Professional Identity Politics

Feminist Studies

Volumn 29, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 422-434+475

  Caughie, Pamela L ^a  

^a LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0142200360     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. To "work through" is to identify a contradiction or blindspot and tease out the various unconscious (and in this case, institutional and disciplinary) processes giving rise to the dilemma. To work through is not to resolve the problem but to identify the forces generating it, a process of confronting ambivalence.
2. Another version of this essay, which I presented at a conference on the university in April 2001, was titled, "Disciplining Interdisciplinarity." I had planned to use that as a subtitle for this essay, before I saw that Cindi Katz used that title for her recent essay in Feminist Studies 27 (summer 2001): 510-25. The point of using both titles together was to emphasize the connection between disciplines and identity.
3. One notable exception is Judith A. Allen and Sally L. Kitch, "Disciplined by Disciplines? The Need for an Interdisciplinary Research Mission in Women's Studies," in Feminist Studies 24 (summer 1998): 275-300.
4. On the exposure of traditional disciplinary structures, see Ellen Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to the Politics of Cultural Studies," in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2 (fall 1990): esp. 20; and Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 79-80; on women's studies' commitment to activism and its ideology of empowerment, see Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay,"Paradoxes of Empowerment," included here.
5. On the exposure of traditional disciplinary structures, see Ellen Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to the Politics of Cultural Studies," in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2 (fall 1990): esp. 20; and Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 79-80; on women's studies' commitment to activism and its ideology of empowerment, see Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay,"Paradoxes of Empowerment," included here.
6. On the exposure of traditional disciplinary structures, see Ellen Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to the Politics of Cultural Studies," in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2 (fall 1990): esp. 20; and Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 79-80; on women's studies' commitment to activism and its ideology of empowerment, see Judith Kegan Gardiner's essay,"Paradoxes of Empowerment," included here.
7. Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 32, 65-66. See also Gardiner's "Paradoxes of Empowerment" for a similar definition of disciplinary knowledge. Foucault's point is discussed by Jana Sawicki in Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York: Routledge, 2001), 83. If disciplines produce subjects of knowledge, then our disciplinary training not only provides us with a professional identity, a title, and academic status, but also shapes our subject positions.
8. Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 32, 65-66. See also Gardiner's "Paradoxes of Empowerment" for a similar definition of disciplinary knowledge. Foucault's point is discussed by Jana Sawicki in Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York: Routledge, 2001), 83. If disciplines produce subjects of knowledge, then our disciplinary training not only provides us with a professional identity, a title, and academic status, but also shapes our subject positions.
9. Fish, 79-80, 105; Sandra Coyner is quoted in Marilyn Jacoby Boxer, When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women's Studies in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 42.
10. Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (London: Jason Aronson, 1991), 184. On interdisciplinarity and issues of trespassing, see Garber, 53; Giles Gunn, "Interdisciplinary Studies" in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 244; Domna Stanton and Abigail Stewart, "Remodeling Relations: Women's Studies and the Disciplines," in Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4.
11. Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (London: Jason Aronson, 1991), 184. On interdisciplinarity and issues of trespassing, see Garber, 53; Giles Gunn, "Interdisciplinary Studies" in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 244; Domna Stanton and Abigail Stewart, "Remodeling Relations: Women's Studies and the Disciplines," in Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4.
12. Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (London: Jason Aronson, 1991), 184. On interdisciplinarity and issues of trespassing, see Garber, 53; Giles Gunn, "Interdisciplinary Studies" in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 244; Domna Stanton and Abigail Stewart, "Remodeling Relations: Women's Studies and the Disciplines," in Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 4.
13. Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 13. As one example of this attitude, last year the women's studies program at my institution hosted a social science scholar who spoke about her recent book on gender identity. After the talk, all the humanities faculty, who were also women's studies faculty, roundly dismissed the work. I, too, found the talk weak, but I was struck by the attitudes of my colleagues. As one woman put it, "it must be easy to get published in [that discipline]." The failing was not attributed to the particular scholar or book but to the discipline as a whole. From the outside we all look alike.
14. Garber, 65. Kaplan explains the subject invests the object with desire (507) and the object of desire, according to Lacan, "only comes into existence as an object when it is lost" to the subject, that is, when the subject needs to satisfy some loss. Thus desire is always destined to contain its own dissatisfaction. See Juliet Mitchell's introduction to Jacques Lacan's Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), 6.
15. Gerda Lerner is quoted in Boxer, 37; Stanton and Stewart, "Remodeling Relations," 6. The ten doctoral programs are at Clark University, Rutgers University, University of Maryland, Emory University, the Union Institute, Ohio State University, University of Iowa, University of Minnesota, University of California-Los Angeles, and the University of Washington. There are also two women's studies programs that offer the Ph.D. jointly with some other degree: Pennsylvania State University and the University of Michigan.
16. Boxer makes this point as well, 40.
17. Martha Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody," The New Republic, 22 Feb. 1999, 38.
18. Fish, 31.
19. George Steiner, "On Difficulty," in On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 41, 46; Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in his Limited INC (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 21; and Gertrude Stein, "How Writing Is Written," in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 490.
20. George Steiner, "On Difficulty," in On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 41, 46; Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in his Limited INC (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 21; and Gertrude Stein, "How Writing Is Written," in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 490.
21. George Steiner, "On Difficulty," in On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 41, 46; Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in his Limited INC (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 21; and Gertrude Stein, "How Writing Is Written," in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 490.
22. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Poetics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); note that "poetics" in the subtitle signals a theory of aesthetics, as does Nussbaum's work.
23. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 365, 371.
24. Fish, 13, 110.
25. Gardiner's pedagogical strategy for addressing this issue is to ask students to critique one another's papers, "helping the authors rewrite to answer the methodological queries of someone from another field" ("Paradoxes of Empowerment"). The question is, what kinds of complexities or subtleties might be lost with such revision? When are we translating knowledge across disciplines and when are we short-changing disciplinary knowledge?
26. When I gave this example at the NWSA session, Kitch pointed out that Nussbaum's writing is not a good example of interdisciplinarity because her analysis fails to transform knowledge, one of the key concerns of women's studies scholarship. Yet Gunn, in his essay on interdisciplinarity, uses Nussbaum's "ethical criticism" as an example of interdisciplinary work. He defines interdisciplinarity as a practice that pursues its questions "into areas of critical inquiry that cannot be mapped at all by the cartographic practices of contemporary disciplines" and that transforms the contributing disciplines rather than simply borrowing from them (239, 241). Although Kitch and Gunn differ in their assessments of Nussbaum's work, both emphasize the transformation of knowledge and disciplines as essential to interdisciplinary scholarship.
27. Claire Goldberg Moses, "Made in America: 'French Feminism' in Academia," Feminist Studies 24 (summer 1998): 262; Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 83.
28. Claire Goldberg Moses, "Made in America: 'French Feminism' in Academia," Feminist Studies 24 (summer 1998): 262; Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 83.
29. Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish," 25.
30. Garber, 53, 61, 72, 76.
31. Ibid., 76.