Theorizing
Structures in Women's Studies:
Interdisciplinarities, Languages of Power & Access, Generations and Careers
Katie King, Women's Studies,
University of Maryland, College Park
(May 2002)
Contents:
Introduction: Methods Coming-into-being across Fields
of Power
This essay was written in the midst of my local feminist community's struggles
to create a new Ph.D. program in women's studies, and as we labor over the difficulties
of communication across disciplines and generations. Local historical developments
contextualize these struggles. We have new faculty who come from different disciplinary,
political, multicultural locations. Our university is restructuring economically
and departments are being pressured to pay for some of their operating expenses
with overhead from external funding, which means that some disciplinary studies
have become more advantageous to the department than others. Our women's studies
department is housed in the College of Arts and Humanities at a moment in which
the humanities are less valued, for institutional structural reasons that have
to do with having less access to such external funding, and for national political
reasons that associate the humanities and universities, not to mention women's
studies, with neoconservative and neoliberal critiques of political correctness,
as their objects. Perhaps most compelling, because we have started up a Ph.D.
in Women's Studies, calling upon a commitment on the part of our university
to our field and department, we are simultaneously also in a situation of increased
scrutiny and surveillance, externally and internally. As a women's studies faculty
we are pondering how to train academics in graduate level Women's Studies, for
what kinds of purposes; wondering who we will attract and want to attract; what
we have to offer them and what they will have to offer to our field and to women's
and other progressive movements.
Although these are struggles of local importance, that is local to our particular
campus in a U.S. state university system, they are by no means singular to us.
Other women's studies programs, not just in the U.S., also have concerns about
the politics of women's studies, about its varying institutionalizations and
resources, about its relations to knowledge production or discipline formation
or interdisciplinary projects or professionalization or social justice movements.
Indeed, these particular yet varying struggles might be said to constitute the
"discipline" of women's studies. (for the U.S. academy see Howe, 2000)
At the same time, globalization processes in their economic and political meanings
are strong forces pressuring our local questions, pushing them into distinctive
shapes at this particular moment in time. However local our questions appear
to us, they are also enmeshed in layers of globals: national and international
politics, large theoretical questions about knowledge production, social movements
across the globe. Yet however similar the large theoretical questions might
be to those engaged by other local women's studies locations on the globe, they
are also shaped by particularisms in layers of locals: institutional particularisms,
generational particularisms, and the multiple cultural intersecting political
identities that inflect the politics and theories of women's studies in each
location. [fn1]
Thinking simultaneously about both large conceptual questions and particularistic
programmatic concerns is what women's studies programs today are doing, as are
other departments. Universities today are thoroughly politicized and despite
neoconservative rhetoric this is not a simple product of "tenured radicals
from the sixties." Women's Studies programs are the result of large scale
and small scale social movements and their histories (Howe, 2000), which influence
legislatures, state and national, even as legislatures attempt to contain them
via budgets and other institutionalizations. Guessing how to position oneself
in relation to state missions is as important to U.S. academic women's studies
as how to teach feminist theories of positionality. While micro engagements
of power, such as within departments, have different ranges of influence and
different forms of positioning than more macro levels of legislature and capital
campaigns, let alone the macro structures of U.S. economic power, the pressure
of issues can move in each direction. These are some of the layers of locals
and globals that constitute the discussions today in women's studies about the
meanings of interdisciplinarity, which have arisen for some around new institutionalizations,
such as the development of Ph.D. programs, in the U.S. and internationally.
So this essay reflects that for the last few years I have been obsessed with
several sites of struggle that come out of these situations in U.S. women's
studies, only too affected by the ways such sites are politicized within and
by feminist politics, within and by academic politics, within and by national
politics. Sites of struggle that have particularly obsessed me include those
within departments and activist cultures over academic languages of power, translation
and accessibility; and those across campuses over meanings of interdisciplinarity
in feminist generations in relation to various tides of institutional processes.
Such varyingly "local" meanings--that is, centered in women's studies
in the U.S. academy and its histories and institutionalizations over the relatively
brief period of approximately three decades--are also of some global significance.
U.S. feminism has operated at times as a speciously named "global feminism"
both embraced and refused by other globally located local feminisms--sometimes
in alliance and solidarity with or against the U.S., sometimes as hopeful visions
of alternative possibilities for women modeled by the U.S. or positioned against
the U.S., sometimes in hopeful anticipation of economic and social advantages
vise a vise the global power of the U.S. or in rejection of such power.
Thinking in this way about what I call "layers of locals and globals"
I consider one new feminist methodology among others, an element in what U.S.
third world Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval calls differential consciousness.
(Sandoval, 2000) Sandoval suggests that globalization processes today are producing
simultaneously both a new "democratization of oppression" (what others
have called "hyperoppression") and a new "Global Citizen"
with emergent forms of subjectivity, that is, agency created within and by new
forms of subjection and resistance. (see also Hennessy, 2000) Sandoval's politics
is about engaging liberatory possibility; neither wholly celebratory or wholly
condemnatory, it is about wringing out possibilities out of the terrors of new
subjectivities under globalization. For some feminists and progressives such
a mixture of critique and visionary longing is considered "celebratory"
or utopian, no matter its criticality and despite its distinct divergence from
commercial utopianisms of technology, capitalism, and progress. (perhaps Ebert,
1996) For many progressives, any politics not engaged entirely in critical rejection
of globalization processes is politically suspect as another form of neoliberalism,
complexly implicated in new capital formations, and in the systems of hyperoppression
that accompany them.
Nonetheless, Sandoval's phrase "democratization of oppression" intends
a "third path" [fn2] that her description of "Third
World Feminism" also points to: one that assumes that such purity of political
statement and renunciation cannot capture the realities of the lives of unprivileged
peoples, whose abilities to maneuver through the terrain of globalizations are
the very condition of their survival. It is those abilities, a complex of collaboration,
refusal, imagination, resistance, analysis of power, and the translations of
power, that are the resources from which the liberatory skills of translating
power in the future will come. That more and more people in the world are drawn
under the web of oppression through globalization marks this strangely "democratizing"
shift she names so frighteningly, meaning that to survive more and more people
will have to learn the skills of analyzing power and translating it, thus bringing
into being this new "Global Citizen" out of great and lessor terrors.
"Differential consciousness" maps out possible positions of power
within a particular field of action and moves among them, shifting in emphasis
and direction in opposition to dominant exploitative forces, exploring each
position of power as a site of resistance, and laboring with difficulty to recognize
and act upon its liberatory potentials. Mapping out layers of locals and globals
is necessary then in a liberatory politics that understands itself as working
within, constituted by and in resistance to processes of globalization. Thinking
about and moving among layers of locals and globals is an element of the differential
consciousness of Sandoval's new Global Citizen. Feminisms are complexly agents
too in such global regimes of subjection and resistance, agents in layers of
locals and globals, that is, in local movements and global travels, in particular
meanings and in generalized ones, in theories that translate well and ill across
fields of power.
Feminist methodology, such as thinking in layers of locals and globals, and
theory, such as Sandoval's exploration of differential consciousness, such method
and theory are just coming-into-being from acts of translation across fields
of power. Often one learns to politically engage via newly emerging methods
and ways of thinking about thinking--that is, learns to know them when one sees
them, finding oneself and others using them--only in the midst of misunderstandings
and struggles, when previously held assumptions are ruptured by micro and macro
movements of power. Communities of struggle can be torn apart by such consequences
even when they have birthed such methods and thinking. It is as passionate prophecy
that Sandoval's scholarship and activism are animated. For myself as a theorist,
for my students learning to theorize, Sandoval is able to produce those pivotal
reframings of reality that shock us, shake us, enliven us. Indeed, provoke us
to commit ourselves to participate in new orders of consciousness, and to create
new social worlds. Sandoval takes us through and beyond what we have ever meant
by critique, expanding the horizon of meaning and possibility of theory as a
form of social change, of theory as the direct action of social movements (Sturgeon,
1995), of theory as that method through which we transform our relationships
to reality.
(Inter)interdisciplinarity as Differential Consciousness:
two eccentric models
Sandoval's first examples of differential consciousness are drawn out of a taxonomy
of feminisms, the legacy of both political struggle and academic teaching practice.
She describes four valorized forms of oppositional political consciousness that
reflect tactics of political resistance: equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist,
separatist. U.S. feminism has had its versions of these forms of oppositional
politics, and Sandoval has deliberately named them in this way to emphasize
feminism's location inside the struggles of many social movements, within the
U.S and globally. I have critically described how these four forms have been
canonized in U.S. academic women's studies as a history of liberal feminism,
socialist feminism, radical feminism and cultural feminism. (King, 1994) But
Sandoval also names a fifth form, which she calls the differential form, the
form that moves between and among the other forms, "a political revision
that denied any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical
subjectivity with the capacity to de- and re-center, given the forms of power
to be moved." (59) She names as the agency developing such differential
consciousness "U.S. Third World Feminism."
In my own women's studies department, attempting to communicate with colleagues
with disciplinary trainings about my experiences with interdisciplinary training,
I have offered this explanation of differential consciousness for two ways of
thinking about (inter)interdisciplinarity in women's studies. First, in a conceptual
mapping, as the kind of consciousness required to move among what I have called
"layers of locals and globals," produced at this historical moment
by the processes of globalization. Such locals and globals are pluralized and
dynamic because they are always relative and relational to each other, that
is, what is local in one context is global to another context and so on in layers.
Thus we use differential consciousness as we work through the struggles in women's
studies that are necessarily local and global in layers, particular to our programs,
state and other institutions, U.S. academy and politics, international academies
and international political struggles, grassroots, official, NGO-driven, and
so on. Second, as another way to describe what one could also call "a principled
relativism" required for communication across interests in committed groups
with great differences: one neither that liberal toleration and pluralism critiqued
by radicals and conservatives for being value-free, nor that god's eye view
relativism accountable to no one and no culture. Instead such a principled relativism
must simultaneously map out the layers of locals and globals, move among them,
value all of them tactically, name them generously, and commit to one or more
at the appropriate times with "strength, flexibility and grace," as
Sandoval says of identity politics, "enough strength to confidently commit
to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year;
enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to
the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's
formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed
to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice,
when their readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands."
(60) I have urged within our department such a principled relativism--a kind
of differential consciousness, which allows us to map many models of interdisciplinarity,
move among them, value all of them tactically, name them generously, and commit
to one or more at the appropriate times with strength, flexibility and grace--rather
than an insistance upon that ever receding (and I would claim, imaginary) entity,
the "truly" interdisciplinary, that which none of us ever instantiates.
