Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
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(Re) Producing Gendered Knowledges: How Institutional Ecologies and ‘Supple’ Objects Influenced Academic Understandings of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the U.S. / Christine V. Wood
Abstract
This essay examines how researchers’ differing definitions of core categories of analysis in women’s and gender studies have yielded a wide variety of knowledge about gender, women, and sexuality across research institutions. The paper draws on historical records from five women’s and gender studies programs and departments in the U.S. and interviews with their faculty. In their formative years these programs defined their purpose similarly: to address the paucity of research on women and the social problems of sex inequality, where the working definition of “woman” was ontologically uncontested. Gradually scholars incorporated a broad range of analytic epistemologies into the women’s studies’ aegis, including gender identities, masculinities, and human sexuality. The degree of intellectual diversity within gender studies programs in the U.S. reflects the relationship between the conceptualization of “gender” as an object of study and the institutional “ecologies” of important departments—understood in terms of program histories and identities, the flow of resources in universities, the attempts of scholars to adapt their research to the local intellectual milieu, and the relationships of gender studies units to other academic departments in their respective institutions.
<1> Women’s and gender studies is one of the most prominent outcomes of second wave feminism, though over four decades the field has transformed and diversified in its aim and content. In their formative years many women’s studies programs held uniform intellectual goals where scholars defined their purpose similarly: to address the lack of research on women and social problems of sex inequality, where working understandings of the category “woman” went epistemologically uncontested. As women’s studies programs earned legitimacy amongst academic institutions, scholars incorporated a more ambitious range of analytic epistemologies into women’s studies’ aegis, including gender identities, masculinities, and sexualities, as well as continuing efforts to do demographic‐based research using well‐defined understandings of gender categories. This article examines a process of ever‐increasing differentiation in the conception and practice of gender research across well‐established women’s and gender studies units in the U.S. [1]. To fully explain the kind of diversification that women’s and gender studies underwent, I examine the changing conditions within which the field subsists—in departments, programs, and research units—by way of the dynamism in research objects that scholars address.
<2> In this study, I employ qualitative methods that include analysis of archival resources from five women’s and gender studies programs and departments and 21 semi‐structured interviews with their faculty. This paper utilizes archival records collected from the Women’s Studies Department at San Diego State University; the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Women [sic] Studies Department at the University of Washington; the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Chicago; and the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Each of these programs was an “early adopter” of women’s studies and was founded between 1970 and 1972, with San Diego State’s unit as the first in the country. Archival records included proposals, mission statements, memos, letters, self‐studies and periodic reviews, strategic plans, newsletters, hiring records, vitae, syllabi and lecture notes, and oral history transcripts. Records were held in the departments or, more commonly, in university archives [2]. Interviews were conducted in person or by telephone and lasted from 30 to 180 minutes, and one interview took place in a group setting. During interviews I asked respondents about their career histories; their initial involvement in women’s studies; their contributions to the growth of the program; the goals of women’s studies, gender analysis, and feminist studies as knowledge projects; and their views on the status of feminist and gender research to disciplines.
<3> In this essay I compare how faculty members in contemporary women’s and gender studies programs and departments conceive the categories of women and gender, and how their intellectual agendas relate to the “institutional ecologies” of the departments in which research occurs (Star and Griesemer, 1989). When referring to the ecology of an academic program or department, I refer to layered social elements that form the conditions of academic departments, including the departmental and curricular structure; institutional conditions; relationships with other departments in the university; the disciplinary and intellectual composition of faculty members; scholars’ collective identities and sense of belonging in the program and to the broader field of women’s and gender studies; and the program’s history. Social ecology theory is useful for analyzing how the composition and organization of an academic department affects the content of research conducted there. “Ecologies” describe social systems as composed of interactions among multiple elements that are neither fully constrained by nor fully constraining of individual phenomena (Abbott 2005). The ecologies framework allows attention to the interactions among various human actors, the structures of relationships within the environment, and the institutions as “elements.” Local environmental factors are also the source of “external diversity” across the higher education institutions I am studying, which are governed by different funding structures and serve different student populations. More specifically, the institutions vary along lines of institutional type and size, historical and legal foundations, services provided to students in terms of the primary focus of the institution in teaching or research, and institutional reputation or prestige (van Vught 2008).
