Women's studies: Interdisciplinary imperatives, again

Feminist Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 514-518

  Wiegman, Robyn ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041034181     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178776     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. See Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 878-902; and Wendy Brown, "The Impossibility of Women's Studies," differences 9 (fall 1997): 79-101. Although its bibliographic citation is 1997, the Special Issue on 'Women's Studies on the Edge" did not appear until late in 1998. For a lengthy critical response to Gubar, see my "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion," Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999): 362-79. See Brown, 83.
2. See Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 878-902; and Wendy Brown, "The Impossibility of Women's Studies," differences 9 (fall 1997): 79-101. Although its bibliographic citation is 1997, the Special Issue on 'Women's Studies on the Edge" did not appear until late in 1998. For a lengthy critical response to Gubar, see my "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion," Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999): 362-79. See Brown, 83.
3. See Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 878-902; and Wendy Brown, "The Impossibility of Women's Studies," differences 9 (fall 1997): 79-101. Although its bibliographic citation is 1997, the Special Issue on 'Women's Studies on the Edge" did not appear until late in 1998. For a lengthy critical response to Gubar, see my "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion," Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999): 362-79. See Brown, 83.
4. See Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Gubar, "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" Critical Inquiry 24 (summer 1998): 878-902; and Wendy Brown, "The Impossibility of Women's Studies," differences 9 (fall 1997): 79-101. Although its bibliographic citation is 1997, the Special Issue on 'Women's Studies on the Edge" did not appear until late in 1998. For a lengthy critical response to Gubar, see my "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion," Critical Inquiry 25 (winter 1999): 362-79. See Brown, 83.
5. This is certainly one way to read Martha Nussbaum's "A Professor of Parody" (New Republic, 22 Feb. 1999, 37-45), which attacks the entire body of Judith Butler's work for its political "quietism," which is to say, in Nussbaum's words (p. 45), that "Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it." This determination of the "real" of feminist politics significantly obviates Butler's critical intervention into philosophical discourses, rendering the academy outside of, if not against, the necessary politics of social transformation. By reducing the effect of Butler's work to her own understanding of Butler's theoretical moves, Nussbaum reasserts the feminist political project as one unified around questions of state-based change. Forget that Butler and others, often under the sign of sexual identity, have been critical of just such a notion of proper leftist agendas.
6. I hope it is clear that these various critiques of institutionalization are contradictory, that scholars who ascribe to one may be wholly unconcerned with another, that there is no uniformity in the analysis of how and why institutionalization has gone wrong.
7. For an extensive discussion of what I call here "apocalyptic formulation," see my "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures," New Literary History 31 (autumn 2000): 805-25.
8. Biddy Martin, "Success and Its Failures," differences 9 (fall 1997): 102. Martin's essay finally resists the apocalyptic formulation by challenging women's studies as a field formation to move outside of those knowledges that have historically been the center of its analysis, humanities and social sciences. "It would be naive and dangerous," she writes, "to think that the work of Women's Studies, or of feminism is over. The question is whether the work can be done in the context of the programs and intellectual formations we have established and institutionalized" (130).
9. Ibid., 103.