the state of the field
As reported by the Seattle Times on July 23rd, the Women's Studies Department at the University of Washington has appointed David G. Allen to serve as the department chair. The issue, as some have pointed out, is the fact that a man has been appointed to the top position in the women's studies department. Recently some bloggers that I read regularly have been discussing the issue. Among these folks as well as feminists and those in the field in general, there are definitely some mixed feelings and it's an interesting issue to discuss.Gloriane of Someday, Somewhere who apparently studied women's studies as an undergraduate, makes some really valid points, saying
My professors and classmates shared stories of their experiences with issues like discrimination, abortion, eating disorders, body image, and family roles. When there was a guy in the class, which happened about three out of the six or seven times I took WS classes, he would offer the man's perspective, but that often turned the discussion into the man's perspective of women's oppression. One of the classes was about Jewish women in America, and the professor, big surprise, was a Jewish woman. There were only a couple Jewish students in the class, but we benefited immensely from hearing about their experiences with faith, family, holidays, schools, society, and on. The professor chose amazing literature and led some of the best discussions I had in college. I don't think a non-Jewish professor would have made it as rich a course.
I both have to agree and disagree with her experience. My undergraduate school had a very new but strong women's studies program while i was there and since i've graduated has switched it's name women, gender, and sexuality studies and appears to be flourishing. The experience described above about sharing stories was very true, especially in the intro courses (one of which i TAed during my senior year). In retrospect I see that experience as being very important to the process - similar to the consciousness raising movement in feminism happening in the late 60s - early 70s. Women realizing that their experiences, both positive and negative were similar, usually crossing racial and class lines.
I was an english major and spent much of my time reading black authors. I took african american literature classes, classes on black women writers, and honestly, i had a white female teacher - Stacey Steinberg. She is a brilliant and gifted teacher, and took me seriously in the academic arena which, as a sophomore in college, i wasn't used to. I don't think that she provided me with a learning experience that was any less rich than it might have been had my professor been an african american woman.
To Gloriane's post on Someday, Somewhere, Mike and Bill respond with some valid questions and arguments. Mike later makes his own post about the issue, laying out how he feels that Dr. Allen will be effective in his post.
In all honesty, I feel that anyone teaching in a field for 15 years, and especially in a field which is in such a constant state of flux as is women's studies or gender studies, has something interesting to bring to the table. Dr. Allen seems to be well supported within his department, from what I have read. I believe that men certainly have a place in women's and gender studies. However my issue is that the higher up you get in academia, the fewer women you see. For whatever reason this is true, i do wonder what precedent it sets when out of 10 women's studies programs in the US where one can earn a PhD, one of those department chairs is filled by a man. I'm worried less about his effectiveness and more about what seems to be a standard, even in professions which are majority female, nursing, librarianship, etc., a higher percentage of the authority figures in the field are male than the male/female ratio within the profession itself.
Mike also provides well thought out, if detached view of the field of women's and gender studies, culminating with the thought that,
One last note, in my view Women's Studies is a misnomer. The field should be called Feminist Studies because it's not a study of women, but of feminism. Were the field really about women in general, there would be greater ideological and intellectual diversity on the faculties within the field.
I found this to be very interesting, having formally studied women's studies as an undergraduate, and as a graduate student I have always tried to apply what I learned in that pursuit to what I am learning now. I do think that women's and gender studies is a theory base which can be applied in virtually any field. That said, with all due respect, i'm not sure that i've ever seen a description of women's studies which is so generally off base. I doubt that anyone who has engaged in the pursuit of knowledge in this area would make this claim, especially if one's focus was concentrated in history, or labor studies, or any number of other areas. (edited to say) Feminism may be a component of women's and gender studies, but unless the department itself is labeled Feminist or Feminism studies (as it is at Stanford), it would be entirely inaccurate to simply call it Feminist Studies as Mike suggests.
As far as voices of those who are in the field are concerned, a friend of mine who is contemplating a PhD in women's studies, and who has a Master's in American studies, is very much in the field of women's studies as an adjunct lecturer at a MD community college. She posted her own feelings about the appointment, and i agree with her take on the matter.
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I'm not sure this adds much to the discussion at this point, but when Mike and I talked about this over the telephone, I mentioned that if the same restriction of actual representation were overlayed onto the humanities, onto art, you would have women creating only female characters, and Anglo art speaking only to Anglos, etc. It limits the human experience to speak only to what you know, without exploration.
I bring this up because I think the hired individual's qualifications, and the content of the NPR interview suggest that he is fully understanding of how his being in the position represents a cultural bias, and he was, I thought, thorough in going point-by-point with a lot of the arguments being blogged. The point of any academic field, to me, is to foster understanding, not to merely represent.
In light of Gloriane's examples of where she feels women may be less forthcoming in the classroom with personal issues, I think that, of course, no gender and no sex holds a monopoly of experience, or a
monopoly on interpretation of what are ultimately human issues of
identity, crisis, and recovery. I also think that identifying such issues as the domain of women's studies can stereotype the field into being viewed as more therapeutic than academic, about which I'm not sure I feel positively.
Anyway, I enjoyed your post.