<4> I also argue that what enabled and constrained intellectual diversification in women’s and gender studies is that the analytic objects “women” and “gender” are supple and can be molded to different uses. The category “women” holds different intellectual significance across departments—from departments that remain committed to examining the social, psychological, and cultural aspects of women’s lives to those that focus on the category of woman to describe specific, tailored, processes and forms of inequality. Scholars in the departments I studied employ different definitions of gender, from research that examines concrete resource disparities between men and women, where the categories of men and women remain stable and gender is considered as a dichotomous variable, to research applying the concept of gender as a permeable category of experience. In this paper I demonstrate how different definitions and uses of the analytic categories gender and women relate to the articulation of departmental priorities and identities in women’s and gender studies units, and I illustrate how the uses of these categories are tied up with the local priorities and conditions of academic units.
Women’s Studies at San Diego State University
<5> Central to the Women’s Studies Department’s mission at San Diego State is a focus on women’s lives, a niche that faculty members see their teaching and research filling. The hiring agenda of the department from the 1990s to the 2000s was to appoint an array of scholars from across the disciplines that studied women. The department experienced steady growth during this period and made regular appointments to faculty members holding degrees in English; reproductive endocrinology; clinical psychology; political science; geography; ethnic studies; anthropology; French literature; and history. A couple of important ecological conditions shaped the intellectual development of the department over time. In formulating their specific intellectual aims and identity, faculty members reference SDSU’s history in women’s studies, via its significance as the first department in the country. Additionally, SDSU is a teaching‐intensive university that serves a student base drawn from the regional community, and during my interviews, faculty members noted that a primary commitment was to serve the undergraduate female population of the university, which they connected to their intellectual aims of focusing on women in the curriculum.
<6> A sustained focus on women is seen as the defining characteristic of Women’s Studies at SDSU, and is framed around the department’s historical legacy as the first department in the U.S. In 2009 the entire SDSU Women’s Studies faculty consisted of women, as it has since the time of its adoption, and the faculty members I interviewed insisted that their research and teaching draw specifically on the experiences of women. There is reservation among faculty members over the perception of a nationwide shift towards “gender studies”—in name and research focus—and away from “women.” In interviews, two faculty members stated that the term “gender” could serve as a proxy for men or masculinity studies, and relayed anecdotes about how other programs and research conferences have shifted foci away from women. Still other respondents stated that the critical value of “women’s studies,” as something that relates to the experiences of women as an underrepresented group, could be eroded by the label gender. One scholar summarized, “Here in women’s studies we study gender, but with unapologetic focus on women.” In their research faculty members understood the subject of women’s studies in myriad ways: in terms of being biologically female (as in the interaction of estrogen on other hormonal reactions in reproductive science), in terms of identifying and being treated as a woman in society (as in the experiences of lesbians resolving interpersonal conflicts in their relationships), or in interpretations of women’s literature (as in a study of the public and private sphere lives of British women authors in the early 20th‐Century).
<7> According to multiple respondents at SDSU, the point of women’s studies is research that is “grounded” and drawn from direct experiences of women. In a group interview, three scholars expressed resentment over what they saw as a theoretical shift in women’s studies, or a shift towards philosophizing on the meaning of gender as a concept or on the content of the category “women.” The respondents cited Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990, 1999) as a catalyst of a theoretical trend, based not on the book itself, but for “how it was received, how it was picked up.” For Butler, gender norms and meanings about the connections between biological sex and culturally constituted gender categories are recreated in discourse and social institutions, leading to philosophical uncertainty about what constitutes the categories “man” and “woman” or even “female” and “male” outside of culture. The scholars at San Diego State spoke in high regard of Butler’s book, and with theory itself, noting that theoretical propositions about women’s subordination and gender stratification are “productive” and “great.” But they felt that the widespread critical reception of texts like Butler’s had displaced attention from the study of women’s lives and to finding solutions to problems that affected women. One scholar noted that the point of women’s studies was “never to produce women’s studies professors,” or scholars competing for intellectual prestige by furnishing theories on the constitutive experiences of gender.
