Abstract
The article traces the history of Women's Studies from its beginnings as the ‘intellectual arm of the women's movement’. It argues that the complex story of Women's Studies has been marked by both ambiguity and uncertainty as well as sustained political commitment in the face of both institutional opposition and feminist ambivalence about Women's Studies as a field of scholarship. The development of Women's Studies occurs through crucial shifts in the theoretical paradigms of feminism and the political preoccupations of the women's movement. These shifts have both deconstructed the founding premises of feminist theory and generated a greater depth to feminist thinking and research. These challenges to Women's Studies have paralleled a different set of problems arising from the increasingly market-oriented direction pursued throughout the tertiary education sector. In spite of these difficulties Women's Studies continues to survive and constitutes an important and contested site of contemporary feminist thought.
The formative moment and early development of Women's Studies in higher education has been closely recorded (Bowles and Klein, 1983; Stimpson, 1986; Sheridan, 1990; Aarons and Walby, 1991; Hinds et al., 1992; Evans, 1997; Stanton and Stewart, 1995; Richardson and Robinson, 1997; Cosslett et al., 1997). It is a complex and diverse history which maps not only different educational cultures and traditions, but also the different political formations against which collectivities of women invented themselves as women's liberation, the women's movement or latterly and more generically, second wave feminism. This history also maps the defining contours of early feminist thinking of the late 1960s and early 1970s about whether the study of women should be pursued as an autonomous project evoking a separate and distinct field of Women's Studies, or whether it should be located within the mainstream and conducted throughout combative engagement with the disciplines.
That the study of women should be undertaken, however, was not in dispute. What partly cohered these differences of emphasis into a collective project was the simple, but also bizarrely monumental truth that the Western intellectual tradition which had for so long dominated the citadels of learning was relatively disinterested in the lives of women, apart that is from the anthropromorphic interest extended to the curious creature ‘Woman’ which demarcated the ‘known’ world from the realm of the natural, and measured the scope of (male) rationality. In the main, and with a few notable albeit singular exceptions, the Western tradition had neither sympathy for, nor curiosity about, the questions ‘represented’ by women: sexual inequality, sexual difference, sexual politics or possibilities, or formations of sexualities held few mysteries when regressively telescoped through enlightened naturalism. Broadly speaking the community of scholars had chosen not to critically engage with the predicaments of women not least because it was reliant on deploying the category of woman as a marker of the parameters of the domain of rational discourse. Necessarily then the feminist intellectual project had to ‘restore the female half of humanity as a proper and necessary topic of social science, historical research and cultural analysis’ (de Groot and Maynard, 1993). Exploration of the related question of why the subject of women had been so avoided, why ‘the huge methodological error in the study of humans’ this represented had been so enduringly intellectually acceptable, became an intimately related project (Gilligan, 1997: 15). Women's Studies was concerned not only with explanation of the social subordination of women, but also with ‘critical examination of the academy itself, as one of the power/knowledge institutions which constitute a central problem addressed by women's studies, that of women's social and cultural subordination’ (Sheridan, 1990: 50–1).
The broader reality of sexual subjugation which shaped women's lives meant feminist enquiry was neither dispassionate nor objective but political. The experience of women registered in the protests of the women's movement were those of constraint, objectification, inequality and discrimination as well as sexual violence and abuse. This fuelled feminist intellectual enquiry and the encounter with these political realities within the academy confirmed the identity of feminist scholarship as the intellectual wing of the women's movement. The movement sought theoretical explanation grounded in feminist research, the latter conducted as much within the new political spaces of women's centres, rape crisis centres, refuges, reading groups, support groups, work based groups or campaign groups as it was within the more traditional domain of the university. Knowledge and data were so scarce that all avenues of enquiry were open to feminist exploration: the realities of heterosexuality; the history of the family; the incidence of sexual violence; the representation of women in literature and popular culture; the power of the law; the economic place of women; the limits of sex education; the politics of abortion; the distribution of money within families; the obstacles to women's autonomy; and the sexual prejudice of science and philosophy were among the many subjects pursued by feminists.
If there was at the outset an absolute certainty about the need for feminist scholarship, there was rather more equivocation about the ‘object’ of study. Two major areas of concern however came quickly to dominate the feminist intellectual horizons of the 1970s and early 1980s. The first of these was the sexual and physical violence against women and the nature of the relations between women and men which gave permission for such an alienated form of human association. The second concerned the explanation for the deep historical and cross-cultural continuity in the subjugation of women. The questions were profound and the intellectual project they inspired was intensely creative and exciting. Both came to be regarded as theoretically and politically misconceived, although the contours of their respective ‘problematics’ can still be traced in the contemporary dilemmas of feminist scholarship. The conceptual terrain they introduced – ‘women’ and ‘men’, and the historical relations of gender – was to prove surprisingly inhospitable and difficult and prefigured the related dilemmas of essentialism and social constructionism which during the 1980s were to almost ‘freeze’ the feminist paradigm in intractability (Brennan, 1989).