In this spirit I describe two models of interdisciplinarity. I name these as
two among many, and I have deliberately chosen ones I attempt here to describe
in layers of locals and globals: I look to the work of two specific scholars
for a particular example of each, but try to name them also more abstractly
as models simultaneously. I have chosen these particular models to elaborate
for two reasons. First and most personal, these are the models of interdisciplinarity
that I use most often myself, both in my research and in my teaching. The two
scholars I name as examples have been mentors to my own intellectual projects,
trained in the same graduate program I took my own degree in, and are people
with whom I have often pondered the micro and macro movements of power in U.S.
academies and their epistemological consequences. The models each exemplify
fundamentally structure my own projects and arguments. Second, these models
are deliberately "to the side" of the ways of describing the interdisciplinary
that center women's studies, deliberately chosen as both complexly outside and
inside women's studies as it is institutionally instantiated today. In a U.S.
academic women's studies still dominated by generations with disciplinary trainings
for whom the "truly" interdisciplinary is often something imaginary,
I hope that these models speak to actual interdisciplinary practices already
working today. I want messy models that can capture the fact that at this moment
women's studies can be simultaneously described as both an emerging interdiscipline
and as various kinds of (inter)interdisciplines; messy models that help us theorize
practices.
The first model I call "A PROJECT BECOMES A NEW FIELD" and the scholarly
example I call upon is the work of William Pietz on Fetish Analysis. In this
model an intellectual project requires a trajectory through several disciplines
and / or interdisciplines, subfields, specialist areas, thematic analyses. The
analysis of globalization processes themselves over a broad range of time are
essential to this project. Pietz, in order to historically and materially analyze
ideas and actualities of "the fetish," has to travel through the fields
of religion, anthropology, psychoanalysis, economics, history, postcolonial
theory, transnationalism, and politics. This doesn't mean the project requires
mastery of all these fields or all of world history, but it does require being
conversant with their materials and their practitioners, and to have some abstract,
or "meta" location, in this case, paradoxically, the project's very
specificity, from which to map these fields historically and epistemologically.
Thus, a subject that is specific in meaning in particular fields, that is, "the
fetish," is newly produced across them, and such specific meanings can
be compared, then noticed to have relationships among them. [fn3]
This project necessarily entails not only the use of several methods, but indeed,
the development of new methodology. Such new methodology is abstract enough
to travel through disciplinary and historical locations. Some other methods
may be borrowed from one discipline to be used on what are the object of study
understood in the usual area of another discipline. Methodological and theoretical
eclecticism are preconditions for the development of this new methodology, in
layers of locals and globals. As this methodological mixing occurs, the new
object of study and the new field become virtually one new thing.
The new methodology developed becomes useful to other scholars who work in those
disciplines, but who also come to locate themselves in this new field. In Pietz'
case, his work and that of others, comes together in the book Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse (1993). In 1995 he is invited as keynote speaker to an international
conference on "Border Fetishisms" at the Research Center for Religion
and Society at the University of Amsterdam, and in 1999 to other international
conferences in London and Tsukuka, Japan. Pietz' training is in interdisciplinary
methods with an emphasis on theory and "meta" analysis; that is, a
training in development as well as use of new methods and theories. When such
a training is successful it creates new forms of expertise. Pietz is an independent
scholar today, with attendant freedoms of time and location, but also lack of
institutional supports. He is also a labor activist with the Green Party in
L.A.
The second model I call "DISCIPLINES AS WORLD VIEWS" and the scholarly
example I call upon here is the work of Sharon Traweek on Particle Physicists.
In this model an intellectual project develops an unexpected point of view in
relation to what appears at first glance to be perhaps a conventional subject.
Particle physics as an institutionalized practice--rather than the subject matter,
practiced by physicists--is usually studied by historians or philosophers of
science. Traweek deliberately takes up another "disciplinary" location--anthropology--to
study "the people" of particle physics in two cultures, Japan and
the U.S. The object of study shifts as the point of view alters how such study
should be constituted now--"the people" of particle physics are emphasized
and newly valued, as one discipline is "substituted" for another unexpectedly.
These defamilarizing effects however make it clear that this is not a simple
substitution of one discipline for another, but a strategic intervention into
the values and "world views" of several disciplines. Traweek's work
calls into question the assumptions of the disciplines and interdisciplines
of history of science, philosophy of science, particle physics, anthropology,
area studies and science studies. All of these are called into question even
as the point of view of anthropology is taken up strategically and allows for
geopolitical comparisons. Traweek's meta-characterization of "anthropology"
is playfully serious, highly self-conscious and meta-historical. At times she
deliberately uses methods and visions of anthropology in their most traditional
and mythic form. Such meta-analysis of the field is so self-consciously displayed
that it approaches parody. This is in analog to the mythic forms of "the
scientific method" that play prominent roles in her analysis of the values
of particle physics and their material construction in the U.S., and, through
the comparison to Japan, show up the local cultural assumptions embedded in
such "global" abstractions as "the scientific method." Such
display of this traditional form of her academic discipline is also pedagogically
deployed: it allows her to explain her project to people not conversant with
the most current methods of anthropology and its postmodernisms and allows her
to spend her time explaining the particle physicists rather than this current
anthropological methodology, just as the deployment of the idea of "the
scientific method" allows scientists to more easily demonstrate complex
projects to lay audiences, since each mythic form answers the expectations of
those not in the fields of anthropology or the sciences.
A theory and history of disciplines is required to think about using and challenging
disciplinary assumptions in this way, in layers of locals and globals. Such
an approach is easy to misunderstand. It confuses those for whom their discipline's
world view is unreflectingly "true": for example, after a public lecture
on her work, Traweek is approached by a particle physicist who complements her
description of the intellectual community but is troubled by the way she has
framed her commentary, saying "it's all true, but I don't understand why
you talk about it as if there could be some other way to do this...." Such
an approach may also confuse those who see their discipline "parodied."
Some anthropologists might misrecognize Traweek's investments in the most current
debates in anthropology, misunderstanding the method of contestation and the
reconceptualizations of anthropology and anthropological authority.
Indeed, this approach is about developing methods for new forms of interdisciplinarity
and scholarly authority that are a collective political project. When the method
is understood, it becomes a paradigm for a new approach in Science Studies,
and a new subfield in anthropology. Her book, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World
of High Energy Physicists (Harvard, 1988), has had just such an influence. One
of varying interventions in Science Studies with their alliances and divergences,
within the subfield feminist technoscience studies, Traweek's career has traveled:
from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program; to Rice University's Anthropology
graduate program under the leadership of George Marcus in a new contested reconceptualization
of the field and its inscriptions of itself; to UCLA's History Department, its
History of Science subfield, and within that hired to help put together a new
Center for the Cultural Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine; meanwhile
always back and forth between Japan and the U.S. comparatively. To engage in
this form of interdisciplinarity and comparative studies one must either be
trained in interdisciplinary methods and / or in several disciplines, as Traweek
was, in several graduate careers. This model of interdisciplinarity takes up
studying how academics are trained in specific disciplines in specific nations
under the regimes of globalization as part of the project, highly self-conscious
analysis of the production of scholars in the relevant fields. Because the method
is open to misunderstandings, it helps to have been conventionally trained in
multiple fields so as to have the academic authority to be heard in those fields
sympathetically, even while the production of such authority is analyzed. Such
training when successful, creates new forms of expertise, and new geopolitical
consciousness.
Using the Models: Discovering Assumptions in the Course
of their Violation
My larger point is that people who do interdisciplinary work are likely to use
several models of interdisciplinarity, at different times and to serve different
purposes, that they move through them in a way similar to that described by
Sandoval as the differential movement among forms of political consciousness.
Although some models are more appropriate for the work of individuals (perhaps
the two I just described in terms of the work and careers of individual scholars)
and some are more appropriate for the work of groups (for example, the model
some refer to as "multidisciplinarity," in which scholars trained
in specific disciplines collaborate together on a project, and where, therefore,
it is the project rather than the scholars that is interdisciplinary), in practice
individuals and groups move among these models, sometimes very self-consciously,
even with difficulty, other times rather seamlessly and unconsciously. Interdisciplinary
programs are in fact reservoirs of multiple models of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity,
and their denizens deploy the models sometimes carefully and sometimes carefreely.
Personally, I valorize those whose "interdiscipline" requires them
to become beginners, over and over, to give up mastery and to open up to risk
and experimentation, connection and mixing, enthusiasm and translation. These
are also elements of women's studies that reemerge again and again, just as
the impulses to mastery, depth, and certification also emerge in the processes
of institutionalization and professionalization. Translation among disciplines
and interdisciplines, among those preoccupied by risk and those preoccupied
by professionalization, among those whose ideas of politics are outside the
academy and those whose politics are inside it, such translation is the necessary
ground for communication among the varying constituencies and multiple cultures
of women's studies. What I have learned from doing interdisciplinary work in
women's studies is how many assumptions about audience and about shared professional
discussions I and others take for granted and, indeed, police. Again and again,
I discover my own assumptions in the course of their violation, and my own impulses
to forget again this knowledge.
Disciplinary and interdisciplinary workers necessarily keep rediscovering that
others do not appreciate the very grounds for discussion, do not use words the
same ways, do not value the very forms of argumentation. Sometimes we pull together
closely in our specific subdisciplines, or our particular interdisciplines,
our intellectual communities, our political communities, to counter these terrible
discomforts, closely negotiating language, evidence and argument. For some,
such close negotiations come to define women's studies, or interdisciplinarity,
or good politics, or good scholarship, or a good Ph.D. program. But we have
to constantly reframe and reconsider how will those of us interested in intersections
in women's studies speak? to ourselves? to each other? to which particular "each
others"? how will we become aware of, locate and teach each other our own
languages, tacit argument-forms, jokes and techniques of representation? when
will we center ourselves and our groups and when will we decenter ourselves?
when will we feel left out and when will we aggressively include ourselves?
In women's studies these truths become only too obvious at particular moments
in time, in particular locations, and in relation to highly contested political
engagements. Feminist experiences require that our tolerance for such wide-ranging
misunderstandings be fairly high; indeed we all have to take them rather as
the very condition of (inter)interdisciplinary communication.
My own research projects tend to depend upon the model in which a project becomes
a new field. To some extent I see work in women's studies very broadly understood
within this model, created over time by many people who have worked in multiple
sites and with multiple agendas. Some intended to create a new field, some find
themselves within this new field without having intended it, a few may even
feel forced into this field when their own ways of understanding their work
might name it differently, or when another job opening would have been preferred.
Similarly, I see work in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered studies (its
newly institutional naming in my local location) also very broadly understood
in this way. Both women's studies and LGBT studies are the results of social
movements in their layered local and global manifestations. Yet for a long time
I have also seen myself laboring with others to create an overlapping new field,
what I call Feminism and Writing Technologies. In the course of engaging in
my own intellectual projects I come to understand them as connected in intention,
materials and methodologies, I see them within several intellectual and disciplinary
and interdisciplinary traditions, associated with and critiquing several newly
connecting bodies of literature, and with an intellectual mission. I desire
to make connections to other scholars working on similar critiques, similar
materials and methods, with comparable or competing intellectual missions and
visions. Thus I come to believe that my and others' projects are converging
in this new field and I labor to create materializations of such a field: previous
essays, talks and collaborations, my next book, web sites, classes; in the future
perhaps conferences, collections, and so on. To what extent others will share
my vision or provide other competing visions or shift the terms of collaboration
and materializations is happening now and in the future, and those contestations
will or will not produce this new field, or other intellectual possibilities.
Other interdisciplinary consolidations of fields also in convergence with this
new field but not equivalent to my vision of it might be named in phrases like
"the history of the book," or "cyberculture studies," or
"studies in orality and literacy" or "cultural studies of science
and technology."