<8> I asked faculty members at SDSU about their opinions on switching the name of the women’s studies department to “gender studies,” or some variation. One respondent answered, “Not while I’m here. Until we see gender parity, the work of women’s studies is not done.” She saw gender studies as an “erasure of history” in women’s studies departments, and feared that by changing the name to “gender” the intellectual project would shift away from women. Even though the scholar identified the “work of women’s studies” as achieving “gender parity”—the even distribution of social resources among men and women ‐ the analysis should be focused on women’s lives. This scholar was especially concerned with hiring and retaining diverse faculty, including women of color and lesbian‐identified faculty, noting that not only is it important to have this representation, but also that the “lived experiences” of diverse women should be referenced in scholarship. The respondent felt that focused research on communities of women was extremely important to the department’s identity.
<9> Among faculty members at SDSU the point of women’s studies and indeed “feminist research” is to address problems related exclusively to women’s lives. This may come in the form of understanding the way the law works for women in particular social positions; analyzing women’s self‐conception across race, class, and sexual orientations; analyzing cultural representation of women; or promoting the inclusion of women in psychological research. In short, the department furnishes research and teaching that places women at the center of analysis.
Women Studies at University of Washington
<10> Historically good relations with administrators encouraged the Women Studies faculty at the University of Washington to shape‐shift their program in strategic ways, by appointing full‐time faculty, obtaining departmental status, and inaugurating a PhD program. Washington’s department obtained status amongst other women’s studies departments by establishing the PhD program. In 2000, faculty members produced a Strategic Plan outlining the department’s long‐term development goals. In the statement, they incorporated a range of analytic projects in the agenda of Women Studies. While boasting the social‐scientific and empirical focus of the curriculum, which has persisted since its founding, the drafters of the plan, unlike their San Diego state colleagues, argued that gender identity categories are permeable, and that they take on different meanings depending on the social or cultural context.
<11> Faculty members reiterated that the name “Women Studies” was part of a strategy to amass good will from administrators. One respondent said that as their proposals for BA and PhD programs appeared before the higher education committee in the state legislature, the title “Women Studies” translated well to officials, who wanted to represent a mission of diversity in the university. A scholar who directed the program in the 1990s explained that the title made a bolder statement about diversity in the university than gender. She said, “…for positioning the department politically, I think ‘women’ garners a broader support base in the university.” The use of the title “Women Studies” remained a sensible choice for faculty at Washington based on its usefulness for attracting broader support and recognition, though scholars in the unit stressed that the meaning of the category “women” had evolved within the department.
<12> While faculty members maintain a conscious commitment to Women Studies, categories like “women” and “gender” are interpreted as polysemic. One of the commitments listed in the department’s strategic plan is the exploration of “what makes specific women and genders unique inside differently configured regimes of power at particular times and spaces.” Rather than refer to gender to describe dichotomous social categories, this definition holds that manifestations of gender identity can be categorized in multiple ways depending on social and cultural context. A couple of scholars have taken up analyses of the permeability of gender identity, based on specific populations. One of the original scholars in the department had conducted ethnographic research on the Native American berdache or “two‐spirit,” a third gender category for people believed to embody the “spirit” of males and females, and on Native American tribes which recognized several gender categories. The scholar explored these categories as evidence of the dependency of gender categorization on cultural meanings. Current faculty conduct research on the social experiences of transgender individuals. This research reflects on the permeability of gender identity categories, and interferes with the notion that the category “woman” has as its clear opposition “man,” and that biological criteria correspond seamlessly with social categories.
