Women's Studies vs. Gender Studies

PART 8 OF 8

We recently changed the name of our department from the Department of
Women's Studies to the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies.
As we were beginning this process, I asked for materials from others on this
list  who had undergone similar changes.  Several people asked me to share
those materials.  Unfortunately, I lost that list.  So if people will
contact me offlist, I would be happy to share what I have
(wgriffin  AT  csulb.edu).
 
On another matter, I was speaking with a colleague this weekend about
changes in the tenor of the department in the 24 years I've been here.  The
faculty used to have a whole lot more fun together.  We would go out to
happy hour, go dancing together, to concerts, over to each others' houses
for dinner and parties, etc.  Granted, most of us did not have permanent
partners or spouses then, but it is more than that.  There was a lot of
silliness and socializing to go along with the hard feminist work we were
doing, both inside the university and outside in the community.  It doesn't
seem to happen now.  Our sense of community has changed significantly.
 
Do any of the other old timers notice this or is it particular to our
department and faculty?
 
Wendy Griffin
wgriffin  AT  csulb.edu

Wendy Griffin 
Chair & Professor Emerita
Department of Women's Studies
CSULB

 Oh, dear, can you change it back? I'll share a womanist thought:
 WOMEN's Studies means the study of WOMEN -- throughout history, in
 the present, in all contexts. Adding GENDER and SEXUALITY changes
 that, and while it makes an inclusion for transsexual, gender neuter,
 and male homosexuals, it also dilutes the emphasis on WOMEN. It puts
 the emphasis on SEX -- both in terms of sexual behavior and gender --
 which is Completely Different from studying WOMEN as a group and in
 diverse contexts. I believe that sexuality is a very small, although
 dynamic, part of women's studies. . . . and to me, a renaming like
 this one is more of the backlash against women, marginalizing us into
 a one-of-three significance, allowing ascendance into the women's
 studies department of folks who believe that being a woman is a
 matter of sex, not a matter of being. A woman is not defined by who
 has sex with her; a woman is defined by whoáshe isáas a whole
 being. Adding gender and sexuality to a department name changes more
 than the title; it changes the meaning of the whole, and once again
 alienates and marginalizes the chance of participation of a
 significant part of womankind.  
 
 Kiesa www.oleandercottage.com
 kiesa  AT  oleandercottage.com

In response to Kiesa (and Wendy) our program is also considering this name
change.  Notice that "Women" comes first!  And we do not see "sexuality
studies" as something "small" - if one thinks how sex and gender are
intimately entwined in "creating" male dominance and female submissiveness
in our collective understanding of what it means to be "men" and "women" in
our society - heteronormativity -  and leaves out "all the rest of us" as
invisible, transgressive.  (I strongly recommend C.J. Pascoe's book, "Dude,
You're a Fag" on this - and gender policing.)

Our program's curriculum is "multicultural" - and includes issues that
pertain to class and national origin, etc. as well encompassing the wide
variety of women's issues and problematizing "gender," as well.  We would
never stop being this way.
Best wishes, Barbara
Barbara Scott Winkler
Women's Studies, Southern Oregon University
winklerb  AT  sou.edu and winklerb  AT  charter.net

Sadly, this goes along with "changes" at my university as well. The
doing away with the chair of gender studies just happened; the doing
away with my two courses of Psych of Women and Psych of Men, both
taught from feminist perspective-they've rolled these two courses into
one that is supposedly incorporating both, while actually doing
neither-Psych of Gender. Legitimate I suppose on its own terms, but
doing away effectively with women's psych specifically. And this
despite the popularity and filling of both courses for over ten
years. Of course it was done without any input from me.

And so it continues that women are again made lesser.
Susan

If the mind can imagine it, the mind can make it so

Dr. Susan Clark-Cook
Clinician
Counseling and Student Development
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Natural and Applied Sciences

>>Notice that "Women" comes first!  And we do not see "sexuality 
studies" as something "small" - if one thinks how sex and gender are 
intimately entwined in "creating" male dominance and female submissiveness 
in our collective understanding of what it means to be "men" and "women" in 
our society 

But doesn't that just buy into the idea that women=sexuality while men
don't? Isn't that just the old men as subject women as object routine?
Men as normal, the 'I', everything in general and nothing in
particular, while women are pinned down and defined and different?