Attempts to theorize patriarchy provisionally united the conflicting standpoints of sex and power and gender and history albeit uncomfortably containing the seeds of the theoretical drama which was to unfold. Embedded in the philosophical tradition of liberal individualism the conceptual protagonists of the patriarchy debate, women and men, were not easily distinguished from the concepts which had for so long been the vehicle for prejudical ideologies of difference. Deployed in the service of feminism the generic, individuated concepts of ‘women’ and ‘men’ were refigured in the language of oppressed/oppressor. Despite this refiguring they were conceptually unable to bear the analytic weight of social relations which complexly articulated sexual power and subordination. Neither, in their bifurcated one-dimensionality, were they able to greatly advance the philosophical questions feminists were trying to open up. More importantly, and true to their long-standing ideological function, the terms women/men accommodated elements of feminist prejudice to the extent that their undertheorization allowed a number of formulations – sisterhood, ‘male’ violence, ‘women's’ oppression – to escape detailed exploration. The debate on gender and history or the history of gender was similarly to be curtailed by this conceptual premise but in addition was caught in a functionalist and reductionist logic inspired by the concept of gender. The contours of these early problematics of sex and power and gender and history initiated a genealogy which continued through the essentialism/social constructionism of the 1980s into the more resonating discussions connecting modernist feminisms with postmodernist and anti-racist feminisms, and debates on the body with those of postcoloniality. Between and across these debates the conceptual status of women, and the issues of historical ‘logics’ and political possibility persist in the theory and practice of feminism.
Although Barrett and Phillips (1992) rightly identify the period of 1970s’ feminist scholarship as being unified by the grand narrative project of modernist feminism, the early differences in conceptual and political strategies between radical, liberal and socialist feminisms not only foreshadowed the disparate trajectories of feminist thinking that were to emerge parallel to and in dialogue with postmodernism, they also directed arguments about the rightful academic place of feminist scholarship. In the UK the argument was over whether feminist scholarship was engaged in the study of women or gender relations. Gender was the conceptual strategy that allowed for confrontations within the disciplines; ‘women’ on the other hand designated a separate sphere of study not only in terms of what was being studied and why, but also in terms of who was studying. The arguments for the formation of Women's Studies were more in the spirit of radical feminism with its uncompromising emphasis on the immediate political realities faced by women and the extent to which the status quo, including that within the academy, was dominated by men and implicitly and explicitly hostile to women and the feminist project. The traditions of socialist and Marxist feminism, formed through the solidarities of socialist struggle (albeit very often failed solidarities), preferred the emphasis of historical relations and the key they provided to understanding the possibilities of social change.
These lines were of course far from clear-cut and were traversed and retraversed by the interdisciplinary character of feminist scholarship, and intersected and blended by the collective political identity of modernist feminism. They were however sufficiently demarcated to lead to doubts within feminism itself over the necessity for Women's Studies, many feminists arguing that Women's Studies lacked an object with which to designate its field of study (Curthoys, 1988), that it would ghettoize feminist scholarship, leave the mainstream untouched by the feminist critique, and expose feminism to the vulnerability of area studies (Hoagland, 1978). These objections to Women's Studies did not take the form of actively opposing strategies to secure Women's Studies; quite the contrary the arguments were open and fluid and allowed many to rethink earlier positions.
In the US the strategy was to use the term Women's Studies to link feminist disciplinary subjects across the faculties into a programme of studies, a less divisive solution that nonetheless did not circumvent the central issue of the politics of location. Stanton and Stewart argue that in the US the interlocking place of Women's Studies both within and without the disciplines meant that ‘from the beginning feminist scholars gained other scholarly perspectives by crossing boundaries, importing materials and methods from one discipline to look critically at another’ (1995: 3). Even in this more fluid and less contested environment Women's Studies still began its life bifurcated: its essential aspect bounded by the unequivocal evocation of women/female sex separating from its more considered diffuse identity, flowing across the landscape of the disciplines, being remoulded in the contours of gender. The location of feminist scholarship was both an issue of the theoretical project and a desire to keep alive the extraordinary signifi-cance of the feminist critique of knowledge. Whether these were best pursued independently or from within the existing spaces of knowledge were issues not easily resolved, particularly at a time when any space allocated to feminist scholarship was welcomed.