<13> In light of faculty members’ sustained attention to gender as a permeable category, I asked several respondents at the University of Washington about their commitment to the title Women Studies and on their views about what falls under the rubric women’s studies in general. Consistent with the department’s commitment to social science research, one respondent understood the category “woman” as a “political category” ‐ as strategic for discussing certain social configurations and interests. She referenced the use of the category “woman” in studies of employment stratification and collective bargaining in labor, to describe segments of the population that have been shut out of bargaining processes and who face wage discrimination. Similarly with the law, she discussed the indispensability of women as an affected segment of the population in discussions of workplace sexual harassment. In analyses of structural inequalities and their distribution across the population, like pay inequities, sexual harassment in the workplace, and domestic violence, attention to the social, political, and economic status of women as a segment of the population are indispensable to their interpretation and application of the term.
<14> The way that scholars eschew the distinctions between “women” and “gender” as categories at Washington is the most defining feature of the work that goes on in the department, especially in comparison to respondents at San Diego State. I asked a historian at Washington how she thought women’s studies or feminist analyses had changed the discipline. She works as a scholar of “women’s history” and occupies a faculty post established for a scholar in that area. She noted that nothing fundamental had changed about history after feminism and gender studies—that historians still study change over time. But she responded, “there has been an infusion of gender into history.” In contrast, a women’s historian at SDSU noted that doing “women’s history” is different from having a “gender consciousness” in history, and that people doing the two kinds of work have different analytic objectives. For the scholar at Washington, the shifts in history were part of one general movement. As I will discuss for historians at other sites, in particular at the University of Illinois at Chicago, women’s history bled into the adaptation of gender and sexuality as useful categories in social history (see, e.g., Scott 1986), not only because these categories incorporate women into analysis but also because social history allows researchers to understand the evolution of gender ideals and their links with large‐scale processes.
Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz
<15> In Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, their most dramatic period of growth occurred from the mid 1990s through the 2000s. The department appointed several full‐time faculty members and ushered an incoming generation of assistant professor‐level scholars who directly influenced the analytic foci of the department. Full‐time faculty appointees over the years have included scholars with PhDs in History, English and, more recently, interdisciplinary areas like cultural and feminist studies. Central to the curriculum is an emphasis on critical theories that assess heterosexual privilege and white racial or European domination and not so much a focus on particular categories like women or gender populations. A major shift was the recent name change from Women’s to Feminist Studies. Part of the reason for the department’s emphasis on critical methodologies over discrete analytic categories like “women” or “gender” has to do with the department’s location within a humanities college with a tradition of housing other interdisciplinary programs, like the History of Consciousness Program, that define their focus similarly, emphasizing not discrete analytic objects but modes of analysis or approaches as paramount. Over the years the university has been supportive of innovate interdisciplinary programs, and this ecological condition has allowed programs like Feminist Studies to thrive with administrative support.
<16> New faculty members appointed in the 1990s and 2000s have identified “feminism” as an analytic paradigm. One respondent noted that the most important changes in feminist scholarship and women’s studies have been methodological. The respondent described “a shift away from identitarian stakes to methodological stakes, from GLBT to queer, from women’s studies to feminist studies.” The respondent explained that the focus of feminist scholarship has shifted from categories that denote populations and identity groups and towards “approaches,” or ways of seeing and interpreting that are abstracted from the experiences and representations of groups. These types of approaches have become especially popular in literature, with scholars interpreting how the categories of perversion or sexual deviance are constructed. One respondent saw “feminism” as a “critical lens” to understand situations of “alterity” around the world, based on sexual identity, gender, and race. A recent department proposal defined the purpose of feminist studies as focusing on “how relations of gender are embedded in social, political, and cultural formations.”
<17> Despite a general agreement about a “methodological” shift, scholars hold different beliefs about the purpose of feminist analysis and the analytic objects a feminist approach subsumes. Among more recent faculty hires, there is resistance to thinking of gender and women in exclusively demographic terms. The more recent hires that I interviewed did not refer to the study of “women” as a population central to their curriculum and research, unless, in the words of one associate professor, when used in specific contexts, like the course “Women and the Law,” which deals with the ways the law “sexualizes power relations,” embeds gendered logics, and affects women in particular ways.
