUDIES ON ITS OWN
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: On Location / Robyn Wiegman 1

I: Histories of the Present

Feminist Cultural Literacy: Translating Differences, Cannibal Options / Sneja Gunew 47

Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women's and Gender Studies / Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal 66

Notes from the (Non)Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color / Rachel Lee 82

The Progress of Gender: Whither "Women"? / Robyn Wiegman 106

The Present and Our Past: Simone de Beauvoir, Descartes, and Presentism in the Historiography of Feminism / Jane O. Newman 141

II: Institutional Pedagogies (A Forum)

Contending with Disciplinarity / Kathleen M. Blee 177

The Past in Our Present: Theorizing the Activist Project of Women's Studies / Bonnie Zimmerman 183

Rethinking Collectivity: Chicago Feminism, Athenian Democracy, and the Consumer University / Judith Kegan Gardiner 191

From Politics to Professionalism: Cultural Change in Women's Studies / Jean C. Robinson 202

Battle-Weary Feminists and Supercharged Grrls: Generational Differences and Outsider Status in Women's Studies Administration / Devoney Looser 211

Taking Account of Women's Studies / Diane Elam 218

Nice Work, If You Can Get It—-and If You Can't? Building Women's Studies Without Tenure Lines / Robyn R. Warhol 224

The Politics of "Excellence" / Jeanette McVicker 233

III. In the Shadow of Capital

Academic Housework: Women's Studies and Second Shifting / Dale M. Bauer 245

(In)Different Spaces: Feminist Journeys from the Academy to the Mall / Sivagami Subbaraman 258

Analogy and Complicity: Women's Studies, Lesbian/Gay Studies, and Capitalism / Miranda Joseph 267

Institutional Success and Political Vulnerability: A Lesson in the Importance of Allies / Marcia Westkott 293

Life After Women's Studies: Graduates and the Labor Market / Maryanne Dever, Denise Cuthbert, and Lindsey Pollak 312

IV: Critical Classrooms

Strangers in the Classroom / Sabina Sawhney 341

"Women of Color in the U.S.": Pedagogical Reflections on the Politics of "the Name" / Minoo Moallem 368

Negotiating the Politics of Experiential Learning in Women's Studies: Lessons from the Community Action Project / Nancy A. Naples 383

What Should Every Women's Studies Major Know? Reflections on the Capstone Seminar / Susan Stanford Friedman 416

Subversive Couplings: On Antiracism and Postcolonialism in Graduate Women's Studies / Laura E. Donaldson, Anne Donadey, and Jael Silliman 438

Afterword: Continuity and Change in Women's Studies / Gloria Bowles 457

Bibliography: Locating Feminism 465

Contributors 491

Index 499

What People are Saying About This

Jill Dolan

As we enter something of a 'post-identity politics'era, one in which colleges and universities are increasingly held accountable for, the kinds of knowledge they produce (and how and for whom), Women's Studies on Its Own offers both a rationale for and a critical analysis of the state of the field.
— Jill Dolan, author of Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance

Cathy N. Davidson

Women's Studies on Its Own charts the course academic feminism has taken in the thirty years since the founding of the first women's studies program. Even better, it offers a game plan for the next thirty years. It's indispensable.
— Cathy N. Davidson, editor of No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader (with Jessamyn Hatcher)

Editorial Reviews

"From the wealth of material and argument in the book, it is possible to construct a model women’s studies program. . . . Women’s Studies on Its Own offers much to ‘change life.’. . ."

History: Reviews of New Books - David L. Sterling

Women’s Studies on Its Own charts the course academic feminism has taken in the thirty years since the founding of the first Women’s Studies program. Even better, it offers a game plan for the next thirty years. It's indispensable.”—Cathy N. Davidson, coeditor of No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader


“As we enter something of a ‘post-identity politics’ era, one in which colleges and universities are increasingly held accountable for the kinds of knowledge they produce (and how and for whom), Women's Studies on Its Own offers both a rationale for and a critical analysis of the state of the field.”—Jill Dolan, author of Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance

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