Women's Studies thus came into being as a vast and heterogeneous field of study that constituted an uneasy balance between an essentialism relentlessly fed by the sexual politics that characterized the lives of many women, and a political belief not only that forms of human association must not be subjugating, but also that they should form a central concern of the intellectual enterprise. Women's Studies implicitly championed the idea that human relations could be egalitarian and digniied, even as it measured the emerging truth of the extent to which they were brutally sex-ualized. It also championed the idea that to understand the history of naturalized sexual relations was a significant intellectual challenge. It is hardly surprising, given the audacity and scope of these convictions, and the sheer difficulty of sustaining such a counter-intuitive embryonic feminist ethics and epistemology in light of the countervailing historical evidence, that essentialism was to prove the easier rubric, or that a moralism should characterize many of the endeavours pursued under the aegis of Women's Studies. The argument that the home, for example, was for many women and their children a place of torment and not a haven could too easily become translated into a fixed notion about the character of women and men, and too easily be distracted by the apparent self-evident nature of the problem as somehow belonging to men. This understandable slide into essentialist preconceptions paradoxically coexisted with the conviction that relations between women and men could be transformed, a conviction which itself had constantly to be articulated against the more powerful commonsense truism that relations between the sexes were unequal and even brutal but that it was ever thus. Intellectual and political aspirations and ambitions that rely on imaginative impulses completely at variance with the day to day givens of historical reality, and which are as well beyond the scope of prevailing intellectual boundaries, can hardly be expected to survive easily. Their vulnerability was the more pronounced given the very uncertain shelter afforded by early attempts to establish Women's Studies.
The parallel project of developing the study of gender relations within the parameters of disciplinary boundaries gave rise to a different set of problems. The concept of gendered subject illuminated issues relating to the partiality of male knowledge, the historical agency of women, and the methodological limitations of disciplinary boundaries that did not centrally consider the workings of gender. What was unclear to many, however, was how gender could conceptually convey intersexual relations as relations of power and, more broadly, whether gender was an analytic category or a subject matter. Even whilst advocating the former Joan Scott acknowledged that conceptually it blunted the critical edge of feminist analysis (Sheridan, 1990). Ultimately gender was to be dislodged as the privileged category of feminist analysis and, accordingly, threatened the status of the feminist project which created it. Remaining within the disciplines seemed to have deprived feminists of the ‘tools’ which Audre Lorde had warned were necessary if feminists truly wanted to dismantle the master's house (1984: 11–12). On the other hand the autonomous development of Women's Studies was in danger of embracing the limits of marginality and accepting the possibility of little more than the gestural transformatory power of feminist scholarship. Thus all the early anxieties about the potential for both incorporation and marginalization proved to be warranted to different degrees and the strengths and weaknesses of the mainstream vs. independent status of Women's Studies were played out in equal measure. In this sense there were no surprises in the development of Women's Studies within the academy, except perhaps that it developed at all.
But develop it did, in spite of the fact that ‘the individualism of the academy was antithetical to the collectivism of 70s feminism’ (Sheridan, 1990) and in spite of the fact that feminists themselves remained divided on the merits of its separate formation. The protracted battles to have courses on women and on gender finally culminated in the development of Women's Studies programmes, Women's Studies area studies, and less often, Women's Studies departments. It also culminated in the development and consolidation of a vast body of feminist scholarship that was contained by but also went beyond the confines of Women's Studies. These battles to establish the legitimacy and validity of feminist scholarship had been hard won. To take but one example: in 1973 two feminist tutors in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney had proposed a course on feminist philosophy which was rejected on the grounds that it would be ‘nothing more’ than consciousness raising. The students occupied the university for a month before a compromise was reached: the course was to be run, but taught by a male academic with the help of tutors ‘who know more about the subject’. The Philosophy Department split as a consequence of these confrontations and remains two separate departments to this day. Twenty-three years later a Women's Studies Department was established at Sydney University which was, ironically, one of the last Australian universities to admit Women's Studies as a discrete area of study.
By 1980 over thirty universities in the United Kingdom were teaching feminist courses and by the end of the decade ‘women's studies in one form or another’ was established in most institutions of higher education (Davies and Holloway, 1995), developments which were gradually consolidated in post-graduate courses, research centres, women's studies units and departments. The pattern was similar in other countries where Women's Studies took root in institutions of higher education. In the USA 20,000 courses and 350 programmes existed in 1980, and by 1982 the National Women's Studies Association (founded in 1977) had over 2,000 members (Stimpson, 1986). The spread of Women's Studies throughout the 1970s and 1980s was phenomenal and coincided with the development of women's studies conferences, networks, journals, research centres, professional organizations and publishing enterprises. Women's Studies became established in North and South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Asia and the Arab world (Robinson, 1997: 4). The early hostility towards the venture of Women's Studies in universities gave way to a begrudging acknowledgement of the considerable intellectual profile of feminist scholarship. By the sheer scope of its success Women's Studies had become a field of study without ever really resolving the pivotal issues of its location or identity.