<18> The course in “Women and the Law” was one of the only courses offered from 2006‐2008 that referred to women specifically, along with “Violence against Women of Color” and “Writing Women’s Lives.” One of the original faculty members focused on “the diversity of women’s lives across class, racial, and ethnic experiences” as the focus of the “Introduction to Feminisms” class. Aside from these courses, studies of women as a population have not been a core theme in the curriculum in recent years. More often the curriculum reflected an open approach to gender and sexuality as ways of referring to subject formation and power relationships, and to the ways subjects and relationships are embedded in social interactions, institutions, or cultural representations.
<19> Reflecting on the name change, one respondent noted that a problem in discussions of the direction of the department was that there was no object of analysis common to all participants. “[The name Feminist Studies] reflected something we could all agree on.” Referring to the more recently hired faculty, she stated, “None of us study women.” One associate professor with a background in literature commented that feminist studies is about developing analytic tools to “look at questions of alterity.” The researcher spoke about how the label “Feminist Studies” did not reflect a singular object.
<20> The label “Feminist Studies” is seen as a broader rubric for subsuming studies that center on both gender and sexuality. Moreover, some researchers in the department hardly focused on gender and sexuality at all, and produced work primarily on the processes of “othering” around racial and national identities. For one senior faculty member, research and teaching on women’s lives remains important, despite shifts in composition in the department. I asked this scholar for her opinion and position on the name change and overall changes in the department focus. She said she was happy with the change but that it took her time to adjust.
I was resistant to it when the conversations started in 2004, because I was very attached to women’s studies. In our case, Feminist Studies is a broader category that allows for critical race, queer, masculinity…in the sense of social constructions of gender. For us…[we have a] capacious idea of feminism.
This scholar referred to a social constructionist view of gender, which considers broad historical and political processes that affect how categories like gender and sexuality are defined. She noted she valued the participation of scholars from sociology and psychology who do not have formal appointments in Feminist Studies, for their work on gender performance studies and social interaction approaches to gender behavior.
<21> In departmental memos and mission statements faculty members have treated the academic enterprise of Feminist Studies as having expansive boundaries. One respondent spoke of the possibilities for department members to “redefine” the academic unit over time, as in deciding to call the unit Feminist Studies while recognizing that the unit is part of a national network of programs that originated as women’s studies. In this department, faculty members have considerable freedom in designing and interpreting the foci of their courses, but in efforts to represent the department to Regents and administrators, faculty members referred to the department’s position as part of a larger field of programs and departments, whose historical origins began as women’s studies.
Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago
<22> In 1999‐2000 the faculty at UIC elected to change the name of the Women’s Studies Program to the Gender and Women’s Studies Program, as the program made new faculty appointments to scholars with substantive interests that deviated from the traditional focus of the program. I asked a core faculty member to explain the reason for the name change. Part of the reason for doing that was that we wanted to be doing more in sexuality studies and GLBT studies. And at that time we changed our name to “Gender and Women’s Studies.” People wanted “Women’s and Gender Studies.” So, the debate was about which came first. It wasn’t about getting rid of women. The faculty at UIC elected to change the name to mark a shift in the intellectual composition of faculty. The rationale of the change related to the addition of new faculty members with specific areas of expertise in the interplay of sexuality and history, and to allay concerns about how to publicize the program in relation to these changes. Faculty members reconstituted the program around gender to be inclusive of sexuality research, after they decided to offer a position to a historian of lesbian and gay political movements in the U.S. I asked the same respondent to further explain why the program constituted itself around gender if a burgeoning interest was in sexuality.
