Women's Studies Worldwide: Cartographies of Transnational Academic Feminism

Abstract

This dissertation retells the history of women’s studies from a global perspective, challenging traditional U.S. and Eurocentric narratives about this emerging interdisciplinary field. Beginning with questions about why women’s, gender, and sexuality studies has incited backlash across a range of cultural and geographic locations, this study draws on transnational feminist theory and higher education research to argue for a more broadly situated understanding of academic feminism. Chapter One describes the creation of a digital map featuring more than nine hundred women’s studies degree programs and research centers in seventy countries. Using cartography software including ArcGIS and StoryMaps, this component offers a broader perspective on the field’s distribution than has previously been documented in the scholarly literature, revealing new insights about how women’s studies has grown and contracted as a result of shifting geopolitical trends. Chapter Two examines several examples of collaborative autobiographic writing to show how variously situated authors construct particular narratives about this field. Drawing on the concept of political grammar, this section demonstrates how edited collections about the founding of women’s studies and articles about cross-border collaborations use credentializing and contextualizing discourse in contrast with ideas of development and colleagueship. Chapter Three discusses three international institutes that grew from the University of Maryland’s Curriculum Transformation Project using archival research and oral histories. Involving academic feminist scholars from China, South Korea, the Caribbean, South Africa, Israel, and Hungary, this case study of international exchange demonstrates the complexity of enacting women’s studies across difference. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for how practitioners in the United States might better enact ethical collaborative relationships with colleagues and institutions situated in other national, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Rather than viewing U.S. women’s studies as a blueprint than can be exported and applied elsewhere, this study concludes by arguing for mutual accountability, centering connections across the Global South, and sharing resources as strategies for building effective coalitions that will nurture the field moving forward.