This was in part only to do with the pragmatics of popularity. The question of disciplinary convention was itself under review not only because of the feminist critique of the unassailability of methodological objects, but also because of the challenges of other contenders to area studies. Black studies, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural studies not only developed on the margins and invoked the necessity for multidisciplinarity, they also queried the validity of forms of scholarship which were exclusivist and rigid in their canonical self-righteousness. The integrity of the disciplines however was also being challenged from within by the divergent array of postmodernist thinkers who, far from being marginal to the Western tradition of the Enlightenment, were at its very epicentre. Their critique was felt the more acutely for that and, insofar as it was incorporated by disciplinary paradigms trying to reinvent themselves, a new productive energy was unleashed. Such were the displacements of focus and object and the redrawing of disciplinary boundaries that pretenders to new ields were interrogated much less than they might have been had the traditional gatekeepers persisted in policing the criteria of professional belonging.
Women's Studies took up its place of residence in the space that had been cleared following the protracted melée on university campuses that had begun with the student protests in the 1960s and gradually subsided with the growing influence of postmodernist thought. The feminist intervention had been but one of many in the period of 1960s expansion of higher education. The complicity it had exposed in the ivory tower of truth was one critique among many. The student movement had made apparent the links between the industrial military complex and the centres of learning, and the related connections between scholarship, colonial domination and imperialist ambition. The Black Power Movement had registered the violence of racist America when the occupying students at Cornell University demanding a Black Studies course had left the building victorious, bearing guns in outstretched arms above their head. The anti-war movement had exposed the tendentiousness of politics and history in their hegemonic accounts of the cold war. The assailants were many and the wounds deep but the ivory towers keep standing if only because the historical foundations were so deep. The intellectual map however was being redrawn to embrace a world of women and men, of black and white, and dominant and subjugated peoples and conflicting and competing truths.
Nonetheless, although feminism had been part of a wider seismic shift of social movements, the fact that Women's Studies achieved a space either within the disciplines or on their margins had been an act of consumate collective political and intellectual will. Feminist scholarship, although it hadn't dismantled the master's house, had certainly nailed its theses to the door and inspired a feminist reformation. Across all the branches of scholarship gender thereafter had to be acknowledged. The feminist challenge had been profound:
for all its pretensions to being universal, what has been until now considered ‘human’ in our Western philosophy concerns only a small fringe of people: white men, proprietors of the means of production, along with the philosophers who theorised their point of view as the only and exclusively possible one.
(Wittig, 1992: 46)
Here Women's Studies and feminism more generally was on what appeared to be its most uncontestable ground. The academy had ignored half the world and the powerful legitimacy of feminism's claim for the need to rectify this staggering omission seemed beyond dispute. However disputed it was, and with devastating effect, not by powerful white men, but by women of colour.
Gender: The Colour of Whiteness
In the conclusion to Inessential Woman Elizabeth Spelman argued there were ‘no short cuts through women's lives’ (1988). It was not possible, she suggested, to sustain the collectivist fantasy of ‘women’ as the analytic and political constituency of feminism because no woman was only a woman. The point had been made by Sojourner Truth whose words were emphatically reasserted by bell hooks’ repositioning of her speech Ain't I a Woman into the centre of contemporary feminist debate (hooks, 1982). Truth insisted upon her identity as a woman in her account of her life which bore none of the supposed characteristics of (white) womanhood. Her identifi-cation as a woman was powerful and uncompromising as was her insistence that its contours had been shaped by slavery and prejudice. She was offering no short cuts through her life to make it it in with lives different from her own. Nor was she accepting the politics of exclusion that the defi-nitions of white womanhood imposed upon her. In similar fashion black feminists and women of colour repeated Truth's refrain in an attempt to achieve a redrawing of the conceptualization of women which recognized that no woman was only a woman. However the resistance to and denial of this truth was overwhelming. The problem of difference, Spelman also argued, was the problem of privilege and the privilege that had underpinned the development of Women's Studies was the configuring of the privileges of class and ‘race’. White middle-class women had converted their reality into the currency of universal womanhood, a conversion itself which was only possible by virtue of privilege.