I mean we haven’t had much but we have had occasional, you know, “this taxpayer demands to know how much of your money is going to gay and lesbian studies,” or something, but [that complaint] did not go anywhere. And that is the only one I can remember like that. I don’t think anybody’s been lobbying for sexuality in the title. I think most of us have been pleased that sexuality studies is within our program.
The title “Gender” denoted an expansive set of projects that was neutral enough to deter controversy at the institutional and public‐funding levels. Like the name “Women’s Studies,” “Gender Studies” is used widely as a label on a national scale, but faculties select it as a title for different reasons, which reflect constraints and opportunities posed by institutional resource conditions.
<23> At UIC gender was a way to incorporate an expansive and evolving set of analytic projects. Gender does not refer only to sexuality in the program, even though the initial impetus to change the name had to do with creating faculty lines in sexuality research. The scholars who conduct sexuality research within the program—scholars of gay and lesbian history specifically—do not focus mainly on gender in lesbian and gay communities, but on lesbian and gay politics and sexual identities. For the intellectual culture of the program, gender is seen as an inclusive or expansive category that accommodates research that goes beyond studies of women as a population. In this case, gender serves as a particularly elastic or expansive analytic object, in that its analytic reach may extend to objects outside of its traditional definition.
<24> UIC’s transition is very much one of a shift in opportunities at the level of administrative and institutional interaction—where opportunities opened for joint hires with history, the program elected to reconstitute its focus. The naming of gender allowed the unit to reconstitute somewhat seamlessly, integrating new institutional opportunities. An analytic focus on “women” has not disappeared from its research and curricula. The program incorporates various kinds of research on gender, women, and sexuality, from empirical research on populations of women to cultural analysis of masculinity in literature and media, though the focus on sexuality at the intersection of history is distinct.
Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
<25> Though the program suffered from poor funding throughout its first decades, the Women’s Studies program at the University of Michigan grew throughout the 1990s. Much of this growth related to faculty members’ efforts to establish the program as the nexus for gender research on campus. Departmentalization brought opportunities for full‐time appointments. As of 2010 the Women’s Studies Department at Michigan boasted one of the largest rosters of budgeted faculty among women’s, gender, and feminist studies units in the country, which is all the more significant given the university’s status as a research‐intensive institution carrying national prestige.
<26> The growth of women’s and gender studies on campus led to debates over how the department should identify its research and curriculum. Debates centered around the focus of the department as “Women’s Studies” or “Gender Studies,” with conversations over where sexuality fit. The scholars I interviewed reflected on past discussions of a potential name change, with respondents agreeing that the name of the department was an important signifier of research and curricular focus and commitments. In the end the faculty members elected to retain “women” as the identifier, after a stalemate in departmental deliberations, which revolved around discussions of the political value of the term “women” over “gender.”
<27> Debates over whether to retain women’s studies or to switch to gender studies arose in the wake of changes in faculty composition and institutional shifts. As the unit became a department and made full‐time appointments, the research interests of faculty appointed to full‐time positions mattered for how respondents talked about the identity of the department. One senior faculty member and former department chair who studies literary representations of sexuality reflected on a potential name change. “I would have been much happier if sexuality had gotten in there. [But] there is a historical aspect to [women’s studies] that I take quite seriously.” This scholar also noted that during the discussions participants had different conceptions of what “gender studies” meant and what the purpose of it is. She offered,
People had different reactions to what the term gender studies meant. Gender studies could be a political blind or cover; a deep politicization; a way of getting sexuality studies in through the back door; a way of referring to masculinity. It boiled down to: are we committed to women or not? The concern about de‐politicization was big…Most of us agreed that women needed to stay in the title, no matter what happened.
This respondent and others seemed confident that regardless of its name, Michigan’s department would remain on the “cutting edge” of gender research, what with the faculty roster expanding to represent practically all aspects of sex, gender, feminist, and sexuality research. But this respondent had concerns about the loss of women from the title and the political connotations of such a change. One of her senior colleagues offered a complementary opinion.