At the same time, the disciplines as world views model is one I move in and
out of constantly as well, and the one I am most likely to use pedagogically.
I find it particularly useful for training graduate students in women's studies.
[fn4] The self-consciousness about disciplinary and interdisciplinary
training that the world views model emphasizes is useful for different students.
For those who see themselves taking a certificate as a form of certification
and professionalization, and especially for those who intend a Ph.D. in Women's
Studies, we are able to consider the meanings of professionalization through
a feminist analysis of the gender, race and class constitution of the academy,
in the U.S. and elsewhere, over time. Thinking of disciplines as world views
allows students to think of themselves as resources from their disciplines,
interdisciplines, various trainings and activist experiences to their feminist
cohort, translating materials and forms of argument and evidence from all their
varying fields to others, thus also learning a self-consciousness of such disciplinary
and political specifics. This kind of self-consciousness makes it possible for
students to consider how to critique the methods and values of their fields
(including women's studies), and to reflect on the internal and external critiques
of feminists and others. It gives them some handle on the canonized critiques
of other disciplines that create their own disciplines' and interdisciplines'
boundaries and analytic languages and to consider how feminism participates
in these border disputes. It raises the possibility of women's studies as an
interdiscipline in the making, as well as an intervention into existing disciplines
and as many (inter)interdisciplinary projects. It raises issues of fields produced
within relations of power and hierarchy and generations, and how graduate training
reproduces those relationships or alters them. [fn5]
Reflecting on the world views and contestations of disciplines and interdisciplines,
inside and outside of particular fields and institutions, allows students to
consider their own beliefs and biases. Especially it allows us to track the
movements across fields of feminist concerns, subjects, methods, themes, and
to ponder the similarities or difference in their meanings as they move from
one disciplinary site to another, from one political generation to another.
This allows us to see how even disciplinary misunderstandings or misrepresentations
can lead to feminist insights, or to be sophisticated about the possibilities
of analytic problems in this kind of movement. It helps us to think in complex
ways about what it means for feminists to translate work across disciplinary
ranges. It makes it possible to map out disciplines and interdisciplines, move
among them and reflect upon them in layers of locals and globals, using differential
consciousness.
Similarly, to discuss the (inter)interdisciplinarities of women's studies, one
has to see women's studies as both local and global in layers, as one possible
"global" category that might be materializing as a new interdiscipline
in the U.S. academy and elsewhere, as many locals of institutionalizations particular
to specific places and activist histories and academic structural integration,
as varying political and scholarly visions, well and incompletely instantiated,
as many globals in many countries with different feminist agendas and different
histories of what counts as feminism, work on women, and political change, and
so on. Interdisciplinary methods and models in women's studies are complexly
inside and outside and overlapping these various layers of locals and globals
of women's studies. This is why I do not feel the necessity to choose for the
two examples of interdisciplinary models two scholars working specifically in
the field of women's studies or in programs or departments in women's studies.
Indeed to do so, mis-shapes these complexities in practice.
In layers of locals and globals "women's studies" is both larger and
smaller than women's studies programs and departments, is also inside, outside
and overlapping with them and with "feminism" in its many varying
meanings. To restrict examination of women's studies, feminist theory or feminist
(inter)disciplinary methods to those inside specific institutionalizations of
women's studies is to misrepresent the practices of women's studies locally
and globally, now and in the future. Traweek's work is explicitly within the
intellectual communities named as Feminist Technoscience, within Gender Studies
as a rubric, and includes studies focused on women in particular, yet women's
studies as an institutional location has not figured prominently in Traweek's
career. Pietz' work is not explicitly feminist nor focused on women or gender
as valorized nodes of analysis, but it is continually about power, about historical
and materialist analysis, and is progressively political and activist. He has
consistently collaborated with feminists and used, valued and promoted feminist
scholarship, and his work has proven to be fundamental for those who are explicitly
feminist who have produced versions of fetish analysis that participate in the
new scholarship on women, on gender and sexuality, and in women's studies. Women's
studies in layers of locals and globals moves differentially among the instantiations
of gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, studies of power, social structure
and racial and class formations, and a variety of social movements in overlapping
alliances, coalitions and political generations, inside and outside the academy.
Reframing Feminist Politics of Access, Accessibility
and Languages and Technologies of Power: Not the Dream of a Common Language
"The Culture Wars" is one way of naming struggles in layers of locals
and globals for positions around education and its materialities of knowledge
production (including disciplinary battles over empiricism and deconstruction),
generationally different histories of activism and academic labor, globalization
of information technologies and new forms of intellectual property, and passionate
and spirited politics, revolutionary and religious, intellectual and anti-intellectual,
on the right and on the left. (Inter)interdisciplinary struggles in women's
studies are also layered in locals and globals around academic technical languages
and technologies and their political meanings. Anti-intellectualism and progressive
movements have a long companionship in U.S. politics, through critiques of elites:
their educations, their consolidations of power through social relationships,
their access to privilege, their ideological and economic control of media and
property; broadly, the conditions of labor and educational technologies. U.S.
universities and education itself figure as both instruments in the reproduction
of elites and as democratizing destabilizations of elites. Women's Studies as
a creature of U.S. universities, struggled for in the cauldron of social activism
in political generations from the sixties into this next century, is also implicated
in the formation of elites and in their subversion. "The politics of difference,"
"diversity," and "multiculturalism" are overlapping and
politically inflected ways of promoting versions of identity politics and their
destabilization of elites within women's studies, the U.S. academy and "American"
cultural ideology.
Feminists have often practiced various politics of renunciation: from contemporary
commercial boycotts in the recent past against Nestle baby formula and current
boycotts against products produced by child labor, to hunger strikes in the
histories of struggles for suffrage. When I teach my course on feminism and
writing technologies, many of my students' political impulses are to practice
such politics of renunciation in relation to "new technologies" as
they define them: as too "male," as not available democratically to
all, as elements in globalization processes that contribute to hyperoppression
globally. Through such political analysis and practice, students struggle both
to rationalize and to challenge the anxiety and avoidance of certain "technologies"
they feel, as the recipients of processes of socialization of subordinated social
groups. At the heart of the course is an intervention into the assumptions students
bring to the term "technologies." My point is to convince students
that technologies are something they use without these conscious and unconscious
anxieties all the time, although they may not think of these objects as "technologies"
in the sense they consider those alien, "male," anti-democratic technologies.
The point of the course is to analyze technologies--especially those like the
alphabet, a pivotal writing technology with many ideological meanings--as sites
of struggles for power that feminists should engage rather than renounce.
Trying to persuade students to struggle with even the analysis of technologies
is flying in the face of both their anxieties and avoidances as well as their
renunciatory politics. Both they and I have strong material considerations:
many of my students are commuters, often with less access to computer equipment
and software as members of particular socioeconomic groups, or with little time
to use labs at school given that they have to work and / or have demanding family
responsibilities. These people are often not the market that the so-called "new
technologies" were manufactured for. Not surprisingly, as members of disadvantaged
groups, they are very concerned with the ways new technologies create new forms
of inequality. They are not in a position to spend large amounts of income on
new commodities that become outdated very quickly, and they feel, rightly, that
these concerns are justifiably feminist, anti-racist and politically progressive.
Still, commuters who do have access to computer resources find that doing many
kinds of work from home on their computers helps with their time and distance
problems, students who don't have their own computers find some camaraderie
in collaborating with others working in the computer labs and helping each other
out, and overall, most find that the kinds of work and research they do using
the internet and the web at the very least makes everything just a bit more
fun, more enlivening. For those who care about activism, many kinds of identity
politics are now proliferated on the web and the meanings of local and global
politics shift when groups can connect with each other. Others discover web
pages as ways of communicating with the world (sometimes realistically, sometimes
romantically). Teaching with and about technology more and more requires teaching
strategies that do both questioning and justifying learning new technologies,
addressing social concerns for those who have not thought about them at all
and those who are sometimes virtually paralyzed by them, and that include a
lot of coaching and handholding as well as encouraging risk-taking and rewarding
mistakes--if we are not to allow the knowledge of such new technologies to be
the principle apparatus of stratification by, race, gender, class, nationality,
ability and geography.
Such questioning and justifying, coaching, handholding, and addressing social
concerns is substantially similar to what I have to do to teach feminist theory
as well. My students are also not sure that "theory" is not some "male"
educational technology that they should properly renounce. They find the technical
and / or disciplinary languages of some theories very difficult to learn, and
the kinds of thinking involved not intuitively comfortable. This leads them
to wonder if perhaps "theory" (in the singular) is not inimical to
women and, more generally, to all socially disadvantaged peoples, part of the
educational apparatuses that stratify by race, class and sex, and that work
to reproduce elites (and, of course, there are times and places for and kinds
of theories that might properly be described in exactly these ways). Feminist
distinctions between theory and practice often convince them that theory-in-the-singular
is opposed to political practice, that one does either one or the other, one
inside the academy, the other outside. Nor it is it only students that feel
this way about new technologies or this singular "theory." These are
concerns broadly held in women's studies, where the politics of accessibility
in the U.S. is linked with multiculturalism, with that long standing progressive
concern about intellectualism and the reproduction of elites, and where the
renunciation of theoretical languages is often held to be a political good.
"Accessible language" as a key phrase in women's studies is also invoked
in interdisciplinary contexts. Feminist journals with both academic and political
histories may explicitly instruct their authors to write in language not particular
to a specific discipline, but also implicitly mean language that fulfills a
feminist injunction against elitism as well. What language it is that does that,
however, calls to mind Adrienne Rich's title, The Dream of a Common Language
(1978). In practice such guidelines are fulfilled within negotiations by specific
political and academic communities, and may involve unreflected upon disciplinary
and interdisciplinary assumptions. Communication in feminist journals across
disciplines is tricky: how do you convince folks in another field that what
you are talking about is worth their knowing? In your own field, there may be
some consensus that this subject matter is important, but that can be a presumption.
Having to realize that, and having to come up with ways of persuading other
feminists why (you think) they should care about your research and its intricacies,
can be frustrating for scholars. Beyond that, having to explain to activists
why this scholarly concern is of importance to their community projects (and
it may not be) can be even more difficult. Earlier in the life of women's studies
in the U.S., when a single scholar / activist could read a large proportion
of the work written in English by a still relatively small number of feminists
with access to publication, distributed in one's local area, perhaps interdisciplinary
feminist work was written with fewer disciplinary presumptions, but also it
was received with greater generosities of time, interest and political affinity.
But given the proliferation of international feminist scholarship, no scholar
can read it all, and no one can afford not to be rigorously selective.
Particular feminist theories (explicit and implicit) may be vehicles of selection,
and / or translation devices among such communities of interest. They may be
abstract enough to move among subject areas and be of use with different contents
to name and reframe political values and assumptions. They may be the languages
through which negotiations over feminist and scholarly value can occur. Some
activists may appeal to feminist and other theories themselves to conceptualize
political projects, to understand why and how they work and don't work, to make
coalitions between social justice projects and communities, to understand their
local practice within an larger, "global" analysis, to create intellectual
communities that will practice activism together with a common set of political
visions and values; or they may simply and complexly instantiate such presumptions,
what Noel Sturgeon calls "direct theory". (Sturgeon, 1995) Accessible
languages, accessible theories, accessible technologies are sites of struggle
within feminism, struggles for authority, for power and agency, for usefulness
and efficacy, for careful (full of care as well as authentic and precise) thought
and action. These issues of accessibility are critical to my students and to
many of my feminist colleagues across my university, and communicating and justifying
my own work is almost always also a communication and justification of my uses
of technology, theory and language, not to mention interdisciplinary methods.