Women's Studies had delineated itself from the identificatory certainty of sisterhood valorized by the women's movement. In the movement women were linked by the recognition of their shared realities and by their collective refusal of hierarchy and forms of political leadership. The power of this unity was protected even as the movement negotiated the schisms of class and sexuality that constantly threatened its coherence of sameness. The differences of class and sexuality, powerful though they were, had nothing of the purchase and impact of the black feminist critique and it is difficult to know why precisely this critique was to prove, finally, so forceful. The issues of the privilege of heterosexuality and the easy presumptions of middle-class values that dominated feminism had, from the earliest days of the women's movement, been subject to some degree of debate, albeit for many a very unsatisfactory debate. In spite of these very real differences however there existed across them an unrecognized unity which allowed white women to identify as ‘women’. This identification, as black feminists argued, was one which underwrote a sense of ‘white’ women sharing a reality as women, and of collectively belonging to the cultural traditions which were identified as constituting the realities of women in general. Perhaps part of the explanation for the pivotal nature of the critique from black feminists was to be found in the dawning understanding of many academic feminists that their whiteness gave them access to a privilege that was entirely unselfconscious and so unacknowledged and unrecognized. This resonated closely with precisely the criticism that women scholars had so deftly delivered to their male colleagues: that their male-ness gave them access to a privilege that was entirely unselfconscious. For white feminists to concede the difference of black women and women of colour meant not only ‘claiming’ their own stakes in a racist social order but also surrendering the only real claim they had to a conceptual object which demarcated Women's Studies’ field of study. Women's Studies was on the whole ‘racially unselfconscious’ and ‘processes of erasure, denial, invisibility and tokenism operate(d) to exclude women of colour from much of the rhetoric and practices of hegemonic feminism'(Bhavnani, 1997: 31). The exclusion was compounded not only by the privilege of whiteness but also by the hard won ‘privilege’ that white feminists had gained through the development of Women's Studies. That this hegemonic status continued to distort the full import of difference was evident in the argument of Ien Ang who suggested that feminism embraced the differences of women on the understanding that difference would not upset the fundamental basis of feminism (Ang, 1995: 73). Much in the way that multiculturalism ‘allowed’ ethnic minorities to participate in the dominant culture providing they had no designs on either the arrangement or the dominant group which initiated it, similarly black women and women of colour could be ‘added-in’ and incorporated by the Women's Studies project. Such an accommodation was unsatisfactory because it left the ‘category of “feminist” itself as singular, universal, unquestioned and therefore intact’ (Bhavnani, 1997: 45). This point is echoed by Drucilla Cornell who argues that
The word feminist is itself intimately related to the democratic revolutions in the West. But it is precisely the ‘westernisation’ of the term that has made some women of colour suspicious that it cannot be separated from its western roots, and more specifically from the imperialistic imaginary.
(Feminist Contentions, 1995: 147)
Thus it was that the two central organizing categories of Women's Studies – women and feminism – were shown to have their roots as much in the conventions of modernity as in the political radicalism that attempted to challenge it. ‘Women’ and ‘feminism’ much like the horse and carriage of the popular ballad, went together and their interrogation by black feminists necessitated a major rethinking of the premises of Women's Studies and the instability of its conceptual foundations. The essentialism of the category women was no longer sustainable. The conceptual crisis that feminism had forestalled for so long, seemingly could no longer be avoided.
Surprisingly however it was, and even more surprisingly this avoidance was secured by the feminist incorporation of the variegated paradigm of postmodernism expressed in the term ‘difference’. Difference became the axis of great theoretical and analytic productivity and although it was a contested term such was its malleability that almost anything could be subsumed under it (Moore, 1994:1). Postmodern difference was the vehicle which both critically liberated feminist thinking from essentialism and provided an analytic framework for consideration of differentiation as hierarchy. Both positions were requisite for feminism if it was to seriously engage with the issue of racialization. To embrace such a paradigm however it was necessary to surrender fantasies of the coherent political subject including those which informed the strategy of collectivist political action and the commonality of political goals. This was an immensely problematic task for feminism and for Women's Studies – still under siege to a certain extent and struggling to maintain the place of Women's Studies and the power of feminist critique, for feminist scholars ‘women’ represented a power base, a certainty, and above all a denial of the difficulties inspired by placing oneself in a complex world where rightness and wrong-ness had of necessity to be displaced by an ethics of negotiation and a politics of alliance.