Respondent: Women’s Studies is an artifact of the past, but there is no consensus of what it should be [now]. Some people think there is a political edge to [women’s studies], that the name implies a history. For some it’s important to keep women in circulation. Gender destabilizes the term itself. And there are people who teach courses that are and were about women—like women’s health.
Interviewer: Women and the law?
Respondent: Women and the Law! “Women” means something in those fields. Name changes change something fundamental—like getting rid of the contested category of woman and replacing it with gender, which is a more analytically neutral category than women…There is a split between those [faculty members] who see themselves as the real women’s studies versus those who don’t feel that they are entirely in women’s studies. So there was some concern over this two‐tiered faculty once the 100% appointments started.
The department has been able to recruit full‐time faculty members for the Women’s Studies Department, expanding the roster and promoting career opportunities for scholars working on broad topics, like identities in Sub‐Saharan Africa in the context of the AIDS epidemic. In light of these changes, respondents express mixed views on how the department should identify itself. But regardless of the name of the department, the content of the department is expansive and not limited by the title “women.” The title women may mean a great deal to some researchers, but not so much to others.
<28> Scholars with appointments in Women’s Studies at Michigan produce a wide range of scholarship, reflecting varied commitments to women, research on gender dynamics, and sexuality studies. With the growth of opportunities and institutional support at Michigan, the analytic foci in the department has expanded. Contentious debate helped bolster rather than stifle diversity across focus areas. Scholars are very much invested in the incorporation of gender and feminist perspectives in their disciplines, and on using disciplinary tools that produce knowledge about gender. None of the scholars I interviewed at Michigan were attached to a particular interpretation of a “women’s studies” methodology outside of their own disciplinary training. A historical commitment to women’s studies as a research field justified retaining the department name, but this did not prevent the department from representing a wide variety of work on gender and sexuality.
Discussion
<29> This essay analyzed the developmental trajectories of women’s and gender studies programs at five universities in the United States, and the ways in which those programs adapted their analytic and intellectual agendas to local environmental conditions. Women’s studies programs began with shared missions: to add studies of women to college curricula and identify social problems affecting women. As women’s and gender studies programs evolved scholars differed over the primacy and meaning of analytic concepts under scrutiny, leading to differences in the content of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality. Pliability in the definition of the core aims of gender analysis has much to do with the type of “objects” women, gender, and sexuality are—that they are supple and can do different kinds of analytical work depending on the phenomena to be explained or the shared intellectual priorities of scholars in the program or department. The local ecologies of programs—their makeup in terms of faculty expertise and disciplinary backgrounds, scholars’ conceptions of the intellectual project and the ways they adapt their interests to the local institutional environment, resource distribution within the universities, degree and program offerings, and relationships to other departments and research centers in the university—shaped the kinds of work conducted across programs over time.
<30> Researchers across these five units hold varied perspectives of the priorities of research on women and gender, and on the meaning of core conceptual categories. Ecological processes affect the developmental trajectory of a program, in terms of pressures to amass institutional resources, the representation of the program to the public or the broader university community, and internal conflicts over the unit’s intellectual identity. Sometimes faculty elected to assume a certain program identity for the sake of resources, to appease administrators or to maintain enrollments. For example, faculty members at the University of Washington maintained good relations with the state higher education board by maintaining the departmental title of Women Studies, and faculty felt that the nomenclature denoted a clearer diversity message to the administration, even though the research in the department had expanded far beyond the study of women. At San Diego State, faculty members constructed their goals around educating a student body composed largely of women from the local community, which was reflected in a curriculum designed almost solely around women’s experiences. But across all sites, the decisions to retain or shift the focus of a unit reflected the research produced within it and scholars’ understandings of the work they were doing. Faculties debated their units’ identities based on how best to represent their collectively held views of the purpose of gender analysis, as women’s and gender studies expanded on a national scale.