That sure is what it sounds like to me anyway. The same old ghetto.

>>Our program's curriculum is "multicultural" - and includes issues that 
pertain to class and national origin, etc. as well encompassing the wide 
variety of women's issues and problematizing "gender," as well.

Well then why not just call it the Department of Multicultural Studies
or the Department of Identity Studies?

editor  AT  butterfliesandwheels.com 

------------------------------
Ophelia Benson, Editor 
Butterflies and Wheels
www.butterfliesandwheels.com
------------------------------

"But doesn't that just buy into the idea that women=sexuality while
men don't? Isn't that just the old men as subject women as object
routine? Men as normal, the 'I', everything in general and nothing in
particular, while women are pinned down and defined and different?"

This is a large part of the reasoning why Women's Studies Department's
are changing to Gender Studies departments, in order to  participate
in scholarship that marks the unmarked, in this case
men/masculinity/heterosexuality, rather than solely treating women as
the object of knowledge in regards to gender.  Also, by shifting the
language to gender, we can address the fact that "woman" and "female"
are not stable and universal categories and, furthermore, what it
means to be "female" or "women" is experienced differently depending
on social context, one's identity, and embodiment.
-- 
Reese Carey Kelly
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Sociology
University at Albany, SUNY

I get all this, but what I am curious to know is how this change affects
courses on the economics,sociology  and politics of women, ie most women.
Where would a course on women and work fit in? Or women and the law?
Maternity, economics and the law?   I get that sexuality and queer theory
are the hot topics now, and perhaps that's where the pathbreaking
scholarship is now. But most women face pretty much the same issues they
always did (as well as new ones). The young women I meet, including some of
the feminists, are quite sophisticated on issues relating to the body  and
sexuality but kind of hazy on these other dimensions. and what about women's
history? Where does that go?
I'm also curious to know to what extent these name changes have to do with
attracting more students in an era where feminism is a dirty word. Is it a
change based on scholarship, or more a response to small enrollments and a
bid for a higher profile within academia?

Katha Pollitt
the Nation
kpollitt  AT  thenation.com

--- Original Message --- From: "Ophelia Benson" <opheliabenson  AT  MSN.COM>
> But doesn't that just buy into the idea that women=sexuality while men
> don't? Isn't that just the old men as subject women as object routine? Men
> as normal, the 'I', everything in general and nothing in particular, while
> women are pinned down and defined and different?

No, no, no, no!  It simply means that all the issues that women are
concerned with are still being addressed - including what Katha Pollitt
mentions in her email.  

Best wishes, Barbara Scott Winkler 
Southern Oregon University, 
winklerb  AT  charter.net and winklerb  AT  sou.edu

I think whether or not male needs take primacy in a department that looks at
women, gender & sexuality depends to a very great extent on the faculty who
already are in the department.  In our department we may not always agree on
everything, but we are all first and foremost feminists.

Wendy Griffin
wgriffin  AT  csulb.edu

> This is a large part of the reasoning why Women's Studies Department's
> are changing to Gender Studies departments, in order to participate
> in scholarship that marks the unmarked, in this case
> men/masculinity/heterosexuality, rather than solely treating women as
> the object of knowledge in regards to gender.

But taking out "Women" unmarks what needs to be marked. We are far from
finished from examining women's history, the erasure of female presences and
experiences, and how these realities -- plural -- remain obscured even now.
The sociohistorical patterns of patriarchy still affect our lives. Saying
Gender alone does not imply a challenge to male supremacy, or the demand to
address women's realities.

To repeat, expanding this investigation and adding Gender to program titles
is welcome. We can examine multiple genders, while expanding conceptions of
the terrain defined as female and male, which for many takes us full circle
to our earliest liberatory impulses.

> Also, by shifting the language to gender, we can address the fact that
> "woman" and "female" are not stable and universal categories

Gender is not a stable category either. Are there _any_ universal
categories? All have intersecting subsets, as far as i can see. All can be
broken down in various ways. That does not render study of categories and
patterns meaningless. We also need to beware of essentializing cultural
conceptions of gender-- not least the assumption that patriarchy is
universal, and the conceptions of gender that it enforces and prohibits.