The certainty that women were still defined in relation to men and that men were more powerful than women had underwritten feminism; understanding this relationship and its consequences had been the project of Women's Studies. That the theory of phallocentrism also identified this relation in the Western intellectual tradition was in some sense affirmative of feminism but it offered little by way of suggestion in how to translate an understanding of othering into a politics of transformation. Strangely in many respects feminist politics had been grappling with the question in its engagement with sexual politics: how to transform the relations between women and men proved such a difficult question that analysing the relative positions of women seemed the easier option. Although there has been some discussion of men, in the main, feminism and Women's Studies (with significant exceptions) abandoned the problem of men and intersexual relations to concentrate on the subordination of women. The problem however did not go away, re-emerging with the power relations between women that black feminists and women of colour somehow found themselves responsible for. When black women pointed out that racism was not their personal intellectual property, or their political responsibility, the issues of relationality and othering again became the terrain of feminism. How do you begin to transform a world where difference was the very substance of connectedness and also the vehicle of power, exploitation, denigration and denial again became a central issue. Whilst for postmodernism this was an ‘academic’ question, for feminists it was a political as well as a theoretical question. In the introduction to a collection entitled Feminism and the Politics of Difference Gunew and Yeatman state in their opening sentence ‘In its third decade, a dominant area of debate in second-wave feminism concerns being able to deal with differences among women without losing the impetus that derives from being a coherent movement for social change’ (Gunew and Yeatman, 1993: xiii). The mistresses’ house remained in tact although now conceived as having multiple voices. The problem was being formulated the wrong way round. It was not a question of how feminist theory could be moulded to incorporate and give voice to the divergent realities of women, but rather how those realities in their connectedness, relationality and othering refigured our understanding of the world we were trying to change, as well as our places in it. This was the import of anti-racist feminism but it was difficult to grasp not only because it was such an unfamiliar place clouded by the guilt and accusation that flowed so easily from the deep historical distortions through which we were all positioned, but also because these diffi-culties were compounded by the imported difficulties of postmodernism.
The difficulties posed by postmodernism were considerable. Lacan's foreclosure of the possibility of a feminine symbolic; Derrida's conflation of politics to a language of exposure; and Foucault's inability to deal with the fact that the ‘pleasures’ of the body include those of producing another human being, did not add up to an analytic framework particularly sympathetic to feminist concerns. The enormous energy that has gone into trying to adapt the postmodern paradigm to the feminist encounter with difference has often resulted in the difference of postmodernism overwriting the more grounded and embodied difference of feminism. Indeed as Bhavnani has pointed out:
It is often asserted that the discussions of ‘difference’ in the past decade have been the impetus for rethinking Women's Studies as a unitary approach to knowledge. While it is true that the past decade has witnessed a significant growth in discussions of ‘difference’, it is also worth remembering that women of colour have been arguing about many of these issues, within second-wave feminism, since the 1970s. At one's most sceptical, one could argue that the reason ‘difference’ is now taken so seriously is because white analysts (both women and men) have engaged with it, whereas before they merely ignored it.
(Bhavnani, 1997: 46)
This point is made in a slightly different way by Brah who argues that
the critique of the humanist subject cannot be understood only, even primarily, in terms of poststructuralist analyses, for it has simultaneously emerged as part of the global movement against colonialism and imperialism, as well as in feminist, anti-racist and other post-war social movements.
(Brah, 1996: 213–14)
Reconceptualizing the gendered subject through the prism of difference did however illuminate the extent to which the full import of global relations registered themselves in relations between women. ‘In their critique of the one sided definition of the female subject, black feminists built on the lacanian idea of the instability of identity’. From the experiences of black and postcolonial women, Mohanty argues that the category of the female subject should have scope for a plurality of differences. Female subjectivity can only be useful politically when it is understood as a regulating concept that acquires meaning through what it excludes as well as what it includes. Instead of being reduced to the psychoanalytically conceived terms to sexual difference, black feminist critics argued for a reconceptu-alization which acknowledged the psychic, gendered and racialized components of the subject as it was located by the relations of postcoloniality, and placed by negotiation of the often contradictory landscape of subject positions. This form of scholarship took boundaries and their crossings as the historical site of analysis and gave new depth to the notion of inter-disciplinarity in its mobilization of the axes of differentiation as the object of study. Avtar Brah argued in her concept of diasporic space that it was necessary to ‘eschew marginalising impulses’ and in their stead, ‘undertake forms of analysis and political practice that took the concept of articulation very seriously indeed'(1996: 246). For Brah this did not preclude the need or indeed necessity to study these axes independently but it did insist that ‘whatever has been prioritised, be it gender, racism or class, it cannot be understood as if it were an autonomous category, even though it can certainly have independent effects’ (ibid.).
