Haunted by citizenship: Whitenormative citizen-subjects and the uses of history in women's studies

Feminist Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 503-533

  Brandzel, Amy L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84859931897     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Chandra T. Mohanty, "US Empire and the Project of Women's Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicity, and Dissent", Gender, Place, and Culture 13 no. 1(February 2006):7-20. Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal make a similar connection by arguing that women's studies is ensnared with the nation-state, particularly through its introductory courses.
2. See their "Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Reconfiguring Women's and Gender Studies", in Women's Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change, ed. Robyn Wiegman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 66-81.
3. Gayatri Spivak with Ellen Rooney, "'In A Word': Interview", in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 359.
4. Syllabi are an extremely rich source of material and a rarely tapped archive. Although some scholars have discussed syllabi within the general register of curriculum or referred to as part of their larger analysis (see Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity [Durham: Duke University Press, 2003]), it is far less common to see syllabi read as texts. Syllabi used in this analysis include those accessed via larger resource sites but also included numerous individual web searches for more current syllabi. Rather than cite individual syllabi or even individual institutional online syllabi collections, I invite readers to survey some of the larger resource sites, such as the National Women's Studies Association's syllabi collections, www.nwsa.org/research/publications/index.php;
5. University of Maryland Women's Studies database, www.mith2.umd.edu/ WomensStudies/Syllabi/;
6. and the Center for Women and Information Technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County database, www.umbc.edu/cwit/syllabi.html. I will not be pointing toward any particular or individual syllabus in order to emphasize this is not an individual or departmental issue but, rather, a systemic one.
7. There are many examples of critical readings of women's studies curricula, such as Beverly Guy-Sheftall, "Engaging Difference: Racial and Global Perspectives in Graduate Women's Education", Feminist Studies 24, no. 2(Summer 1998):327-33;
8. Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, "Transnational Practices";
9. Kathleen B. Blee, "Contending with Disciplinarity" (177-182)
10. and Susan Stanford Friedman, "What Should Every Women's Studies Major Know? Reflections on the Capstone Seminar" (416-37), both in Women's Studies on Its Own;
11. see also McDermott, "Internationalizing the Core Curriculum", Women's Studies Quarterly 26, no. 3/4(1998):88-98.
12. There are also some examples of scholars reading commonly used women's studies texts, such as Patrice McDermott, "The Meaning and Uses of Feminism in Introductory Women's Studies Textbooks", Feminist Studies 24, no. 2(Summer 1998):403-27.
13. Anthologies that were analyzed in the course of this study were limited to those that were most commonly assigned in these courses: Alice S. Rossi, The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1974);
14. Miriam Schneir, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)
15. and Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1994);
16. and Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, eds., Feminist Theory: A Reader (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005).
17. I also reviewed commonly used secondary feminist history texts including Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002);
18. Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2000);
19. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder: Westview Press, 2008);
20. and Imelda Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to "Post-Feminism" (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
21. Mohanty, "US Empire", 15. Although Mohanty offers a sustained and important critique of the endurance of imperialism and coloniality in women's studies, I depart from Mohanty when she turns towards "contested citizenship" as a potential site for resolution because, as the argument here suggests, I find citizenship to be a corrupt, alwaysalready colonialist enterprise.
22. The majority of the articles in the following anthologies and special journal issues dedicated to debating the field of women's studies discuss the question of how the field is an "interdiscipline" in one way or another: Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Women Studies on the Edge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
23. Wiegman, Women's Studies on Its Own;
24. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman, eds., Feminism beside Itself (New York: Routledge, 1995);
25. Elizabeth Kennedy and Agatha Bains, eds., Women's Studies for the Future (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005);
26. and Feminist Studies 24, no. 2 (Summer 1998).