We've reached the point where "gender theory" needs to be cross-examined in
the way that "women" has been. The critiques of romanticization apply here
too. Who is researching how crossing gender boundaries differs for those
born and socialized as females and those born and socialized as males within
a culture? For example, where are  the FTM counterparts to hijra (India) or
mustarjil (southern Iraq) and where is the formal cultural space allotted to
them? They can be more easily located in indigenous cultures. I think it
would be fruitful to look at how such transgender categories are embedded or
marginalized in various types of social systems: imperial or indigenous,
patrilineal or matrilineal, various class contexts, and how all these
interact. To look at how gender manifests outside patriarchal systems, and
sexuality too.

> and, furthermore, what it means to be "female" or "women" is experienced
> differently depending on social context, one's identity, and embodiment.

And the politics of culture, and personal socialization, and so many
factors. None of this should negate the necessity of recognizing and naming
culture-forms that subordinate, colonize, and abuse billions of females
because they are female. From a matter of life or death -- how much food and
care a baby gets, or whether she is killed outright -- to whether a child is
educated, how much he gets to play or she has to work, whether she has to
look down and stick around home or is free to run and swim, and on to the
subtle and blatant enforcements that shape socialized female behavior, and
the command performances of dominance-based gender systems altogether.

We are losing something big if we can't see connections as well as
differences between women in different contexts (especially around violence)
and if we fail to take into account how women are treated compared to men of
their own family, class, ethnicity, nation, religion. These patterns have
everything to do with the rigidity of current gender systems, affecting
people who identify as lesbian, gay, bi, FTM and MTF (violence again) and
atrocities enacted upon intersex people whose bodies don't fit the binary
system. We can integrate these understandings, while holding the hard-fought
ground of feminist  movements-- including the "women" in Women's and Gender
Studies.


Max
-- 
Max Dashu
Suppressed Histories Archives: Real women, global vision
http://www.suppressedhistories.net

Women's Power DVD
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/womenspowerdvd.html

Max, 

This makes so much sense to me, amidst what seems to me to be, in
these discussions, a persistent Euroforming/essentializing of
gender/(deficit)female gendering as *nothing but* one of many
(presumably structurally alike) interlocking systems of oppression.
But structurally, as we can learn from the study of systems of the
"gendering of a balanced universe" (Mann) in diverse indigenous
knowledge systems, gender is not the same as, for example, race or
class.  Not at all to minimize the need to
de-construct/de-essentialize the category of woman/female --or to
treat unequal gendering systems as among the various intersecting
systems of oppression.  But this itself underscores that, as you
wrote:

"We also need to beware of essentializing cultural conceptions of
gender--not least the assumption that patriarchy is universal, and the
conceptions of gender that it enforces and prohibits."

Suzanne

I don't think having "feminist" or "feminism" in titles would lead to small
enrollments, on the contrary.  But administrators or also maybe faculty in
other fields seem not to like this popularity and attractiveness of studying
feminist studies.  Perhaps they regard it as identity politics rather than
education about debates and critiques about identity politics, or teaching
for change (too activist) or teaching an ideology (indoctrination) rather
than a legitimate field of inquiry.  These are common stigmas of feminism in
academia, ignorant stereotypes.  I simply do not agree that feminism is a
dirty word for most students these days.  That certainly is not my
experience.  I experience a hunger to learn about feminist thought and
history and social movements in many students of many sexes and
self-identifications and demographics, and coming from many different majors
across a great range.  Some may arrive at such courses needing to think
through ambivalence about feminism but that is a challenge they seek, and
usually they need some dialogue to realize what they have subliminally
figured out already, as this is really quite basic, and these students are
highly driven to learn about feminism and feminist foremothers and
forefathers and fore-thinkers.  They seek a place to do this and they are
surprised to learn about academic suppression of the word "feminism"
(because they naively assumed there is academic freedom and equality in
academia).  In the early to mid 1980s I was told I could not use the word
"feminism" in a course title (but it was okay in a course description, I was
told), so I created courses with the titles *Philosophy of the Sexes &
Racism* and *Sexuality, Race & Representation*.  I do like these titles,
however.  Of my many other courses since then to present, only two have the
word "feminist" in them, but the way I teach, all are antiracist feminist
studies.