However for Women's Studies, and indeed for feminism, gender had functioned as an autonomous category. Like the category women it was the privileged category of feminist scholarship. It had facilitated the movement of feminists across the divide of Women's Studies and disciplinary feminism, a movement which had become increasingly concentrated as the old hostilities demarcating 1970s feminism slipped into history. As well, its central privilege derived from its status as the category which sustained the argument that the deployment of gender meant a redrawing of the social world and a rethinking of the intellectual universe. The difficulty with this claim was that black feminist criticism in conjunction with theories of the postcolonial subject had mapped a different, much denser and decentred world in which gender was relativized as an axes of domination and a modality of being. The problem this posed for feminism in general and Women's Studies in particular could be seen as acute. Reflecting on this issue Stacey poses the problem somewhat starkly:
So fully has feminist attention to differences among women and to conceptions of multiple subjectivities displaced unitary formulations of gender differences between women and men that it has become challenging to decide whether one still can identify an intellectual terrain that remains a specifically feminist project.
(Stacey, 1995: 324)
If neither gender nor women can be taken as privileged categories, on what grounds does Women's Studies insist on its right to be? That it continues to survive in the academic world is not open to doubt. The steady expansion of Women's Studies has never really abated and indeed expansion extends to the new spaces of the post-1989 world order (Braidotti, 1997). This expansion has not exclusively taken place in universities (Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, 1997), and success within universities has inspired institutional difficulties as well as theoretical ones (Davies and Holloway, 1995; Stanton and Stewart, 1995; Stanley, 1997; de Groot, 1997). Moreover the spread of Women's Studies within higher education has spanned a period of enormous change in universities themselves, changes which have brought the massification and commodification of education globally. The restructuring and resource stripping of the university sector that has developed with the ascendancy of economic rationalism as the credo of state managers increasingly seems to dictate the survival of disciplines, not by virtue of their intellectual integrity and coherence, but rather by virtue of their competitiveness in the growing market of educational products. In many universities physics does not recruit students, but Women's Studies does and that, finally, is what seals their respective fates. When women no longer wish to pursue Women's Studies no institutional sentiment will be on offer to alleviate waning fortunes, regardless of the rhetoric of mission statements. These are very harsh times in higher education, for students and staff alike and increasingly they seem to be enveloped by an anti-intel-lectualism and philistinism inspired by the failed Faustian pact that educational managers struck for the sake of expansion. ‘Re-engineering’ university education to market requirements did not guarantee jobs and the value of education diminished accordingly. This is a very long way from the intellectual and political optimism of the 1960s which proved to be so inspirational for feminist scholarship and indeed from the liberal atmosphere which allowed, however ungraciously, for the confrontation of intellectual projects that lead to so many refigurings of objects of study.
However if Women's Studies measures the positive and negative dynamics of educational change it also, rather more depressingly, measures the persistence of deeply conformist patterns. For while Women's Studies has achieved some standing in the community very little has changed in the gendered and racialized hierarchies of higher education. In the UK women hold less than a quarter of the academic posts, account for only 4.9 per cent of full professors, are less likely to be promoted than their male colleagues, are significantly under-represented in senior grades, work on average longer hours than men, and make up the bulk of contract staff (Davies and Holloway, 1995; Davis, 1997). The pattern is as old and familiar as it is widespread: in the US, where women's studies programmes are better resourced than anywhere else in the world (Stimpson, 1986), 26 per cent of academics are women, 14 per cent of whom have achieved full professorships (Davis, 1997). The contrast between the success of Women's Studies and the failure of equity is measured by Kathy Davis in her account of one of the most successful Women's Studies Departments in Europe. ‘Women's Studies in the Netherlands may be flourishing’ she argues, ‘but the position of women in the academy couldn't be worse.’ The Netherlands, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, ‘has one of the largest gender gaps in the academy’. Quoting from an international comparative study, her case is bleak: in the Netherlands only
2.3 per cent of the full professors, 6.1 per cent of the senior lecturers (associate professors), and 15.7 per cent of the lecturers are women (assistant professors). There are fewer women in all university functions than in any major European country, less than in Botswana and just slightly higher than in Iran and Pakistan.
(Davis, 1997: 187)
The ‘success’ of Women's Studies she argues should not be allowed to function as an alibi for the more general deterioration of the position of women within universities.
