Troubling Women's Studies

In Troubling Women's Studies, Ann Braithwaite, Susan Heald, Susanne Luhmann, and Sharon Rosenberg, drawing on responses from other feminist intellectuals, converse, somewhat anxiously, about "the current ambivalent mood" in women's studies, a field they say "appears deeply troubled." But despite their "often uneasy attachments to this field," they all "continue to believe in Women's Studies as a "vitally necessary" intellectual project. It is a "a strategy of preservation, for it allows one to maintain a love for the field and to be critical at the same time."

These words demonstrate that even after 40 years of feminist activity, both within and without the academy, women's equality in the university is far from achieved — or assured.

This volume is an insightful collection of stories about stories: more specifically, the stories that academics tell about the field of Women's Studies. The text contains four separate narratives that seek to illuminate the process by which Women's Studies has sought/seeks to define itself and its relationship to the women's movement(s) and feminism more generally. The trouble with Women's Studies, it posits, centres around feelings of ambivalence, separation and alienation: a recurring theme of 'Paradise Lost' that is embodied within the internal debate around the discipline's own genesis, ascension, and perceived 'fall from grace.' The authors trace the attempt of the founding mothers to construct a 'master narrative' of Women's Studies, and demonstrate how this process has excluded a polyphony of voices, erasing the disparate experiences of class, culture, ethnicity, and gender. If the 'prime directive' of Women's Studies is both self-reflexivity and accountability, then Women's Studies epistemology contains a serious flaw, since it spends little time 'exploring the difference that difference makes' (132).

While the motifs of alienation and loss lend the text an internal thematic cogency, they also give the work an overall flavour of Judeo-Christian-liberal ideology that is overwhelming at times, undermining the authors' appeals to inclusivity and polyphony. The implied assumption throughout is the notion that the 'new' and 'innovative' are always 'progressive,' and that continuity retards evolution. As a professor of First Nations Studies who has taught courses in Women's Studies, I found myself questioning the 'naturalness' of this attitude. First Nations cultures tend to stress continuity over radical change, recognizing a cyclical cosmology where nothing is ever really new, but is derivative of what came before it. In this worldview, continuity does not preclude change, innovation, or diversity: rather, continuity provides the social stability necessary for those elements to evolve.

Nevertheless, I found the text valuable for reflecting upon the state of my own discipline, noticing many parallels between the debates and dilemmas of Women's Studies, and those that occur in First Nations Studies. Particularly interesting was Susan Heald's examination of the Talyoristic aspirations of the modern academy, in which a university degree has been reduced to a commodity for which students are the intended consumers. In this model, curricula in disciplines such as Women's Studies (or First Nations Studies) that are rooted in experiential and emancipatory ethics don't pass the 'cost-benefit' analysis of university administrators, students, or prospective employers: the benefit of receiving the education is not perceived to outweigh, or even match, the cost of its production (in terms of dedicated funding) or consumption (in terms of securing employment, or its potential use to employers). Overall, the text left me wondering if the modern academy has any room left for pedagogies that require a meaningful form of self-reflexivity and accountability, and if marginalized disciplines like Women's Studies sometimes choose co-optation as a form of survival. Ultimately, in contemplating our own disciplinary origins and identities, we must realize that we can't go 'back to the garden' because it didn't exist in the first place.

The starting point for writing this book is the authors' uneasy attachment to the field of women's studies and the increasing instability of the very term 'women's studies.' Central for the four authors, all of them current and former full-time practitioners in Canadian Women's Studies to future students and future academics.

In the first chapter, Susan Heald reflects on her experience of teaching students autobiographical practices, crucial for Women's Studies. Students learn to see themselves not as the 'unique' or 'autonomous' individual that liberal theory and its manifestations in western culture encourage them to be, but as social actors both constituted and constrained by broader social forces, which they need to analyse and try to understand (46). The difficulties of teaching autobiographical thinking and writing arise from the students' voyeuristic desire to 'explore' (in order to possess) the Other, which is prevalent Western ways of knowing' (53). Exploring their own social status would mean (for the majority of students) analysing their belonging to the white middle-class heterosexual dominant group of society. Another problem, as Heald argues, is the (mis)use of empowerment. Mostly understood to imply the promotion of equality of opportunity and participation, empowerment has often been used as a means to foster individualism and self-assertion, rather than to analyse social power structures. What Heald calls for is the use of autobiographical practices to challenge the liberal humanist theory of the subject in the interest of a subject who is always/already in community (66). However, in an increasingly market-driven university, where students don't see themselves as part of a community of knowers and learners, but as individual clients of a service industry (71), autobiographical work seems more and more at odds with contemporary academe. Suspending, instead of reporting, the theory of the liberal humanist subject in which students and universities are embedded and which permits the persistence of various forms of oppression is what Women's Studies need to do, according to Heald (83).