[fn6]
For some of these students and colleagues the investment in accessible language
instantiates an ethic of giving back to communities that have supported and
/ or been the subject of their work. For others the care for accessible language
is about hoping to be heard finally by individuals and communities that have
never supported their intellectual longings. For some feminist scholars, writing
for one's "Mother" is a pattern of accessibility that signifies both
giving back and longing to be heard. But the phrase "accessible language"
(especially in the singular) begs the question, "Accessible to whom?"
[fn7] Indeed, that "dream of a common language"
that motivates presumptions underlying some forms of mass movement politics,
begs the question of whose language gets to be the common one? Historically
such common languages are usually the result of unequal powers in collision,
in which the losers surrender their distinctive languages. Such common languages
are the languages of the powerful. (Similar to so-called "global feminism.")
Indeed, the imposition of a single official language in nation-states may actually
be repressive, or alternately, may be the result of the negotiations of different
cultural communities striving for complicated national identities after a period
of colonial rule. Mostly, single official languages in nation-states signal
a history of colonialization, either as a colonial power or under the rule of
one. A feminist "Dream of a Common Language" requires us to forget
such questions as Whose language is this? what is its history, its politics?
what are its disciplines of reference, its communities of practice? Indeed,
it assumes that the "ownership" of such languages is obvious, rather
than in the flux of struggle.
Several Chicana feminist theorists have offered alternative metaphors and political
visions that entirely reframe this politics of accessibility. Gloria Anzaldúa
and others emphasize the spiritual, political and creative meanings of dialects,
ideolects, pidgin and creolized languages, and their salience, both material
and metaphorical, in border negotiations of globalization--current and historical,
in colonialisms, neocolonialisms and postcolonialisms. (Anzaldúa, 1987)
In such an understanding feminist theory could be simultaneously an infrastructure
of many such translations, and also different "objects" in feminist
communities of practice where membership is based upon commitment to a specific
and particular "object" feminist theory. (King, 2001) The politics
of accessibility shifts then, from the dream of a commonly understood, "clearly"
stated kind of pedagogical explanation for large common audiences to a much
more complicated and difficult matter of translation across fields and disciplines
of power, where at every moment power, and the struggle for it, is refigured
and moves, and in which the outcomes desired shift and change. (Pérez,
1999) Here again, differential consciousness comes into play, a valorized ideological
strategy becomes one among many, layers of locals and globals are self-consciously
analyzed or dynamically and tacitly intuited and instantiated. Complexity is
not renounced or made "clear" but is recognized as hard necessity.
Especially salient then are the partial failures of communication among the
multiple cultures, generations and (inter)interdisciplinarities in feminisms,
in layers of locals and globals. I have learned terms and ideas from the work
of feminist technoscience theorists Leigh Star (1999) and Lucy Suchman (2000)
useful for thinking about these problems. From Star descriptions and discussions
of "infrastructure" and "communities of practice" redraw
what is at stake for those inside and outside specific feminisms. (see also
Bowker & Star, 1999; and my discussion King, 2001) From Suchman I find a
model of knowledge that refuses to "hand-off" ideas from one site
of production to others, refusing to reinforce the limited spheres of knowledge
we have about each other, and the sometimes crude conceptualizations we have
about the work of others. She argues instead that claims on mutual learning
and partial, always inadequate translations demonstrate the need for new divisions
of professional labor, altering assumptions about knowledge production. [fn8]
I wonder about how we can actualize such new working relations among interdisciplinarities,
how we can, in Star's words "queer" the infrastructures within which
we work in (inter)interdisciplines. (1997)
A pedagogy of accessibility that depends too uncritically upon the dream of
a common, clear language suffers in its own powers of generative thought. [fn9]
A better pedagogy is one that continually reinvestigates the changing meanings
of underlying assumptions, and shows how to make new translations, rather than
to be the unknowing recipients of politicized meanings packaged as explanation.
Such feminist theoretical work produces students as agents in theoretical practice,
not consumers of pedagogical product. Working with the materialities and metaphors
of translation values that ideas in different languages are not exactly equivalent,
even if translatable. Partial translations, good-enough translations, literal
translations, poetic translations, the sense of the idea for a particular audience,
or from the sensibility of a particular translator, become analogies of communication
among feminist (inter)interdisciplinarities, uses of feminist theories, traveling
feminist methods. Mistranslation, deliberate, inadvertent, unavoidable, or even
fortunate, becomes an understood, if at times lamented, condition of (inter)interdisciplinary
communication. Artificial and invented languages, as also jargons and technical
languages, are explorations and conditions for new crossings of boundaries,
or are creations of fields coming-into-being and of new methods of thinking
about thinking only just barely grasped individually and collectively.
U.S. Feminist Political Generations and Oppositional
Consciousness
Pedagogical practice reifies a particular understanding of generational differences
in U.S. academic feminism. Two models of generational difference (as if each
were unitary, and as if each were mapped upon the other) are unselfconsciously
mobilized: teacher-student and mother-daughter. These models make generational
political differences appear to be diadic, pedagogical, age-stratified, successive,
and mutually exclusive; they make power differences among generations of feminists
appear relatively benign and "familial" (despite feminist critiques
of the power-laden institution of the family) and generational control appear
pedagogical (despite feminist critiques of male-structured pedagogies). [fn10]
Mid- and late-nineties examinations of feminist generations both mobilized and
subverted these two models in U.S. scholarly registers; for example, Nancy Whittier's
1995 monograph Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's
Movement and Leslie Haywood and Jennifer Drake's women's studies / cultural
studies 1997 edited collection Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism.
Whittier's book is a historical sociology of feminisms and feminist institutions
in Columbus, Ohio from about 1969 to around 1988. Third Wave Agenda describes
its collection of essays written by "feminists born between the years 1963
and 1973." Each U.S. university-press-published book is highly self-conscious
in its use of the terminology of generations; each depends upon different (inter)disciplinary
traditions and practices for discussions of U.S. feminist generations. Each
defines itself against the term "post-feminist," and against the media-saturated
critiques of U.S. feminism by authors like Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe. In doing
so, these authors deliberately locate themselves as grateful inheritors of the
activisms of earlier generations, disassociating themselves from the "rejection
of the mothers" in some versions of the mother-daughter model. As grateful
inheritors each book differently deploys the mother-daughter model, and within
the academic settings each describes, also the teacher-student one. However,
the diadic and mutually exclusive assumptions of these models are made more
complicated, and the assumptions of successive age-stratifications become highly
unstable in these analyses (even though age-grade is used as the principle of
selection in Third Wave Agenda).
That feminist generations are defined by age or life cycle stage is challenged
by Whittier, who self-consciously sees herself as developer of this generational
approach to social movements. Not age, but entry into activism defines Whittier's
generations, the moment when initially politicized. "Thus members of a
political generation have roughly the same 'activist age,' although their chronological
ages may vary. Political generations are made up of multiple, overlapping micro-cohorts
that enter the movement during the same era and share some commonalities."
(Whittier, 1995, 84) Within themselves generations are divergent, volatile in
"micro-cohorts." Micro-cohorts are defined by function in relation
to changing institutionalizations of feminist movement, and one could imagine
extending Whittier's analysis, examining other micro-cohorts defined by principles
overlayering those she discusses. I think especially of multiple cultural and
political identities, those with membership in several social movements, circulating
in the differential movement Sandoval names. (see earlier discussion of Sandoval,
2000) Such additional layering of micro-cohorts (and others could be imagined)
might dynamically refigure women of color and women of other identity politics,
or those who define themselves against identity politics, in U.S. feminist generations.
Whittier names these micro-cohorts for the feminist generations in her study,
and clearly she intends to generalize from Columbus, Ohio, to the U.S. more
broadly, perhaps with implications for other national feminisms. This is a tacit
generalization, however, without explicit discussion of what would be divergent
in various geographical locations even within the U.S., although her use of
the term "overlapping" suggests that the years she mentions might
be somewhat different in varying locations. Nor does she examine what membership
in multiple movements might mean for these micro-cohorts. The historical categories
she comes up with are: initiators (1969-1971), founders (1972-1973), joiners
(1974-1984) and sustainers (1979-1984). These four micro-cohorts make up one
political generation in the U.S., what many have called "the second wave."
Within the "next wave"--the next U.S. feminist political generation,
what some have called "the third wave"--she identifies two micro-cohorts,
tentatively the first two that she can see and describe. They do not have names
in quite the same way, not like these other functionalist categories. Rather
together they make up a new "post-feminist" generation in the U.S.
The first micro-cohort, reluctant to use the term "feminist" because
of its media associations, believed that feminist action had been beneficial
yet was convinced by early eighties media that feminism had completed its political
tasks. Whittier says this micro-cohort rethinks these assumptions over their
next ten years, becoming outspoken and pro-feminist. The following micro-cohort
more quickly reestablishes its continuity with the second wave and especially
with radical forms of feminism, that is, with disruptive social and cultural
action. Together, however, they redefine meanings of "feminism," creating
conflicts with the "second wave" generation, thereby producing a new
moment in feminist movement in the U.S. Whittier's interviews suggest there
"are relatively few connections between the incoming political generations
of the 1980s and the 1990s and longtime feminists, and they have constructed
collective identities that differ in key ways." (256)
What creates these generational and micro-cohort differences are local and national
historical conditions, layered in locals and globals: the state of the movement
itself including the frictions between micro-cohorts and generations, but especially
the kinds of resources available for feminist institution building, which shape
whether and what forms of institutionalization occur. For example, Whittier
reframes the development of so-called "cultural feminism," analyzing
it not as a political tendency (as Alice Echols does in Daring to Be Bad , 1989;
indeed there, a degeneration of radical feminism) but rather as a shift in sites
for feminist action as levels of resources shift in Reagan and post-Reagan "America."