I think you make a key point about fewer women higher up in academia. It's not the fact that a man is being appointed - its that fact that a woman isn't. Are there not highly qualified women to lead such a department - women just as qualified, if not more, then him? I suspect there are.
I just added a comment over at your friend Mike's, laying out exactly why I thought his discussion of the topic was ill-founded and poorly reasoned.
I think what often happens is the conflation of feminism-- a social movement-- with Women's Studies-- an academic field. They overlap, but cannot be described with the same terminology, or dissected by the same methods to draw conclusions about both at once.
Hi Sarah.
Great post. We obviously disagree. I think the departmental and faculty self-descriptions (as well as the publication subject matter, and the friend you link to for that matter) support my claim about the nature of the field.
Jackie (who I responded to in my space) made a similar statement about how feminist theorists can belong to any field. That's certainly true, which is why I was specifically referring to the field of Women's Studies and the role feminist theory plays in that field (which is clearly a dominant one).
The point being is not that you have to be in Women's Studies if you believe in feminist theory, but that if you're in Women's Studies it's overwhelmingly likely that you believe in feminist theory.
So when I say the department should be aptly named "Feminist Studies" I'm really saying that it should be named "Feminist Theory Studies" since it seems clear that is the theoretical rock upon which the field is founded.
-Mike
In response to Lauren's post here: during the original NPR interview (linked in Gloriane's post) Allen states that the search to fill the position was restricted financially and therefore by locality to persons already in the Women's Study department at UW. 15 years of Allen's experience in that field occured at UW, and he cites previous experiences elsewhere. Were the search broader, I think these questions would be fair, but as it was defined, it seems they chose a well experienced candidate from the available pool.
I also think that Jackie's comment here -- ["what often happens is the conflation of feminism-- a social movement-- with Women's Studies-- an academic field. They overlap, but cannot be described with the same terminology, or dissected by the same methods to draw conclusions about both at once."] -- is exampled in the language of Gloriane's original post, and it's that part of Gloriane's post with which I most disagree: that the appointment sets back opportunities for women to discuss personal experiences in relation to the classroom.
wow. thanks for commenting everybody.
bill - of course you're adding to the discussion. i do share the same concern as Gloriane to some degree. in regards to this comment In light of Gloriane's examples of where she feels women may be less forthcoming in the classroom with personal issues, I think that, of course, no gender and no sex holds a monopoly of experience, or a
monopoly on interpretation of what are ultimately human issues of
identity, crisis, and recovery. I also think that identifying such issues as the domain of women's studies can stereotype the field into being viewed as more therapeutic than academic, about which I'm not sure I feel positively., as well as your later comment in response to Jackie's comment i do feel as if this misses the experience of being in the classroom. and really this is my greater point -- to really understand why women's studies/gender studies isn't feminist studies, to the effect that, to really get what Gloriane, Jackie, and I are saying, I think you'd need to actually pursue the field of study a bit (and forgive me if you have and i'm not recognizing it). without that experience you really don't get what we're saying and is why the arguments you and Mike are making seem a bit glib.
bear in mind i was an english major as an undergraduate and my main focus was on female authors. while the intro to women's studies class that i took was interdisciplinary (co taught by male and female professors ranging in every field from psychology, to math, to philosophy) many of the classes i took were literature, philosophy, and critical theory classes. the purpose of art is to share the human experience. when you are discussing pieces like the yellow wallpaper, a room of one's own, bone black, sula, beloved, etc. they are about the human experience yes, but are, more specifically about the experiences and (sometimes) fictionalized accounts of western women. the western cannon is comprised mainly of white male authors. and in my experience, this is 90% of what we read in high school. reading literature where the protagonist is female, and the author is female to boot does provide a new in-road for personal identification. to deny that, and to deny or downplay the discussion that surrounds that in the classroom is to devalue the work itself. the professor which i mentioned before, Stacey Steinberg, talked to me about this after she moved from teaching at an institution where the students were primarily traditional (i.e. right out of high school) to a community college where her students were older and had more life experience. it is a profoundly powerful moment when a student or any reader can identify with a character or a piece of work. and for a student to read something and have the room to say, "hey this spoke to me because i felt this way", "i had this experience", "i had this experience but i don't feel this way at all!" is a pregnant moment in the classroom. this is true not only for literature but critical theory in women's studies. agreeing or disagreeing with it is often a result of life experience. while a classroom should not turn into a therapy session (and i have been in classrooms like this and there're terrible. actually any time this happened to me, it was literally never in a women's studies class and the teacher was always a man). i think it is a loss to say that the discussion of personal experience does not belong in the classroom.
Lauren - thanks for taking the time to comment! and i should have mentioned that in the article about the hire they did say that because of budget constraints they were not open to a wider search. (which is a whole other can of worms entirely). but, i'm glad you see my point!
Jackie - as usual i fully agree. I'm doing some readings into social movements this summer - you'd enjoy them. i'll send you the bib.
