from NWSA Journal Volume 16, Number 3

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The Politics of Feminist Locations: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Studies

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Assessments of the discipline of Women’s Studies must account for the location of those who claim to speak in its name. Most who work within the discipline are located in institutions with heavy teaching loads, “high needs” students, administrative mandates that limit the content or scope of their programs, and without the resources—particularly time for research and reflection—that would allow them to contribute to a conversation on assessment. Not surprisingly, then, most commentary on the discipline of Women’s Studies comes from those located in what Carnegie classifies as Doctoral Research Universities—Extensive. We offer our own experiences of Women’s Studies at a small, secular, liberal arts college as an example that complicates previous assessments based on limited perspectives borne of particular locations. Issues include institutionalization, pedagogical practices, and disciplinary objects and labels. The process of assessing the discipline requires the input of many voices in addition to what has heretofore been published, including our own. Therefore, we conclude with a call for contributions to a forum in the summer 2005 issue of NWSA Journal titled “The Politics of Feminist Locations.”

We have grown tired of the declarations of Women’s Studies’ failures.2 As part of the continual self-assessments that have helped define Women’s Studies in the United States, there must be room for affirmation, particularly since much of the news is good: Women’s Studies has helped sustain feminism by doing work that has shifted the paradigms by which we gain, understand, and apply knowledge. U.S. educational institutions can and do change, and students who attend these institutions are transformed by their experiences. However, the portraits painted by many selfassessments have tended to leave blank certain sections of the canvas.

Here is a recent example that makes the point. The 2002 anthology, Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, “works to trace . . . the difference that the present makes for thinking about Women’s Studies as a knowledge formation, academic institution, agency of the state, and pedagogical insurgency” (2002, 4). Chapters include treatments of transnational perspectives on the discipline, the historiography of feminism, the value of activist projects, generational differences, tenure, the labor market for graduates, “women of color” as a theoretical category of difference, and the capstone seminar for undergraduates. Both the introduction’s title, “On Location,” and the bibliography’s label, “Locating Feminism,” point to the centrality of place in assessing Women’s Studies.3 Yet three-quarters of the contributors to Women’s Studies on Its Own were actually located in what Carnegie would categorize as Doctoral Research Universities—Extensive (formally called “Research I”) institutions at the time the collection was published. Of course, the location of the authors does not invalidate their observations and theories. But that is exactly our point: in order to assess Women’s Studies accurately and in all its complexity, we must understand where its practitioners situate themselves vis-à-vis the institutions in which the discipline’s various outposts are located; how it goes about organizing its practitioners and constituencies through research, teaching, service, etc.; and how it exercises the power of authorizing its representations. In other words, we want to examine who can and does speak in the name of Women’s Studies.

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