"Many women's movement organizations folded, but feminist culture, which
had never relied on external funding agencies, survived...." (246) Indeed,
Whittier challenges sociological analyses of social movements and their tendency
to devalue cultural politics, insisting: "[c]ultural events sustain feminists'
collective identity, recruit new women to the movement, and provide a base from
which participants organize other forms of protest. More directly, cultural
challenges undermine hegemonic ideology about gender by constructing new ways
of being a woman that are visible to outsiders as well as insiders. Far from
being nonpolitical, such efforts are central to the survival and impact of the
women's movement." (250)
Boundaries between feminists and non-feminists, women and men, lesbians and non-lesbians, and between micro-cohorts can be permeable or rigid, can vary in meaning and importance, are ambiguous and shifting. In these terms Whittier discusses changes over time in feminist rejections of sexist language, divergences from and alliances with gay men, and the emergence of bisexuality as a valorized political identity. These are all examples of shifting boundaries between communities of practice that become more permeable over time. (Whittier notes that rigid boundaries are appropriate for small cadre organized politics but hinder mass recruitment.) Whittier maintains that while all these other boundaries have become more permeable over time, generational boundaries have not. The differences among micro-cohorts is rancorous at particular moments, but "[a]t some point, separate micro-cohorts cohere into a distinct political generation when the similarities among them outweigh their differences....[in the early 80s] differences among second wave micro-cohorts paled in the face of both the antifeminist climate and the divergent attitudes of younger feminists" (81)
I think of these feminist generations in analogy as overlapping kinds of identity
groups within the identity politics Whittier assumes. Such multiple identities
are privileged examples of the processes of differential consciousness, requiring,
as Sandoval has it, strength, flexibility and grace in moving among them. The
metaphor of rigid and permeable boundaries assumes that both sides of the boundary
are equally rigid or permeable, but I speculate that boundaries between the
micro-cohorts described by Whittier and the identities of various groups in
identity politics are not always equilaterally rigid or permeable. Thinking
of Nancy Henley's analysis in Body Politics (1977) I wonder whether a difference
between boundaries, in which on one side, they are either rigid or permeable
and on the other side, quite the opposite, signals important power differentials.
As Henley claims that it is the more powerful person who gets to touch or to
move into the space of the less powerful person in certain kinds of social contexts--say
male boss touches female subordinate, or pushes subordinate back up against
a wall--I would speculate that rigid generational boundaries might be maintained
by a more powerfully institutionalized generation over more permeable boundaries
maintained by a subordinated generation, say, students in the academy. As Sandoval
says that differential consciousness will be learned by those newly oppressed
under a "democratization of oppression," and draws its form from U.S.
third world feminists' movements beyond the political divisions of the "white
women's movement--I think of subordinate academic feminist generations more
likely to move between and among, knowing about, and sometimes identifying with,
the generational political concerns of the micro-cohorts of the second wave,
learning this differential movement. This subordination has pedagogical effects--as
Sandoval notes, differential movement produces a kind of knowledge--and academic
pedagogies allow, indeed require, students to recapitulate the political histories
of their feminist teachers. Of course, teaching and learning are power-laden
activities, with particular inflections today in institutions under shifting
globalized economies. (see especially Bousquet, 2002) Rather than a diadic teacher-student,
second wave-third wave political generational boundary though, Whittier's analysis
and notion of micro-cohorts, and the extension of her analysis through the ideas
of differential consciousness and movement among social activisms by those with
multiple identities--these would suggest that many layers of activist "ages,"
of experiences in different social movements with differing histories, are elements
in academic feminist "generations" and (inter)interdisciplinarities
in women's studies.
In Waves: Being Feminist, Doing (Academic) Feminism in
(Inter)interdisciplinarities
Different disciplines were "politicized" by women's studies, or "transformed"
by the new scholarship on women, or "transfigured" by gender studies,
in layers of locals and globals: in particular institutions and departments
and across them by diverse cohorts of feminists with a range of activist histories,
generations and visions, according to when the field was most directly engaged
by feminist scholarship and teaching. In other words, some fields may have different
feminist "activist ages," as Whittier uses the term, than others,
and some fields may be dominated by different feminist generations and cohorts
than others. (And similarly for particular departments in particular institutions
in their own local histories of lengths of activism and patterns of hiring and
resource allocation.) Patterns, practices and traditions of professionalization
within fields will have a great deal to do with these ranges of feminist possibility
and contestation and domination. In some fields the possibilities of feminist
work are inextricably tied to interdisciplinarity, while in others there are
depths of very disciplined feminist scholarship; or these divergences may be
generational, or may characterize subfields or particular objects of study.
Acts of translation from one disciplinary site to another, indeed from one subfield
or set of interdisciplinarities to another, are crucial to feminist scholarship.
Inherently involved in contests over and about disciplinary values, how to take
into account in such translations also the generations of women's studies is
likely to be insightful and full of mistakes, labor intensive, enthusiastic
and frustrating, and always contentious. (compare Suchman, 2000)
Whittier's 1995 book--like two subsequent feminist books, Noel Sturgeon's Ecofeminist
Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (1997) and Stacey
Young's Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics and the Feminist Movement
(1997)--intends an intervention into sociological and political analysis of
social movements revaluing so-called "cultural" politics. In various
disciplines and interdisciplines of U.S. women's studies, disciplinary generations
may differ across a feminist / non-feminist boundary, or within feminism and
feminisms; that is to say, in some fields there exist more than one feminist
generation (and / or salient differences across Whittier's micro-cohorts) or
there may exist only one feminist generation, depending upon the history of
feminist scholarship in that field. Younger scholars and activists in the U.S.
(these three, as also the editors of Third Wave Agenda, are identified at the
time of publication as either assistant professors in U.S. universities, or
in Stacey Young's case, an international activist from the U.S., with, for the
most part, this their first academic book), such younger scholars and activists
intending disciplinary interventions may need to negotiate U.S. feminist generations
and feminist (inter)interdisciplinarities as well as disciplinary world views
and values. Whittier's discipline of reference is sociology, Sturgeon's interdisciplines
of reference are women's studies and American studies, Young's is government
and politics and Heywood and Drake's are English and women's studies. For all
them, across disciplines and interdisciplines, claiming cultural politics as
an appropriate form of political action for feminists is a project with generational
investments. While Whittier, Heywood and Drake all name themselves in the "next
wave" or "Third Wave," such a generational location in Whittier's
terms is not especially clear for either Sturgeon or Young, not claimed by either
and probably not appropriate. As with other kinds of "identity groups"
in identity politics, however, it is tricky to create names or identities, to
name oneself and to name others. These are all political acts in identity politics.
[fn11]
I said earlier in this essay that "The Culture Wars" in the U.S. names
the kinds of struggles in layers of locals and globals for positions in philosophies
and materialities of knowledge production. Indeed I began by talking about my
questionings of the sites of struggle in U.S. women's studies and the ways all
are politicized within and by feminist politics, within and by academic politics,
and within and by national politics. These are some of the historical and institutional
conditions that "the next wave" generation of feminists are created
by, within and resist, and that their differential consciousness has enabled
them to survive, in 2002 "America," the feminist academy, and various
social movements. They have had to translate, for themselves and for others,
across disciplinary and generational fields of power within feminist scholarship
and activism, and these texts embody such political acts. They are courageous,
conciliating, tactical, offensive, belabored, brilliant, eclectic, dogged and
rigorous.
I match these examples of U.S. feminist generational political action to comparable
action in another arena of activist scholarship overlapping women's studies,
that is, in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered studies, and the rancorous
struggles over the politics of the term Queer. Here I am using the term "generational"
more loosely than Whittier, highlighting her "micro-cohorts" as generations
as well as her two generations in "waves." In my own experience "micro-cohorts"
are still contentiously in struggle and although I respect the interpretations
Whittier places on her interview materials suggesting that the boundary between
generations is more rigid than that within generations, I believe that such
boundaries are not as stable as this suggests. In micro-political terms they
are rigid and permeable situationally and in relation to structures of power,
indeed tactically rigid and permeable, even differently so on either side of
the boundary, and differ in their intensity as institutional and activist processes
alter from place to place, from discipline to discipline to interdiscipline,
and from activism to activism.
Indeed when I read Whittier I found it very difficult to place myself in only
one micro-cohort. In various ways I felt I was properly in all four micro-cohorts
of the second wave. I speculate that one element of this ambiguous self-identification
might have to do with experiencing several social movements simultaneously,
movements that overlapped in constituencies and in time periods, but which had
different histories and different rates of development and institutionalization,
different activist practices and traditions, and different political visions
and strategies. [fn12] I also believe that my experiences
of multiple overlapping social movements and multiple political identities requires
a kind of differential movement similar to what Sandoval describes, and I speculate
that such differential consciousness is a kind of knowledge others in similar
circumstances might also struggle for. I do not think that differential consciousness
is only experienced and struggled for by particular identity groups or particular
generations or particular movements, although I do believe Sandoval is quite
right to valorize U.S. third world feminism as the pivotal agency of differential
consciousness in the last three or four decades of U.S. feminism. (Sandoval,
2000) I do think though, that as we experience over time what Sandoval calls
the "democratization of oppression" later generations are more likely
to know differential consciousness intimately, as are other groups whose relations
to power shift over time, and that among groups and individuals this experience
of differential consciousness is uneven and not necessarily consciously reflected
upon, although learned though its mobilization, as Sandoval says, for "survival."
Earlier I mentioned that the teacher-student and mother-daughter models make
generational political differences appear to be diadic, pedagogical, age-stratified,
successive, and mutually exclusive; they make power differences appear relatively
benign and "familial," and generational control appear pedagogical.
Queer activists have worked hard to challenge these apparent "benign"
elements of intergenerational politics. The term Queer is one of great instability,
and this instability is the very condition of its intensive productivity now.
Uses of the term Queer vary from discipline to interdiscipline, from one activist
generation to another, and from one political vision to another. I would contend
that in no sense does this instability of meanings and politics make the term
meaningless. On the contrary, Queer is a concept coming to have material consequences
and powers. For example, for academic historians of sexuality, the term Queer
might be used to distinguish present-day categories of identity and analysis
from historically specific social-erotic behaviors and identities of the past,
in a politics that emphasizes historical discontinuities and a pedagogy that
works to demonstrate the "otherness" of the past. Thus "Queer"
provides a clear global "meta-language" that can be kept distinct
from a historically specific and local "object-language." [fn13]
In terms of political vision, Queer can also stand for new liberatory practices
not yet possible but envisionable, or even not yet envisionable, but longed
for. In global activisms, gay liberation, feminisms and lesbianisms, human rights
activism, the term Queer may function as an inclusive meta-term that similarly
might distinguish among global political visions and local sexual and social
behaviors and identities, or that might refuse to make divergences among identities
and behaviors, or among kinds of sexuality, or not privilege institutionalized
practices at the expense of more fluid meanings, histories, and acts, and /
or create alliances among those whose interests center in one or another of
these tactics of meaning and resistance. At the same time, Queer may also be
critiqued as a term so saturated by globalized commerce and capitalist appropriations
of sexual identities as to be only a creature of late capitalism, without contemporary
liberatory value. Queer may be primarily associated with academic cultural analysis
and rejected as theoretical and trendy; or Queer may be primarily associated
with disruptive avant garde activisms and rejected as politically self-destructive
and / or elitist. In various forms Queer may be critiqued for overvaluing a
discontinuous history of sexual politics rather than one with powerful and material
continuities.
As a generational politics the term Queer refuses earlier political visions,
institutionalizations and generational power. For example, Queer as a self-identification
can represent a politics that refuses dichotomies between heterosexual and homosexual,
or among those heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual and transgendered, or that
allies with sexual and sexual-ethnic minorities otherwise reduced by the term
heterosexual. It can valorize "coming-out" earlier in one's life,
during socially liminal periods of childhood or adolescence, perhaps made more
possible with greater social tolerance, and create generational cohorts with
such similar experiences. It can refuse the institutionalized authorities and
knowledges associated with women's studies or with gay studies and the politics
of their institutional actors and their pedagogies. Such generational meanings
may be conflated with postcolonial concerns as well, and thus refuse the imperializations
of gay liberation as a global movement, of human rights discourse as a liberation
within neoliberal paradigms, refuse feminisms and women's movements from so-called
developed countries and their resources for representation and propaganda. Queer
may also be used as either an internal or external critique of identity politics.