Mike - i disagree with you but you know that. :) i don't think that missions statements you provide on your original post support your statement. literally only one mentions feminism directly. while this may sound nitpicky to you, there is a broader point to be made here, which again, is something you may not recognize because as far as i know (and please correct me if i'm wrong) you've never spent any time pursuing this line of study. one of the greatest contributions to women's/gender studies (at least in my mind) occurs in the field of history. it's hard to argue that the experience of women in any culture have been adequately represented in historical accounts, whether it be in anthropological reports, history texts, etc. what the hell were they doing? will we ever know? and it's a profound loss. historians who study women in virtually any period fill in the gaps of our historical knowledge and provide a more complete picture of both cultures and specific periods in time. the pursuit of truth and knowledge is not in itself exclusively a feminist act. the real value in women's studies is providing support for this kind of work. the pursuit of historical truth is one of the areas where women's studies crosses fields and genres - what were women's contributions to math, to science, to gastronomy, to religious theory that we don't fully know about and aren't widely recognized?
feminist studies and feminist theory is only a facet of women's studies and to say otherwise is pure fallicy and negates this kind of study. yes, one can do women's studies in any field, but it took the recognition of the field of women's studies to provide the support for this kind of work as well as the room to move within the field and expand what can be included in the research.
Hi Sarah,
I enjoyed reading your response to my comments in your blog, and have enjoyed this discussion immensely overall -- though it is frustrating for these conversations to take place virtually. I'm no great typist, and the ideas being shared are nuanced ones. I wanted to remark on your thoughts and share some experiences of my own.
I have a a BA in English like you, though b/c I went to a small lib. arts college, we didn't have the benefit of size to support a women's studies department, though honestly, the English faculty were predominantly female (I know of one full-time male English faculty member during the time I was there among about ten FT English faculty), as was about half of the college administration -- so our classes seem more naturally imbued with the perspectives you and Gloriane have shared from departmental experiences -- those that deal with the predominance of a male perspective, the bias of the author, or even of the 'implied author,' the recognition and examination of women's contributions, and so of course I understand the practical and phenomenal shifts that can subtly or largely recast a work, or piece of literature in the reader's mind, and in how the reader interprets her own experiences. Conversations shared about violence, as well as body image, recovery, etc. were shared on a more personal level among my peers outside the classroom (and there were, for good or ill, many conversations on these topics). Because it was small department among a campus of, then, 1,800-1,900 students you saw the same faces often and were able to build strong and open relationships in general, I feel.
Which is maybe why I feel that too much of the personal brought in by students can force the instructor to redirect her class enough to lose sight of the underpinning experiences that define the effort -- that was my experience. Many students, male and female, and myself included, sort of loathed the introduction of personal information into the classroom's deconstruction of the literature. We wanted a 'direct' experience with the author without contemporary associations, or without our personal issues stitched into it -- those were conversations more appropriate outside of the classroom. This is a bias I continue to hold for no other reason than I think that students can sometimes accrue enough influence as to emphasize their experiences over the goals of the course, or of the original message (if there is one) of the work. I get from you that such a recasting is not inappropriate, but can be profoundly contributory. I agree to an extent, thought I think that leap is uncommon -- and perhaps less common now as popular cultures have overweighted the voice of the individual to the extent that there is often no need to connect personal experience to any larger frame. I believe the role of any undergraduate level of training (which is the level of experience most of the commentators in the blog discussion have come from in regard to Women's Studies) is to provide that framework into which personal experiences and knowledge-gathering can be contextualized.
Back to the issue at hand, which is the appointment of Allen: I am supportive because I think there is a need for representation of male experiences within the conversation of women's studies (though perhaps, fundamentally, I am confusing this with gender studies -- I did enjoy reading the definitions of three such programs that Mike found and posted and those definitions lead me to think that women's studies are an appropriate venue).
Having a male voice recognized in the larger analysis of the dominance of the male perspective in all aspects of our culture is fundamentally valuable, because there are situations in which even a male may face issues of voice or identity or of lack of representation within the perceived norms of what the predominant culture dictates. There are fields of study for some of these situations but not for all of them, especially is they do not overlap with issues of gender identification or sexuality. But to redraw Gloriane's examples, where does a man who has been raped go to find his views mirrored in even a pocket of society? There are books, but very few, and the topic isn't widely -- if ever, actually -- discussed. Where do men with body issues tied to shaping experiences of violence go? Professional counseling or therapy is the likely answer. But wouldn't having a voice or representation of these issues institutionalized provide the same value to identification, to understanding, as the "a-ha!" moments you describe occurring between women with voices of women's experiences?
Allen may not have had any experience in these situations (though that's no requirement for success in this or in any arena), but having a male recognized as an individual able to find a voice separate from the prescribed norm, which can contextualize a very similarly marginalized experience within a larger body of experiences -- that seems invaluable. Is there a better connection academically than with women's studies as you define it? Women have the advantage of having these opportunities for analysis institutionalized, whereas men with identical issues are forced to deal with them on their own, without support from the academic institutions. I believe that difference is because of a bias of expectations that these issues are the realm of women, but the appointment of Allen to his role as dean shows me that this may not always be the case.
Perhaps too it demonstrates that the acceptance of Women's Studies isn't nearly as precarious as it may have been even ten years ago -- as in genetics, variation is the forbearer of evolution.
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