Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joan Wallach Scott is the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her many books include The Politics of the Veil, Gender and the Politics of History, and Feminists Theorize the Political (co-edited with Judith Butler).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

WOMEN'S STUDIES ON THE EDGE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

JOAN WALLACH SCOTT Introduction: Feminism's Critical Edge........................................................................1WENDY BROWN The Impossibility of Women's Studies.................................................................................17ROBYN WIEGMAN Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure...............................................................39AFSANEH NAJMABADI Teaching and Research in Unavailable Intersections.............................................................69SABA MAHMOOD Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror........................................................81GAYLE SALAMON Transfeminism and the Future of Gender.............................................................................115ELLEN ROONEY Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies.....................139BEVERLY GUY-SHEFTALL WITH EVELYNN M. HAMMONDS Whither Black Women's Studies: Interview...........................................155BIDDY MARTIN Success and Its Failures............................................................................................169Works Cited.......................................................................................................................199Contributors......................................................................................................................211Index.............................................................................................................................215

Chapter One

There is today enough retrospective analysis and harangue concerning the field of women's studies to raise the question of whether dusk on its epoch has arrived, even if nothing approaching Minerva's wisdom has yet emerged. Consider the public arguments about its value and direction over the past half decade: Is it rigorous? Scholarly? Quasi-religious? Doctrinaire? Is it anti-intellectual and too political? Overly theoretical and insufficiently political? Does it mass-produce victims instead of heroines, losers instead of winners? Or does it turn out jargon-speaking metaphysicians who have lost all concern with Real Women? Has it become unmoored from its founding principles? Was it captured by the radical fringe? The theoretical elite? The moon worshipers? The man-haters? The sex police? Perhaps even more interesting than the public debates are the questions many feminist scholars are asking privately: Why are so few younger scholars drawn to women's studies? Why are many senior feminist scholars, once movers and shakers in the making of women's studies programs, no longer involved with them? How did women's studies lose its cachet? Is it a casualty of rapidly changing trends and hot spots in academe, or has it outlived its time or its value in some more profound sense? Does it continue to secure a crucial political space in male-dominated academia? What is the relationship between its political and its intellectual mission?

I want to consider a problem to one side of these questions that might also shed light on them. To what extent is women's studies still tenable as an institutionalized domain of academic study, as a circumscribed intellectual endeavor appropriate as a basis for undergraduate or graduate degrees? Given the very achievements of feminist knowledge about foundations, identities, and boundaries over the last two decades, what are the intellectual premises of women's studies now? What are the boundaries that define it and differentiate it from other kinds of inquiry? These are not abstract questions, but ones that issue from the very real conundrums currently faced by those of us in women's studies. Consider the following examples from my own program, one that is formally strong and robust with its five full-time faculty, two hundred majors, and introductory courses that annually enroll more than seven hundred students (and hence reach nearly one quarter of the undergraduate population of the university as a whole).

In the early 1990s, women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, undertook that frightening project of self-scrutiny known as curriculum revision. What brought us to this point is itself interesting. For a number of years, we had maintained a set of requirements for the undergraduate degree that comprised an odd mix of the academically generic and the political, requirements that were not coined all at once as a coherent vision of a women's studies curriculum, but rather had been pieced together in response to various and conflicting demands as the program developed. The generic: students were required to take a three-term sequence consisting of "Introduction to Feminism," "Feminist Theory," and "Methodological Perspectives in Feminism," a sequence marked by category distinctions notably at odds with the expansive understanding of theory, the critique of methodism, and the challenge to a meaningful divide between the humanities and social sciences that are all putatively fundamental to feminist inquiry. This meant that quite often our first project in these courses was to undo the very distinctions we had given ourselves, thus repeating our founding rebellion against disciplinary distinctions, this time in our own house. The political: the only other content-specific requirement for the major was a course called "Women of Color in the United States," in which students gained some exposure to the histories, literatures, and cultures of Asian American, African American, Latina, and Native American women, and white students in the course learned to "decenter themselves" while women of color spoke.

This strange combination of genres in the curricular requirements schooled our students in the isolated intellectual (and putatively nonracialized) character of something called theory, the isolated (and putatively nontheoretical) political mandate of race, and the illusion that there was something called method (applied theory?) that unified all feminist research and thinking. Most of the students loved the experiential and issue-oriented introductory course, feared theory, disliked methods, and participated somewhat anxiously in the "Women of Color" class. Hence, most women's studies students regarded the requirements as something to be borne and the major as having its rewards in the particulars of the elective courses they chose or in the feminist community of students the major harbored. Moreover, the limited and incoherent nature of these requirements as a course of study meant that our students were obtaining their degrees on the basis of rather impoverished educations, something women have had too much of for too long.

But what happened when we finally sat down to revise the curriculum is even more interesting than the desires symptomatized by the existing curriculum-in particular, the desire for disciplinary status signified by the claim to a distinct theory and method (even as women's studies necessarily challenges disciplinarity) and the desire to conquer the racialized challenge to women's studies' early objects of study by institutionalizing that challenge in the curriculum. In our curriculum revision meetings, we found ourselves completely stumped over the question of what a women's studies curriculum should...