So the success of Women's Studies is qualified, not only by these considerations but also by the fact that many women's studies programmes survive only because of the committed defiance of students and staff who engage in feminist scholarship in spite of the difficulties entailed.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
So is Women's Studies between the rock of methodological dissolution and the hard place of a changing but still inhospitable educational environment? The answer has to be yes, but with the caveat that these troubling times for feminists have a certain familiarity to them. Even at moments of its greatest success the practitioners of Women's Studies were mindful that it would not be ‘a discipline like any other’. How could it be otherwise when its very existence represented a challenge to the foundational coherence of the academy? There has never been much doubt either that Women's Studies should retain its position on the margins for precisely the reasons bell hooks advocated, that it is a location that makes possible radical critique. And even as Women's Studies secured an institutional home within the academy, it has always been with the proviso that it was an embattled one which was less a retreat than a staging post. How could it be otherwise when the feminist project so uncomfortably and frustratingly straddled the transitionary flux between modernity and postmodern-ity? That this place sometimes felt like a hurly-burly of loss betwixt identity and difference was also not surprising:
feminism is wedded to the modern by virtue of its rootedness in the space opened up by rights discourse and by the ideals of the bourgeois public, but at the same time, its commitment to difference and diversity and its sceptical stance towards Reason call forth the postmodern. The relationship of women to modernity, and to social theory as a modern project, is truly one riven with contradictions and ambiguities. Feminism … constituted both a critique of and a defence of modernity, so has a great stake in the modernity–postmodernity debates, which are at heart about the possibility of a ‘subject’ for social theory.
(Marshall, 1994: 148)
Neither are these issues solely issues of theoretical paradigms. They are centrally issues of the political realities of women's lives which are bounded by a hegemonic essentialism embedded in structural and social relations which designate ‘women's’ nature as natural, their subjecthood as, at best, qualified and their difference from men unequivocal. This formation of difference continues to bound the lives of women, even as they challenge and attempt to transform it. It also of course explains feminism's persisting attraction to the elusive promise of coherence, autonomy, rationality and agency ‘which undergirds an unreconstructed modernism’ built precisely on the denial of women's autonomy, even as it promised it in the language of equality and rights. As Stuart Hall has argued ‘It is only too tempting to fall into the trap of assuming that, because essentialism has been deconstructed theoretically, therefore it has been displaced politically.’ Speaking of postcolonialism he argues that:
while holding fast to differentiation and specificity, we cannot afford to forget the overdetermining effects of the colonial moment, the work which its binaries were constantly required to do to represent the proliferation of cultural difference and forms of life, which were always there, with the sutured and overdetermined ‘unity’ of that simplifying, overarching binary, ‘the West and the Rest’…. We have to keep these two ends of the chain in play at the same time – overdetermination and difference, condensation and dissemination – if we are not to fall into a playful deconstructionism, the fantasy of a powerless utopia of difference.
(Hall, 1997: 249)
That the other overarching binary of women and men also continues to overdetermine the lives of women, the projects of feminism, and the nomenclature and the methodological vagaries of Women's Studies is precisely what measures the space between a rock and a hard place. It demands constant recuperation of feminist intellectual and political ambitions as well as a reflexive criticality to foreclose the temptation to retreat to the imagined certainties of essentialism, and a stamina for reinvention towards a place that we can hardly yet imagine.
Just Another Cell in the Beehive?
Is Women's Studies/feminist scholarship just another cell in the beehive? Here too the answer must be qualified. Certainly, as Mary Evans argues, feminism ‘has to a large extent destabilized the Western canonical tradition, and contributed, in a very important way, to the idea that no text is stable’ (Evans, 1997: 121). Feminism however has arguably a much wider project than this which is to reject gender differentiation
because it misrepresents the self difference of the gendered subject. It restricts the play of difference that marks every attempt to confirm identity…. The deconstruction of gender categorization … affirms multiplicity and the ‘concrete singular,’ and at the same time opens up the possibility of communicative freedom in which the Other is not there as limit but as supportive relation, the ‘ground’ of my own being.
(Cornell and Thurschwell, 1987: 161)
Women's Studies is the sentinel for this project. It faces the fixity of a world which continues to render woman as the eternal other and looks towards the possibility of a world where ‘genuine difference is inseparable from a notion of relationality’ (Cornell and Thurschwell, 1987: 161).
The need to reimagine difference is central to the projects of feminism. Feminism, if it is to realize its instinctive ambitions at all, must be able to configure a world in which ‘difference’ is no longer a vehicle for inequality, racism and subjugation. This is of necessity a creative act but also an intensely difficult theoretical relocation. It is the vast project of denaturalizing the social world and retheorizing/resocializing human connectedness and association. Women's Studies is one of the sites in which feminists are attempting to rethink themselves as intellectuals who can generate the kind of generosity of spirit that can sustain this project, although it has to be said the odds against it are high. Women's Studies also marks the hard edge of the deeply historically entrenched realities of women's experience and it is this which impels students – women – to study. Women's lives embrace what sometime seem to be impossible contradiction. Women's Studies must retain the commitment to interrogate critically the possibility that it need not always be thus.
Footnotes
Helen Crowley teaches Women's Studies at the University of North London and is a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Review.
I would like to especially thank Merl Storr and Ann Curthoys for their careful reading and comments on the draft of this article. I would also like to thank the Feminist Review editorial group but particularly Ann Whitehead and Catherine Hall.