It can refuse what it calls "labeling," as an implicit critique of
identity politics or as a valorization of individualism. Queer sexualities may
be understood as sexualities that do not produce identities, or as sexual politics
that do not lead to identity politics or refuse it. Queer may mark anti-essentialist
political intentions, either within identity politics or in a critique that
assumes that all identity politics are essentially essentialist.
Conversely Queer may be used in a strategic essentialism to produce new collectivities
and alliances. In a generational politics of refusal, Queer may be used in a
limiting move, rejecting globally whole systems of political alliance and academic
and political literatures, as a way of processing overwhelming weights of materials,
inheritances, and illegitimate uses of generational and geopolitical power.
Such generational refusals have been critiqued as well: for example, some generations
of feminists might refuse as inaccurate and inadequate such global political
assumptions about the powers and resources of women's studies, feminism and
women's movements, as too various, generationally, geographically and internationally,
and in institutionalizations, to be made monolithic and unilaterally rejected.
Critiques of the term Queer might practice their own generational politics,
constructing a self-valorizing history of political movement now misunderstood
and not valued by subsequent generations, although indebted to it materially
and politically (similar to a critique of the term "post-feminist").
[fn14] The term Queer may create alliances across nations
and across generations, either political generations in activist ages, or across
age-grades more locally. [fn15]
"Next wave" cohorts / generation of feminists inhabit a landscape
intimate with the meanings of the term Queer and especially the uses of its
instabilities, and some may consider themselves simultaneously feminist and
Queer, or may reject the term Queer and its politics, perhaps in a solidarity
with other generational feminist critiques of the term. But whether they identify
with it or reject it, it still offers its generational critiques, especially
of women's studies and gay studies, as a resource for analogous generational
dissatisfactions and conflicts among feminists. Indeed for some feminists of
the second wave cohorts / generation Queer and post-feminist are politics suspect
for very similar reasons: they call into question the assumptions of multicultural
feminist identity politics in its pedagogical histories and institutionalizations,
and may insist upon seeing generational difference as the deployment of illegitimate
power, and generational pedagogies as the containment and control of new political
agencies. An appreciation of feminist generational politics though, also has
the potential of creating alliances across generations, those of activist-ages
and of age-grades, as the term Queer can sometimes also do, under new terms
of generational power. And of course, generational power shifts over career
and life cycles as well too, in differential meanings of the term generational.
Careerisms in Feminist (Inter)disciplines
A lyrical narrative of the seasons of academic life, female and feminist, is
described in a essay by U.S. feminist education philosopher L. Lee Knefelkamp
(1990). She uses the metaphor of seasons to revise both age-grade and stage
theories of life span and career paths. Such "a matrix of developmental
'seasons'" are revisited over and over, each time with new epistemologies
as resources and as consequences. Each season is understood in the feminist
idiom of community service, and such service is understood to produce forms
of knowledge and configurations of value. Knefelkamp describes them in terms
of "a virtue, a vulnerability and an essential gesture" in order to
articulate the seasons as arising from "the internal dynamics of the individual"
rather than from "external tasks or expectations." There are eight
seasons in the matrix. The first four are expressed in terms somewhat role-oriented
and classroom connected, while the second four are expressed in terms of complications
and contradictions. Their cyclical character suggests that an individual goes
through all at some point, but the intention to recognize that there is "no
rhythm that fits every single person, no order that can be predicted" suggests
that the sequence is logically descriptive rather than experiential. The metaphor
of seasons casts an elegiac image of waxing and waning in turn over the matrix.
The first season is "The power
of ideas" and its virtue is joy, its vulnerability the realization that
knowledge is not Truth, and its essential gesture engagement in searching, in
ongoing conversation and in language. Second is "The faculty role"
defined by passion, by being overwhelmed and by teaching itself. Third is "The
student" in which wonder, attempts to master students, and making connections
are engaged. Fourth is "The public self" moving beyond the classroom
via publication, service and administration; its virtue is instrumental caring,
its vulnerability careerism and its essential gesture putting theory into practice.
The next set of seasons complicates these roles, rewards and consequences. The
fifth season is "Multiple and competing commitments" defined by will,
guilt and continuing to work. The sixth season describes "The need to stop
out" within the virtue of rest, the vulnerability of shame, and with a
call to "plan for, allow, and reward" fluidity in academic roles.
The seventh season is "Marginality." Its virtue is mutuality and its
vulnerability is isolation. Marginality is the occasion to confirm "diversity
in all its complexity" and to create meaningful communities built around
commonalities. The last season is "the courage to act in spite of fears."
Knefelkamp calls this "the most important season...in which we must give
up the notion of privilege, mastery, and control and venture into the uncharted
territory of creating new educational cultures." Its virtue is "courage
to go into the unknown," its vulnerability despair, and its essential gesture
the refusal to give up. Although these seasons are described as individual,
Knefelkamp calls the curriculum itself "our collective autobiography"
and these seasons also suggest a history--past and future--of feminist transformation
of the academy. The essay is a plea for new systems of rewards and support for
"a new ecology of academic life," rethinking "our present practices
of faculty induction, socialization, tenure, and promotion."
In a contrast that should be jarringly evident Sharon Traweek talks about the
narratives of career told by U.S. particle physicists in her study, Beamtimes
and Lifetimes. (1988) I recount Traweek's framework so as to use it by analogy
and contrast, along with Knefelkamp's, to sketch out a possible description
of the careers of women's studies academics. But I invoke Traweek's framework
for another reason as well: to include in the analysis a shadow of the expectations
of high level academic administrators in the U.S. of what an academic career
is. Although the U.S. particle physics community's narratives are specific and
local in the many practice communities of science, they can still broadly stand
for the kinds of careers expected by scientists more generally, and to some
extent by social scientists as well. On my own campus, the top level administrators
are regularly drawn from the sciences, and their expectations of what makes
sense in scientific academic career practice (as well as in contemporary corporate
career practice) is the model upon which changes are being imposed on the university
as a whole under new systems of academic management, with particular contrast
to historic practices in the humanities. Such systems of scientific and corporate
practice are currently promoted in the U.S. as more efficient, better suited
to an academy complexly situated inside globalization processes, and are mobilized
to reallocate funding resources within universities and to find new sources
of funding outside for universities (from, say, transnational corporations).
They increasingly operate as the standards under which tenure and promotion
are awarded as well, in a U.S. university that assumes that to tenure all its
assistant professors is a failure of academic standards, as well as, more covertly,
the loss of opportunities to restructure departments, colleges and divisions,
and strategically to deploy graduate student, untenured and non-tenure track
teaching staffs for financial reasons. (compare Bousquet, 2002) Traweek's model
is salient then for women's studies in layers of locals and globals.
Traweek describes a career with stages within stages: the first twenty years
are divided into two halves, 10 years of training and 10 years of reputation
building. Training occurs in three stages: as an undergraduate students learn
that facts are not challengeable, that the scientific past is one of errors
but also of geniuses, and that to delve too much into scientific history and
thus error is debilitating to the grasp of contemporary scientific fact. Undergraduate
training develops anxieties about one's capacities in the face of error, genius
and fact. Graduate students are introduced into the community of particle physics
by avuncular advisors (indeed, their families are socialized as well), learn
the subfields of physics, and often treat knowledge as a commodity. Graduate
training develops anxieties about how one's time is being used up on the research
projects of others. Research Associates or "postdocs" are initiated
into oral knowledges, are groomed to be competitive and aggressive, to disdain
the work of others as a form of self-assertion and bravado. Their initiation
requires their overcoming a difficult double-bind in which they are held to
contradictory values simultaneously: they work in groups in which cooperation
is necessary but they also see that they achieve advantages only through competition.
Postdoctoral training develops anxieties about the future, about one's own research,
about competition and cooperation. Each stage associates emotional states with
activities, and altogether they produce a system understood as a meritocracy,
and preoccupied with the obsolescence of knowledge. Those successfully initiated
become group leaders at top research institutions; those not so rewarded may
leave the field, may teach at institutions on the "periphery," or
may become staff members at one of the major labs. So passes the first ten years.
The next ten years are spent developing a reputation while group leader of a
lab and becoming a senior physicist. Senior physicists see themselves as being
wholly committed to their field and fear that younger colleagues lack the same
levels of commitment, instead are lured by trends, glamour, excitement. Around
age 50 senior physicists cease an active experimental career. They become statesmen
of science, recruiting students, accumulating funding and attending to public
understandings of science. Although honored in public spheres, inside physics
they are seen as spent, indeed, their commitment to scientific reason contaminated
by the necessities of public persuasion.
Self-consciously cyclical rather than linear and exhaustive, Knefelkamp's model
presumes that one cycles through these seasons more than once. It envisions
a future of fruitful progression, of the proper apportionment of time, energy,
vision; a sense of return to possibility and harvest. A grand procession, elevating
any individual career, it assumes that all pass through all stages in varying
degrees and with varying effect, in a mythic narrative of completion that continues,
all stages important, valued, shared. The contrast with Traweek's analysis could
not be greater, and indeed, the mythic element of Knefelkamp's model is intended
precisely to envision another, quite alternate vista of what an academic career
might be. Not intended to be the same kind of anthropological description that
Traweek's is, rather it paints a psychological landscape of possibility and
difficulty.
Knefelkamp's model says something about what some feminists might like a career
to be, and what it is not. Most feminist scholars in the U.S. are professionalized
into various disciplines and interdisciplines, from feminist biologists, to
feminist sociologists, to feminist classicists, to feminists in women's studies,
comparative literature, American studies, health sciences and so on. Most U.S.
feminist scholars find positions in the same fields in which they hold a degree,
although some with interdisciplinary degrees may find positions in a variety
of fields, and some with disciplinary degrees may "travel" (literally
and metaphorically) to teach and research in other locations. Barely a handful
or so of people with a position in women's studies today has a Ph.D. in women's
studies, in the U.S. and in other nations with developed programs in women's
studies, although many more may have degrees in interdisciplinary feminist scholarship
of some kind, or have some sort of concentration on women in a discipline or
interdiscipline. Although more common than in the past, in the U.S. it is still
relatively rare for feminists to hold appointments solely in women's studies;
most women's studies appointments are joint positions with another discipline
or interdiscipline. Even women's studies scholars with sole appointments in
women's studies, however, still wear multiple "hats" in institutional
terms, traveling across structural institutional boundaries of many kinds in
the academic practices of women's studies. Given this complexity of disciplinary
and interdisciplinary locations common to all women's studies programs and to
the smaller number of departments, a single career narrative for a feminist
academic is impossible, and accounts for the mythic and internal psychological
register of Knefelkamp's narrative. Each discipline's and interdiscipline's
career narrative is going to be meaningful for its feminist scholars, but the
complexity of their particular institutional location, especially in relation
to women's studies, is going to inflect it or even transform it. And of course,
not every feminist scholar in the U.S. and internationally has or desires ties
to women's studies either. Nor does every scholar working in women's studies
consider herself a feminist. Although these are common connections they are
not universal.