Barrie Karp, Ph.D. (Philosophy)
NYC

Barrie, I find what you say quite heartening, as it was only this
morning on my way to work that I was thinking, sadly, that maybe
feminism is dead and not applicable in today's world and for today's
young women. I was a child of the 60's and remember beings so excited
that there was a word for what I felt and saw, and the activism that I
was involved in and was all around me. This was a time not only of
women's rights and activism, but of civil rights, racial rights and
more. I don't see that involvement and excitement on our campus, so
it's good to hear it still does exist.

I have been working at a business college for the last 20 years and it
has been my experience ( and I realize business students may be
different from other college students due to the emphasis on money,
business dealing and so on-also these students tend to be very
concrete, see in black and white and don't like to use their
imaginations) that the women here by and large do not like to identify
as feminists, and see it as a negative thing. It has long been
suspected because of what and how I teach that I am a man hating, male
bashing, liberal (one of the truer things) lesbian. Still, my classes
did fill.

I am advisor to the Women's Center here and while most of these women
do identify feminist they too stay away from the word, and like to
call themselves girls and at times lack a clear understanding of many
of the issues surrounding women and so forth. I find myself in despair
often, and the campus politics are unclear as to where we are headed,
but they have done away with my courses, they have let go the chair of
the "gender studies", and it is evident that less and less of these
kinds of courses are going to be available to our students. This is on
top of the fact that they also did away with the only organization
here that dealt with women's issues for staff and faculty, and nothing
has replaced it.

So I guess mostly I was saying thanks for sharing a more hopeful
aspect and what you see in a more positive way than what I'm
seeing. Maybe I can trudge forward, although feel increasingly alone
here.  Susan

If the mind can imagine it, the mind can make it so

Dr. Susan Clark-Cook
Clinician
Counseling and Student Development
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Natural and Applied Sciences

We just had a discussion in class about the "F" word - meaning feminism;-)
Many of the students in this class - WS 302: Contemporary U.S. Women's
Movements - are taking it for gen ed credit and so are not knowledgeable
about the history of the women's movement in the U.S. nor particularly
feminist - but they did choose this class over other classes that would
fulfill the upper level gen ed requirement.

I found that we had a range of opinions in the classroom, but no one
dismissed the words "feminism/feminist" outright and some of the
self-identified feminists in the room "taught" the other students how that
changing the term might be a sign of both backlash and "internalization of
oppression" - giving in (consciously or unconsciously) to that backlash.  I
was very heartened by this being _their_ teaching moment, not mine!

I think we have to keep working _with our students_ to combat the backlash
of the last 25 years or so and both convey the "excitement" of that time - I
am a baby boomer and actively took part in the events - but also find out
what motivates our students to look into feminism - and adopt it - today.
Barbara Scott Winkler, Women's Studies, Southern Oregon University
winklerb  AT  sou.edu and winklerb  AT  charter.net

Our program changed its name to Feminist and Gender Studies a few years
ago -- we call it FGS and the students call it Fem-Gen.  Since the change
we have seen no fall-off in our enrollments.  In fact, there seems to be a
new energy among those students who see themselves as feminists and a new
sense that that is a "cool" kind of counter-cultural way to be.  But our
students are mostly privileged and probably have more freedom than many
other students to "try on" various aspects of identity.

[the rest of the message has been omitted]

Eileen Bresnahan
Associate Professor
Feminist and Gender Studies
Colorado College
14 E. Cache la Poudre
Colorado Springs, CO   80903
ebresnahan  AT  coloradocollege.edu

"but I don't believe in co-opting the women's studies department and
allowing those studies to assume primacy above the very real need for
emphasis on womanist, feminist, and all women's lives."

How often have they focused on ALL womens lives though?  It usually
focuses on a certain social class of women.  It is also the case that
in doing this that they get to distract from the women that other
women are actively oppressing, like a woman who makes 5 figures
complaining about a man down the hall making a few dollars more while
paying slave wages to the woman who cleans her house, until it can
focus on ALL women- even the poor ones, below the poverty level who
are exploited by women with money- it isn't really about women at
all, it is about middle, upper middle, and upper class women, its
about money NOT feminism or sex or gender or sexuality, unless ALL
women come together to end the poverty of the rest of the women it
will always only be about women with money, aside from the very few
of us who do work relating to what women who lack necessities
actually need.  For the most part in my (only) 7 years in academia I
have almost only seen a focus on the money, never on women qua
women.