27. For an interesting book-length discussion, see Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
28. See, for example, Robyn Wiegman, "Academic Feminism against Itself", NWSA Journal 14, no. 2(Summer 2002):18-37
29. and her "Feminism's Broken English", in Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003):, 75-94;
30. Kaplan and Grewal, "Transnational Practices", 66-81;
31. Sabina Sawhney, "Strangers in the Classroom", in Women's Studies on Its Own, 341-67;
32. and Danielle Bouchard, "'Warped Deductions and Mixed Identities': Politics, Globalism, and Interdisciplinarity in Women's Studies" (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2006).
33. Examples of these types of laments are plentiful and discussed throughout this article. For other examples not discussed directly, see Jane O. Newman, "The Present and Our Past: Simone de Beauvoir, Descartes, and Presentism in the Historiography of Feminism", in Women's Studies on Its Own, 141-73;
34. Blee, "Contending with Disciplinarity", 181.
35. Freedman, No Turning Back, xi.
36. Sara M. Evans, Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (New York: Free Press, 2003), 5.
37. Joan W. Scott, "Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity", Critical Inquiry 27(Winter 2001):290.
38. Robyn Wiegman, "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures", New Literary History 31, no. 4(Autumn 2000):819.
39. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 12.
40. Susan Stanford Friedman asks a similar question when she reflects on the role of the capstone seminar in "What Should Every Women's Studies Major Know?" 416.
41. Edén E. Torres, Chicana without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003), 65.
42. Rachel Lee, "Notes from the (Non) Field: Teaching and Theorizing Women of Color", in Women's Studies on Its Own, 89.
43. Importantly, Wendy Brown is also subject to the critique offered here as she argues that mainstreaming women's studies would help ensure that students learn the "appropriate antecedents" to feminist theory, which happens to correspond to the canon of political philosophy, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. See Brown's "The Impossibility of Women's Studies", Differences 9, no. 3(1997):98.
44. For more on this critique of canonization, see Dominick LaCapra, "Intellectual History and Its Ways", American Historical Review 97, no. 2(1992):425-39.
45. Lee, "Notes from the (Non) Field", 88-89.
46. For more on this point, see Amy L. Brandzel, "Queering the Subject (s) of Citizenship: Beyond the Normative Citizen in Law and History" (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2006).
47. Antoinette Burton, "Some Trajectories of 'Feminism' and 'Imperialism'", Gender and History 10, no. 3(1998):560.
48. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" in A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 263-93.
49. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 114-163, 152.
50. Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and Artifice", 285.
51. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
52. Burton, "Some Trajectories", 558.
53. See Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, "Challenging Imperial Feminism", Feminist Review 17(Autumn, 1984):558.
54. Susan S. Lanser, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper', and the Politics of Color in America", Feminist Studies 15, no. 3(Fall 1989):434-5.
55. Alys Eve Weinbaum, "Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism", Feminist Studies 27, no. 2(Summer 2001):297
56. Lanser, "Feminist Criticism", 420.
57. Deborah McDowell, "Transferences, Black Feminist Discourse: The 'Practice' of 'Theory, '" in Feminism beside Itself, 95-118, 96.
58. For a published version of this problematic, see Seung-kyung Kim and Carole McCann, "Internationalizing Theories of Feminism", Women's Studies Quarterly 26, no. 3/4(1998):115-32.
59. Elsa Barkley Brown, "'What Has Happened Here': The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics", in Feminist Studies 18, no. 2(Summer 1992):295-312.
60. Mrinalini Sinha, "How History Matters: Complicating the Categories of 'Western' and 'Non-Western' Feminisms", in Is Academic Feminism Dead? Theory and Practice, ed. Social Justice Group (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 167-86.
61. Danielle Bouchard, "By 'Transnational' I Mean 'US': The Disciplinary Work of Women's Studies", unpublished manuscript, 28.
62. See also her "Women's Studies' Guilt Complex: Interdisciplinarity, Globalism, and the University", Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 37, no. 1(2004):32-39, and "Warped Deductions and Mixed Identities."
63. Gayatri Spivak with Ellen Rooney, "'In a Word': Interview", in The Second Wave, 359.