In a very impressionistic way I am going to "draw a cartoon," structurally
more in analogy to Traweek's narrative than Knefelkamp's, of varying nodes in
a feminist career. Drawn against Traweek's framework it overvalues perhaps the
normative expectations to which feminists are actually often in resistance,
to which their careers may, in the spirit of, say, Mary Catherine Bateson's
Composing a Life (1987), actually create alternatives, deliberately and inadvertently,
at times hoping to aspire to something in the spirit of Knefelkamp's vision
and pleas. Given the brevity of the institutionalizations of women's studies,
the likelihood that women's studies scholars have non-traditional career paths
("traditional" in specific disciplines especially) is high. So this
"cartoon" is considerably less data driven than Traweek's analysis,
and at least as mythic, although for different purposes, than Knefelkamp's.
It attempts to capture what the career path might appear to be now to those
newly professionalizing in women's studies in 2002 in the U.S., about which
we have more guesses than data, although drawn from experiences over the last
two decades. [fn16]
Given the range of disciplines and interdisciplines of U.S. women's studies
there can be no set time frame understood for the training of a feminist scholar.
Ph.D. programs just now developing in the U.S., as is ours, have to accept whatever
new normative time frameworks their institutions require, or replicate standards
currently instantiated by "neighboring" graduate programs. We are
granted five years, although I know my own training took twelve years, which
I understand was the norm in the humanities at that time I got my degree (1987),
a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. There I completed course work and scholarship in interdisciplinary feminist
theory, in what amounted to two successive graduate careers in two locations.
I see myself as having a degree that comes as close to a Ph.D. in women's studies
as one could get at that time (1975-1987). This conviction on my part is shared
by some of my colleagues and not by others. How much my graduate training can
count as "a" model for an interdisciplinary women's studies scholar
is contentious in my department. What will count as a women's studies graduate
degree will continue to be up for grabs for some time, as we all continue to
create this still new interdiscipline; we in my local community, and we in many
varying instantiations of women's studies in many layers of other locals and
globals.
Considering Traweek's stages of training, I would locate three stages of training
of a women's studies academic scholar in the U.S.: undergraduate, graduate and
untenured junior faculty; subsequent stages as tenured junior faculty and senior
faculty. But in fact the different instantiations of women's studies create
a more complex landscape than that institutional path. We call our women's studies
entity at College Park "the women's studies program and department"
because we are simultaneously both a small institutionalized department, with
all the advantages and disadvantages of that size, and a very large program
historically, with affiliate faculty throughout the university teaching courses
that are required within our undergraduate certificate, major, graduate certificate
and now Ph.D. Beyond this faculty structure, women's studies is complexly connected
to the President's Commission on the Status of Women, the Consortium on Race,
Ethnicity and Gender, the Curriculum Transformation Project, the undergraduate
Women's Circle, and various forms of connection with equity officers throughout
the campus, human relations administrators, campus life service professionals
and their projects, the journal Feminist Studies, and so on. We are an academic
unit, reiterating that over the decade and a half I have been at Maryland and
before, that reiteration required because of these extra academic connections
that other departments do not have. At some universities women's studies is
associated with research centers, with women's centers on campuses and off campuses,
may have community members as well as faculty (sympathetic and unsympathetic)
on advisory boards, may mandate work with local communities. Thus, people staffing
these varying institutionalizations, some as ladder faculty, some from other
professional and credentialed locations including administrators at all levels,
some from trainings specific to particular institutions, some as clerical and
other support service professionals, not to mention graduate teaching, research
and assistance, and various adjuncts and other forms of untenured teaching;
all these folks have important structural relationships to women's studies,
and their local salience varies dramatically according to each institutional
history of women's studies. Perhaps the kinds of institutions exemplified by
the land-grant universities have the strongest and longest lived women's studies
programs in the U.S., while private institutions associated with greatest status
in the U.S. academy may have the most conventionally defined paths for scholars,
may be more thoroughly disciplined and may be more recently created.
Traweek's analysis of stories told about careers by particle physicists privileges
the most elite version of the career path as promoted by and (at least somewhat)
instantiated at the most elite research institutions, and such valorization
is part of the very set of values she is studying. Women's studies in contrast
figures in a different academic landscape, with challenges to elitisms part
of its core understanding of itself, however inadequately effected. Similarly,
the analysis of power is fundamental to women's studies, which accounts for
an ambivalence about academic institutionalizations and for the range of institutional
experiments of women's studies in local versions. Such experiments (although
limited in scope) and creative and necessary conceptualizations of how to use
limited resources are reasons for varying versions of programs and departments
in women's studies. (for some U.S. histories, see Howe, 2000) So, to the extent
that a "tenure-track" establishes one sort of normative career path
in U.S. women's studies, it is always inflected by this complexity of actual
institutionalizations in divergent particularisms. To imagine a career as a
newly professionalizing women's studies scholar in the U.S. is to move among
these complexities of normative requirement and particularistic histories, sometimes
self-consciously with great political sagacity, more often pushed and pulled
by many claims and visions of those with micro and macro power.
Similarly, Traweek's career path is intended to produce one most valued trajectory
from which all others are lesser divergences, a function of the production of
a single elite. Women's studies is shot through with elites, but also as a challenge
to elitisms, views itself as producing both scholars and activists. Each node
of an academic career then is alternately a gateway into a non-academic women's
studies location, that may or may not be professionalized, that may or may not
be perceived as "lessor" to an academic career. For example, not getting
tenure at a U.S. institution in women's studies may result in leaving the academy
but not an activist life, either in another profession or not; may result in
getting tenure elsewhere, usually in an institution of less status in an elite
hierarchy, which may or may not match the vigor of its women's studies programs;
or may even result in a lawsuit, which may or may not reinstate the faculty
member; may result in continuing to teach in a women's studies program, even
in some places gaining the non-tenure track equivalent of security of employment
and functioning with great agency in one's women's studies program, although
never with the kind of institutional authority or financial reward granted by
tenure; may result in moving into administrative or other professionalized service
positions, possibly in the same university or the same community, or in others.
For some such "lateral" movement may be second best, especially after
the rejections of not getting tenure; others might never seek tenure, finding
such occupational locations far preferable and more supportive of their own
political visions of women's studies and feminist activism; others might never
have gotten tenure-track jobs in the first place, deliberately or disappointingly
in a difficult "job market." (for a critique of the notion of "job
market" see Bousquet, forthcoming) Others may have been facilitated by
soft money appointments after receiving a Ph.D. and before getting a tenure
track job, or with post docs; while others have had to accept these for long
years possibly rewarded finally with jobs, or not. In some disciplines graduate
education is valued most when reproducing academics; in others this is only
one valued career outcome among several, still possibly hierarchicalized. It
is unclear now what sort of interdiscipline women's studies will be, whether
the field's status in the academy will be dependent on prioritizing the reproduction
of academics or possibly, in an age of economic cutbacks and appeals to public
utility, the fields' importance will rather be dependent on convincing students
to turn to many careers, and facilitating multiple professionalization. (for
a highly critical view of this outcome in English Studies, see Bousquet, 2002)
Unlike Traweek's analysis of the possibilities of "contamination"
by the requirements of persuasion in public life of the physicist, in the U.S.
one is more likely to be deauthorized within the value system in women's studies
by too pure a commitment to the academic life, held to be debilitating of one's
commitment to social justice issues. Proving such commitment is another motivation
for the renunciation of "theory" and a continual personal and institutional
self-critique. Some disciplines are understood to be more consistent with promoting
social justice issues and are valorized in a women's studies (inter)interdisciplinary
education, as may be internships and other forms of promoting activism or engagement
in non-academic professions or women's communities.
Within a women's studies program academic status is very important (despite
protestations or hopes to the contrary), but it is only one field of power that
matters. Demonstrations of commitment to social justice issues are also of great
importance, to colleagues, to students, and to activists. What counts as such
demonstrations of commitment vary considerably, are indeed, relative and relational,
in layers of locals and globals. For some, this is defined by one's very disciplinary
interests (some disciplinary locations may even be held to be debilitating in
this regard), for some by histories of activism (and whether inside or outside
the academy may matter considerably), for some one's location in identity politics
may be pivotal in attributing social justice meanings to activities of teaching
and scholarship as well as to non-academic activities. The length of time one
has been involved with women's studies may be taken as indicative of such commitments,
or similarly, involvement with various social movements and their academic examples
(such as, say, African-American Studies or Ethnic Studies). Community service
may be most highly valued in some programs, and to varying extents is important
in all. Administrative activism may be valorized, sometimes over scholarly work,
which may even be understood as rather self-indulgent and careerist in comparison.
In some programs contentious activist histories are most important, while in
others an "ethic of care" and its professionalizations may matter
more, similar to the register in which Knefelkamp's narrative is described.
To arrive as a new untenured junior feminist scholar in a new job in women's
studies in the U.S. is to learn quickly both how common such concerns are, and
how differently they can be inflected in any particular place. No training,
formal or informal, can prepare one for the variations possible in such micro-politics;
and indeed, in all disciplines and interdisciplines such micro-political knowledge
is part of tacitly communicated patterns of mentorship, orally alluded to, privately
intuited or sometimes collectively guessed at in peer groups. That such knowledge
is sometimes officially discussed, even part of graduate education in women's
studies is one example of attempts to challenge elitism in the academy, if a
limited one. To arrive as a new tenured senior feminist scholar in a new job
in women's studies in the U.S. may also be to arrive in a kind of "(disciplinary)culture
shock." In each case the generational politics may be especially difficult
to assimilate. Also in each case the temptations to reduce the new particulars
to already understood previous experiences is high, and perhaps totally necessary.
But living in layers of locals and globals is nonetheless the reality that one
will of necessity experience. How, in "strength, flexibility and grace"
one will negotiate them, is the double-bind one will experience in women's studies.
Occasionally double-binds are transcended by the creation of new knowledge,
and often they are not, leaving everyone, at best, in a kind of unvoiced struggle,
perhaps punctuated by brief moments of strength, or flexibility or grace.
Careers and careerisms are a knot of meaning understood differently across feminist
political generations as they are also inflected by (inter)disciplines, moments
in career path, age-grades and life stages, activist histories and understandings
of commitments to social justice projects. It is no accident that some of the
critical meanings of "post-feminist" have essentially been accusations
of careerism and / or elitism. Highly self-conscious analysis of career paths
by graduate students and junior faculty are sometimes interpreted by senior
faculty as a lack of commitment to women's studies and to social justice projects,
as may also be attempts to constrain intensity of time commitments to, in some
cases, service or teaching, in some cases, research, in some cases, administrative
activisms. Time given to friendship and family life in particular, under the
speedup workaholism of U.S. multicapitalism today, is made as difficult in women's
studies as in any other part of the academy under regimes of globalization.