NIcole

Katha and all others fretting over "changes":

I'd like to suggest that the very key to understanding the perceived
change in support for the term "feminism" on campuses lies in Katha's
post: where she elides the term "feminist" here with "politically
progressive" (her daughter's college).

Yet, the very next sentence basically all but says Third Wavers are a
lost cause for calling themselves "girls".

Haven't we laid down the anti-'girl' guns long ago? 

Last year I was on a one-year appointment and taught the first Girls'
Studies class at a small liberal arts college. For the course, I
defined girls loosely -- including chronologically-aged young females,
Hooters Girls, and Riot Grrrls. As one student said, "I'm so happy for
this class. I feel at 21 I can finally start to be a girl."

It was surprising to hear juniors and seniors -- Women's Studies
majors -- rail against feminist criticism of the Spice Girls as they
were going on their second world tour when our seminar was in
session. Another student, a first year, fondly remembered the Spice
Girls when they first came out when she was 8, said, "Yeah, I don't
see how feminists could say the Spice Girls evacuate feminism of
political meaning and are the cause of post-feminism. I was 8 playing
Ginger Spice and I went around kicking things and was happy!"

Clearly, these are young women who get *all* the debates, but feel
persistently dismissed by the discourse.

Katha, have you realized that one of the reasons 'feminist' is
disdained is simply because it has come to be seen as the hegemonic
stalwart old-brand of feminism, that accepts no critique, refuses
self-reflexivity, doesn't evolve or change, and is by definition
conservative?  Feminism, today, signs in for "old-fashioned." It's not
the students who don't get it, Katha, it's feminism that is slow to
change.

If you talk to young women of color, they will willingly offer up the
explanation that feminism often, to them, means "white". If you talk
to gender queers, they will willingly offer up angry retorts that
'feminism' means female bio-privileged and the decades of critiques
against cosmetic surgery has actually set back the fight for trans
rights for surgical intervention. And, of course, if you talk to young
women, "feminist" simply means old and conservative.

Listen to students, let them tell you about feminism. 

The same should be said about name changes to departments. It seems to
me what needs to change is Women's Studies leadership, not department
names. Frankly, all this re-naming smells like duck and cover to me.

Is anyone else out there under the age of 40 amused by the recent
panic on this list serv over department name changes? Or, amused by
the posts expressing woe over a perceived change in department culture
where 'back in the good 'ol days' faculty all got together for dinners
and hung out together?

Excuse me -- but, was this back in the good old days before women of
color fought for tenure? Before third wave feminists started hitting
the academic job market with PhDs, research grants and published books
and seeking tenure-track positions when older faculty secured tenure
on much less? Before women's studies departments became largely
staffed by contingent part-timer adjuncts running between multiple
term-appointments with no time for Scrabble, bowling and other such
collegial after hours play?

We all should stay tuned -- there's 2 pop culture depictions of
Women's Studies that seems to be right out of the issues raised on
this listserv. One, a horror movie called "Women's Studies" will be
out later this year.  IMDB.COM lists the plot as: "Women's Studies is
the story of a pregnant grad student and her friends who are held
captive at a women's academy that's actually a cult of feminists bent
on the enslavement of men. A look at groupthink, women's issues, and
how blind belief in a one-sided dogma can create a terrorist."

The other, is a new HBO show in the works, also called "Women's
Studies."
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2009/04/15/hbo_womens_studies/

So, here's a shout out to Daphne Patai who has long been a critical
voice within Women's Studies encouraging the discipline to be less
"disciplining."  

Sarah


Sarah L. Rasmusson
Fellow
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH)
University of Illinois
srasmus3  AT  illinois.edu
      

Sarah, thanks for saying so much that I wanted to say, and for saying it so well.