Reflections on Women's Studies and the women's movement, as Ann Braithwaite argues in the second chapter of the volume, are characterised by the large unquestioned connection made between 'the women's movement' (always referred to in singular) and Women's Studies as an academic project. By yoking together these two separate sites, according to Braithwaite, the phase 'the women's movement' comes to act as a magical sign which functions to condense, displace and reduce Women's Studies to an academic pursuit assumed to be linked with a certain construction of Othe women's movement' (105). Braithwaite argues that many authors writing about the inception of Women's Studies foster, for example, the assumption of race and class as always having been central to Women's Studies and feminism in a broader definition. This 'writing in', she believes, is actually working to 'write out' the difficult, complex, and challenging history of those issues in Women's Studies (107). 'Writing in' a particular set of issues, such as race, as always having been of central concern ironically leads to the fact that those challenges are then 'written out' as not relevant through their very inclusion (128). Hence, 'inclusion can also work as a type of exclusion' (tokenism, political correctness) (131). Thus, mobilising the term 'the women's movement' risks obscuring the complexity and multiplicity of meaning and identity.

In the third chapter, Susanne Luhmann challenges the thinking go the past, present and the future as linked in a linear manner. For Women's Studies, considered as a counter project to the existing university and to mainstream knowledge production, and as potentially and eventually able to transform thought and thus produce social change, 'losing its central narratives about its role, foundations, ambitions and aims constitutes a problem' (153). Luhmann asks why these fundamental doubts, anxieties and feelings of loss emerge at a point in time, when Canadian Women's Studies seems to be much more secure than ever before. Institutional integration, as Luhmann argues, can also lead to dilemmas and problems for the self-definition and understanding of the field. What happens if Women's Studies, as it matures, takes a different route from that once imagined by its founders? Although Women's Studies and feminism are closely linked in their emergence and appearance, they are not identical. For Luhmann, feminism is in some way a theory and Women's Studies a practice, that is, Women's Studies is the 'site of the academic investigation of feminism' (158). This is not to suggest that Women's Studies is to be understood as the academic arm of the women's movement or of feminism. And, yet, the narrative of continuous identity of the two persists. The tendency in contemporary debates over the history of Women's Studies is to suggest that the field's history is a guarantee of the field's future. To imagine the past, present and future as linear, risks conservatism; the might hinder the further development of Women's Studies.

In the last essay, Sharon Rosenberg turns toward the question of how to pass on Women's Studies, which is caught in a paradox of the modern university: challenging disciplinary boundaries, on the one hand, and constituting a distinct area of study -- a discipline -- on the other (208). By looking at the feminist memorial response to the Montréal Massacre, when 14 women were shot dead at the École Polytechnique, University of Montréal by Marc Lépine, who blamed feminism for ruling his life, Rosenberg seeks to find instructions for the current troubles facing Women's Studies. For Rosenberg the experience of loss is a site of learning (202) and remembering has also always had to do with loss. Drawing on the theories of Irit Rogoff (2002) and Patt Lather (2000), Rosenberg maintains that 'looking away' and 'getting lost' are necessary conceptual and methodological practices for passing on Women's Studies as a troubled and troubling intellectual project of the modern university (203). According to Rosenberg, the Montréal Massacre has been neglected by feminist scholarship, since it has mostly been dealt with in terms of violence against women. This conception has displaced the killer's own accusation, which was explicitly against feminists. In a similar mode, as Rosenberg argues the category of Owomen' in Women's Studies functions emblematically, that is, as a stand-in for all women (2280, which holds the risk of excluding as much as it includes (231).

Troubling Women's Studies: Pasts, Presents and Possibilities is a very illuminating and useful source for anyone interested in what is at stake for Women's Studies in the modern university. Topics include autobiography as a feminist method for teaching and research, (feminist) memoirs of Women's Studies, the past present and future of Women's Studies as an unquestioned linearity, and remembrance of Women's Studies as a troubled/troubling project. By addressing the current, rather apocalyptic, debate on the 'end' of Women's Studies, the authors insist that another Women's Studies is possible. The volume provides a vast bibliography and it would have been even more useful had it provided an index of both names and subjects.