In the grand procession of seasons of an academic life, a women's studies program
or department would have people spread out among the seasons, such that the
program itself would be enriched by a diversity of political generations, age-grades
and life stages, social justice commitments and rank and career moments. With
or without such diversity, that principled relativism I spoke of before, a kind
of differential consciousness, is required to allow us to map these differences,
move among them, value all of them tactically, name them generously, and commit
to one or more at the appropriate times, and to empathize with the necessarily
and properly divergent commitments of others. "Interseasonal" and
intergenerational women's studies is as important as interdisciplinary women's
studies; it instantiates the kinds of differential consciousness we have as
our resource for liberatory possibilities, the modes of possibility that we
must struggle to know when we see them, to value when our assumptions are ruptured,
power we must give up to enliven our realities.
[fn1] In the context of on-going department and programmatic
concerns, these large questions--theoretical, political, methodological--are
raised concretely in the midst of concerns about local particulars: how do we
decide which job candidates are the "most" interdisciplinary, and
for which ones of us does that matter? should we hire a junior or senior person,
and what sort of generational political, institutional and methodological affiliations
will they have? how do we describe the curricular structure of our new Ph.D.
degree, and whose specialties will be emphasized, who will be best positioned
to work with graduate students, who will teach what kinds of courses? what will
count as feminist theory, and whose varying visions of the uses of feminist
theory will be mobilized in the new curriculum? what disciplinary and interdisciplinary
experiences will be valued by the department as a whole, and looked to or dismissed
as models for our new program? will senior faculty have the most power in the
design of the new Ph.D. because they are the ones writing the proposals, shepherding
them through and having to defend them in high level committees, consulting
with their generational cohorts at other institutions with comparable concerns,
and getting outside grants? will we discuss these issues only as such local
particulars, not wanting to take the time or risk the conflict of raising them
more abstractly, or will we make them the occasion for struggling over questions
of process and differences in the department? what forms of process will work
to allow for struggles without exacerbating current and potential conflicts
and what do they reveal about our political histories and visions?
[fn2] One that significantly predates and preempts any neoconservative
claims using this or similar phrasing.
[fn3] Thus illustrating what Leigh Star and Geoff Bowker call
"boundary objects":
"Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities
of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them....plastic
enough to adapt to local needs and constraints...yet robust enough to maintain
a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and
become strongly structured in individual-site use. These objects may be abstract
or concrete....The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process
in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities....[they]
arise over time from durable cooperation among communities of practice... "
(Bowker & Star, 1999)
[fn4] In our institution today students who want to do feminist
work in several specific disciplines can do so, for those departments have strong
feminist faculty with lively and influential scholarly projects and tracks of
study precisely for such degrees. So graduate students in those particular disciplines
have had reason to take our graduate certificate primarily if they intend to
do some interdisciplinary work with us. Other students, however, may have had
rather different motives. They may be getting degrees in departments in which
there exist no such recognized tracks for work in the new scholarship on women
in their fields. Their department may acknowledge such work, but not have many
faculty to teach it, or indeed the department may resist such work, although
having some faculty struggling to do it, or the department may feel that such
work is outside its mission, in its understanding of its discipline and / or
in its instantiation of the discipline in this particular university. Students
may discover active hostility to feminist work or work about women, or simply
ignorance or disinterest or even a feeling that such work is best done in the
women's studies department. For any of these reasons students might want to
take our graduate certificate in order to find a refuge from their department
or discipline, to find community with other women's studies scholars as teachers
and mentors and as peers, to learn methodologies not taken up in their departments,
to share political concerns, and to engage in intellectual and political work
to alter the fields they are training within, therefore wishing to learn how
such change has occurred elsewhere in the academy. Finally, in the past some
took the certificate only because we did not yet offer a Ph.D. Today they can
get such a degree with us, they can center their work in women's studies "itself."
[fn5] See new work on academic labor recently proliferated
in literary and cultural studies, such as that published online in the electronic
journal Workplace at: http://www.workplace-gsc.com/
[fn6] This idea of "accessible language" may presume
that anything can be said in clear language, that such "clarity" is
the mark of importance, elegance, truth, intelligence, education, care, reality.
Renouncing the opaque, the displeasing and labored, the jargon-laden, the boring,
it may presume that transmission of knowledge and communication pleasures are
top priorities in writing. It may presume that mass movement politics and propaganda
are the most successful forms of political action. But writing can also be a
way of working out ideas only partially accessible to the thinker and an often
inchoate appeal to others for collective thinking-in-progress, sometimes in
small cadres of politicos, artists or intellectuals. "Clarity" may
require alternatively: the total control by a single author of textual production,
the editorial corrections of many in stages of production, or may require the
difficult to control breakthrough understanding of an entire intellectual community
who, as both authors and audiences, read, write and exchange their thinking-in-progress.
Unreflected upon presumptions of "clarity," may depend upon highly
conventional ideas of access and communication pleasure, dependent upon narrowly
shared assumptions within linguistic and cultural communities, may even privilege
certain traditions without examination of the political effects of traditional
practices, or of the development of traditions and conventions in particular
feminisms. (Star, 1999) Alternate, avant garde feminist cultural practices instead
are often predicated upon transgression against the traditional, the conventional,
and the pleasurable, challenging presumptions about a proper transparency of
language, valuing instead opacity for its defamilarizing effects, for the political,
conceptual and psychological labor it requires; instead attempting to reframe
what counts as accessible and / or pleasurable by teaching these values and
skills to people who do not yet have them. Assumptions of transparency can ignore
contests for power, mobilizing specious generalities and insensitivities to
context; one person's "jargon" can be another person's crucial technical
language of explanation. Languages of explanation, description or analysis are
also political, and instantiate different political visions. They are most transparent
to those who agree with them. For them, they embody "clarity."
[fn7] Who can use this thinking and writing? What purposes
does it serve and who needs it? Which longings does it embody? Which communities
have supported this work and which have provided reference for explanation?
With whom is this thinking and writing properly exchanged and for what other
kinds of thinking and writing and longing? Is this thinking and writing an academic
and scholarly project? Is it an activist project? Is it a kind of bridge between
academic and nonacademic activisms? between disciplines and interdisciplines?
between intellectual and activist projects? Is it intended for a small group
with shared concerns, languages and forms of argument? Is it intended to contribute
to struggles over which concerns, languages and forms of argument ought to shared,
with whom, and for what reasons? Can it (and should it?) be read by audiences
other than those for whom it was intended? What does it feel like to impersonate
the reader this writing presumes? What does it feel like to have one's political
visions instantiated in this writing? or, not instantiated? Are the local answers
to these questions properly or improperly "globalized" or generalized?
What layers of locals and globals are made invisible by a too simple appeal
to "accessibility"?
[fn8] Suchman's description of the circumstances of communication
in a local project I use to think across movements, interdisciplines, generations:
"... an increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people and activities,
each operating within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously
crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others....Gradually, however,
we came to see that the problem lay neither in ourselves nor in our colleagues,
but in the division of professional labor and the assumptions about knowledge
production that lay behind it.....What we were learning was inextricably tied
to the ongoing development of our own theorizing and practice, such that it
could not be cut loose and exported elsewhere....In place of the model of knowledge
as a product that can be assembled through hand-offs in some neutral or universal
language, we began to argue the need for mutual learning and partial translations.
This in turn required new working relations not then in place." (Suchman,
2000)
[fn9] It over relies on the explanation of already developed
knowledge, theory and method, and inhibits some generations of new forms. As
explanation it may over rely on the condensation of broadly synthesized literatures,
relationships, communities of value, and leave out the contestations of meaning
and politics among them. Pedagogically motivated, it may present ideas as if
already stabilized, when they are still in political and intellectual flux.
See my criticisms about taxonomies of feminisms that present themselves as neutrally
descriptive, rather than as machines for the production of tendentious political
identities, or for the reproduction of past political histories of institutionalized
pedagogues. (King, 1994)
[fn10] For analyses that embody these assumptions: Kamen
(1991) depends upon the teacher-student model and explores academic, journalist
and political policy landscapes; while Glickman (1993) depends upon the mother-daughter
model of generational difference in a psychological register. Both challenge
media stereotypes of feminists and feminisms.
[fn11] They produce and refuse alliances, recreate political
identities, build theories; directly in action (Sturgeon, 1995) and abstractly
in thinking about thinking. "Feminist theory" includes all these.
(King, 1994)
[fn12] These movements are difficult to name, the names contentious
and changing across time. Nonetheless, indicative of my "activist ages,"
they are: the anti-war movement against imperialism, the gay liberation movement,
the women's liberation movement, the children's liberation movement, the mental
patient's liberation movement.
[fn13] Alternatively, histories of sexuality that celebrate
or focus upon historic homosexualities in a politics emphasizing historical
continuities use Queer inclusively to create identities and historical subjects
across time. Which will function as global meta-terms, for what political purposes,
are among the contests around Queer. Queering can emphasize history and politics
showing how social constructions come-into-being within fields of power. Or
Queering can represent new methodologies that emphasize such epistemologies.
As such an unstable concept, Queer is especially useful in histories of sexuality
marking pre-institutional processes and formations inside a history of social
constructions.
[fn14] Some lesbians critique Queer as a speciously "unmarked"
category, adjunct to the term "Man." ("Man" epitomizes the
"unmarked" category in liberal humanism, the realized instrumentally
active individual with political agency, able to represent all humans. It creates
"marked" categories: humans who can stand only for themselves as a
particular kind of human (eg. women) or beings only sometimes and contingently
human (eg. slaves and women). Which categories are marked and unmarked shifts
depending on the universe of discourse: white women as if able to represent
all women, or heterosexual women more "universal" than lesbians. Gay
and Queer may position themselves as unmarked terms, able to stand for many
kinds and genders of alternative sexualities, as specific political interventions
into several collectivities, and have political consequences in oppositional
politics of resistance to unmarked (hetero)sexuality. But "Lesbian"
has not functioned to include men, although Gay has sometimes claimed to include
women. Some Queer activists contend Queer revises this history, is inclusive
of multiple marked categories without claiming to stand for all. Some critics
contend that Queer not only recapitulates this specious unmarked use, but depoloiticizes
it, a mere range of consumptions. Some lesbians contend Queer is "male,"
and criticize its generational politics.
[fn15] I am inclined to use the term Gay for some of the
purposes that the instability of the term Queer allows, for largely generational
reasons. (King, 2000) But I understand both as alternate terms which could each
work as a global meta-category to the other. My politics emphasizes historical
epistemologies of social constructions and a longing for ways to enliven the
dynamic relations between unmarked and marked uses of Gay, Queer, Lesbian. I
emphasize the materialities of globalization and local agencies and powers in
a self-critical anti-essentialist identity politics accountable to changing
movements of power, a conceptualization-in-process that I designate under "layers
of globals and locals."
[fn16] Although it could emphasize generational antagonisms
globalized economies of U.S. universities structurally produce today, which
matter enormously in understanding illegitimate uses of power institutionalized,
I point to rather than center this dimension. (see especially Bousquet, 2002)
I hope to build generational alliances that work together against illegitimate
uses of generational power through such analysis. This essay began within local
conversations intended to increase such communication and analysis in a new
Ph.D program in women's studies, calling upon "a principled relativism"
required for communication across interests in committed groups with great differences.
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© Katie King 2002. Citation: King, K. 2002. "Theorizing Structures in Women's Studies." Available online at: http://www.womensstudies/wmstfac/kking/present/interdis.html [last updated 3/16/03; viewed <your date>].