Some have been suggesting that what we need to do is to get students
to adopt feminism.  I would argue that what we need to do is to
educate students about feminisms and teach them to think critically
about the different focus/approach of each feminism.  I know a lot of
women who are working for women in many different contexts and who
share a lot of the same goals that "feminists" (as an umbrella term)
do, but who have chosen not to identify as feminists because of
exactly the reasons that Sarah points out.  In the last two years, as
Amanda Marcotte's book (with racist illustrations) was published by
Seal Press; and as Seal Press, itself a face of Women's Studies,
regrettably brought itself under significant and largely unanswered
critique for its tendency to center white women's feminisms; and as
the Feminist Majority Foundation's Young Women in Leadership
Conference talked about a vague global other whom feminists needed to
"help" (one suggestion was to move U.S. troops from Iraq to
Afghanistan); as "radical feminist bloggers" who I think bear little
relation to actual radical feminism have written hateful diatribes
against transfeminist positions and sex workers' feminist analyses -
as these and many other incidents have occurred, claims have
repeatedly been made about what feminism is, and these claims have
*again and again* put the issues of white, middle-class, cis-women at
the center.  In the face of this, current Women's Studies students
and graduates who blog and post on blogs have been increasingly
demoralized about what feminism and Women's Studies appear to be.  A
number of well-respected women of color bloggers who write about
issues concerning women have rejected feminism outright, claiming
that the movement is a narrow movement that clearly doesn't want them
in it.

Further, a "Women's Studies" that doesn't make central the issues that
have for so long been seen as separate from feminism because they are
not issues that can be separated out by gender - indigenous women's
work, for example, which indigenous women often do not call feminism
specifically because of their (correct) understanding of second wave
feminism; immigrant and immigration rights; racial profiling - a
Women's Studies that doesn't engage these issues as deeply as the
issues that white middle-class women see as central is a Women's
Studies that will continue to create disgruntled graduates who will
maintain that feminism is not a revolutionary movement and that they
are not feminists.  We can't know who these unhappy grads will be, but
they are out there, now, on blogs, writing about the class they took
last year that ignored trans issues or the persistent racism they felt
in their Women's Studies program.

Changing a name doesn't mean that these problems will automatically be
fixed, but I disagree with Sarah that it is about "duck[ing] and
cover[ing]" - I think it's about re-evaluating the state and future of
the discipline as well as the state and future of the feminist
movement, and that this is something that happens periodically and
that *should* happen.  It happens across disciplines, in fact - an
English Dept. becomes an English and Journalism Dept. or a Language
and Literature Studies Dept.  This does not signal the end of a
movement, simply the end of one era and the beginning of a new one.

As far as Wesleyan University is concerned, "feminist" may not be a
term people are using right now, but I've seen plenty of feminist
posting on Wesleying, a group-authored student blog.  As a graduate of
Wesleyan, I can see Wes students thinking they are "beyond" feminism
and wanting to come up with some more hip term - which is both a
reflection of Wesleyan arrogance AND the sense that feminism needs to
be updated.  I'd be interested to hear from any Wes faculty or
students who are on this list about their experience of feminism and
Women's Studies there.

I also don't think, as Sarah has implied, that this is necessarily a
generational issue - I mean, it's a generational issues in terms of
generations of feminism, but not so much in terms of our actual
generations.  I think it is unfair to imply that women over 40 take a
particular position on this - there are plenty of women over 40 who
count themselves as third wave, and plenty of traditionally aged
college students who count themselves as second wave.

However, I do take the point about the shift in tenure expectations
and the impact that has had on "free time," and Sarah said it much
better than I could.

Jessica

Jessica Nathanson
Director, Women's Resource Center
Augsburg College
Minneapolis, MN
nathanso  AT  augsburg.edu

It is convenient that rejecting a view of Women's Studies and feminism that
has traditionally associated feminism with other liberal political movements
has now opened the gaping chasm of unapologetic ageism.  I don't think it is
either necessary or accurate to assign stereotypes to any particular
generation.  I think it makes it even worse to introduce specific
chronological ages (under 40, over 40) as some sort of touchstone. I know
this became an issue in the earlier discussion referred to by Maryann, but
we all know that chronological age is no more a determinant of our thinking
than biological gender is.  For the feminists in my program, most of whom
are over 40, I believe that the key is self-actualization, which certainly
has some fluidity as a cultural construction itself.

Linda R. Payne
University of South Alabama
lpayne  AT  jaguar1.usouthal.edu

I'd consider myself third-wave, if forced to identify with a wave, but
I do not call myself a girl.  That's as much a stereo-type as is the
man-hating lesbian one, which we all so easily dismiss.

Some food for thought: The disdain on this list for multiple ways of
identifying as feminist is, perhaps, one of the symptoms in academia
that our students sense and a possible reason why they are
uncomfortable with the label.

One thing that I've been thinking about while reading these numerous posts
has to do with the students themselves. That is, regarding the topic of
program name change, are students opinions being solicited? I ask this
because many students I've talked with have overwhelmingly indicated a
preference for "Gender and Sexuality Studies" for a program name. There are
probably many reasons why they prefer this title, but one consistent answer
I hear is that these concepts make more sense to them in terms of the
contemporary widespread (i.e. global) and rapidly evolving changes at the
social, cultural, political, and juridical levels regarding sexed and sexual
identities.

Queerly,
Nolita Carbohydrate

-- 
Nelson Rodriguez, PhD
http://www.tcnj.edu/~wgst/faculty/rodriguez.html
Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Critical Theory in
Education
The College of New Jersey
www.tcnj.edu
School of Culture & Society
http://www.tcnj.edu/~culture/
Bliss Hall, Room 116
P.O. Box 7718
2000 Pennington Road (for UPS and FedEx)
Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
E) wgst  AT  tcnj.edu

I absolutely and completely agree. We all need to a better job of
creating space for a range of feminist identities.

Alpha DeLap
University of Washington
Information School

>>We all need to a better job of creating space for a range of feminist identities.

But is feminism primarily an identity? Or is it a substantive
political position? I think it's the latter. I think feminism has
propositional content, and that if it's turned into an identity and
then a range of identities...then the propositional content is
diluted, or just washed away altogether.

People don't generally talk about creating space for a range of
socialist identities, or libertarian identities, do they? Political
views are political views, and if you create too much 'space' for them
then they turn into something else. I don't think feminism has yet
been so successful that it's time to turn it into something else. I
wish.

editor  AT  butterfliesandwheels.com
------------------------------
Ophelia Benson, Editor 
Butterflies and Wheels
www.butterfliesandwheels.com
------------------------------

Ophelia wrote:
"But is feminism primarily an identity? Or is it a substantive political 
position? I think it's the latter."

I would argue that, regardless, there are more than one of them.
Jessica Nathanson
nathanso  AT  augsburg.edu

[most of message omitted]

Lastly,  Ophelia is right that it is incorrect to assert feminism as a field
of inquiry at all.   Women's Studies may be a field of study but the chronic
use [of] Women's Studies, Gender Studies, or Sexuality Studies, etc.
interchangeably with feminism is illogical.   I know there are a small
handful of Feminist Studies depts out there but that's about as close as it
comes.

Maryann Breschard
52 Women Films
mt  AT  52women.org
www.52women.org

Actually, Maryann, the extent to which you might not see "Feminist
Studies" might be tied to the recent contentions in these
postings. "Feminist Studies" often refers to critiques of Women's
Studies, feminist theories, and women's movement dominant
historiographies. I find it curious that those most invested in
resisting change often don't see "Feminist Studies."

"Feminist Studies" contingents of major national conferences,
divisions of national academic organizations, and new-ish journals are
emerging with greater fury and speed than Women's Studies deparment
name changes.

For example, here's the definition of the "Critical Feminist Studies"
Division of the national Cultural Studies Association (shameless
plug!!).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Studies_Association

It's also combined with a trend that any current PhD candidate can
tell you about: those of us in non-WS PhD programs are re-disciplining
ourselves for the more traditional fields -- Communications,
Sociology, Literature, Political Science, Anthropology,
etc. Anecdotally, I can tell you from the amount of private posts I
received in the past few days and from colleagues and friends
currently on the job market, young feminist post-docs are headed to
departments that don't call themselves Women's Studies IN ORDER to do
'feminist studies' (partly because WS is seen as so hostile.)

This trend is definitely rife for a Chronicle of Higher Ed piece.... 

Sarah


Sarah L. Rasmusson
Fellow
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH)
University of Illinois
srasmus3  AT  illinois.edu