<31> Disciplinary heterogeneity did not account for major differences in how scholars identified the core conceptual categories in their research. Instead, the local ecologies of the individual programs and departments shaped the differences in intellectual trajectories that I explain via the idea of the supple object. For example, scholars at San Diego State maintained a strong focus on women’s lives, while drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives across the social sciences and humanities. Scholars at Washington maintained an emphasis on social science or empirical methodologies, but incorporated a range of conceptual categories in the departmental agenda, including masculinity and transgender studies. Scholars’ affinities with a particular vision of what gender research should accomplish accounted for the most important differences across cases.
<32> I have argued throughout this account that the forces of “localism”—the conditions of the local university like budgetary considerations, levels of administrative support, and staffing conditions as well as the culture and identity of the programs—are related to the kinds of ideas and concepts that have developed across women’s and gender studies units (Camic 1995). Ecological conditions affected the way scholars in each program conceived of the intellectual priorities of their programs, in efforts to attract budgetary support from administrators or to carve an intellectual identity in light of new faculty additions or scholars’ collective views of the historical legacy of the program. These adaptations resulted in the diversification of knowledge aims and priorities across departments; where once women’s studies programs articulated similar aims centered on the analysis of women’s lives and experiences, many programs expanded their intellectual content as the field became more institutionally stable and nationally recognized.
<33> Changes in the degree of intellectual diversity in interdisciplinary fields deserve more sustained attention. My analysis considers the conditions under which an intellectual field becomes more heterogeneous in its content, a process that has not yet been considered in the analysis of disciplinary development. This process of diversification may apply especially to fields that begin by prioritizing particular objects of study and then reclassify under the banner of broad and pliable analytic categories (e.g., from women to gender). In the case of women’s and gender studies, not all programs and departments reclassified their interests and aims to incorporate gender analysis. For example, scholars at San Diego State University sustained their commitment to the analysis of women’s experiences over time. But at other universities, including the University of Washington, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Michigan, scholars incorporated a range of new analytic objects into the aegis of women’s studies, and with different agendas. Across sites, I observed marked differences in how scholars defined and prioritized the use of analytic objects, based on institutional conditions and scholars’ collective understandings of the history and core traits of their departments and programs. Taken together, the five institutions provide evidence that, as a research field, women’s and gender studies has become more heterogeneous in its content and aims.
<34> A major contribution of women’s and gender studies has been in convincing researchers that including omitted subjects permits a more complete understanding of social processes. Feminism led to the adoption of critical strategies for seeing inequality and discrimination along lines of sex, gender identity, race, and class disparities. Over four decades women’s and gender studies programs and publications have incorporated new objects of study. A couple of core questions arise from this analysis: What, if anything, unifies women’s, gender, and feminist studies? What does intellectual plurality suggest about the future of gender research? This study demonstrates how environmental conditions and intellectual processes interact in local contexts of gender research in the U.S., and describes how dynamic and broad‐based women’s and gender studies has become in its aims and scope in recent years.
Endnotes
[1] Previous literature in the sociology of knowledge has examined the developmental trajectories of intellectual fields. In some cases scholars have found that academic departments tend to become more structurally and intellectually similar to one another over time, a process commonly referred to as “isomorphism” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), where organizations begin to resemble other organizations that face similar sets of environmental conditions (van Vught, 2008). For example, Neil Gross (2002) observed that by the late 20th‐Century in American philosophy, “non pragmatic analytic philosophy” became the most widespread specialty among faculty in American philosophy departments, eclipsing diverse areas like psychoanalysis, existentialism, and structuralism that enjoyed popularity in the 1940s and ‘50s.
[2] I consulted and quote from the following archives:
San Diego State University. Center for Women’s Studies and Services Records. Special Collections and University Archives, San Diego State University Library.
San Diego State University. Women’s Studies Department Records, 1966‐2003. Special Collections and University Archives, San Diego State University Library.
University of Illinois, Chicago. Department of Women’s Studies Records, 1972‐1990. University Archives and Special Collections Division, University of Illinois, Chicago Library.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Women’s Studies Program Records, 1972‐1990. The Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
University of Washington. College of Arts and Sciences Records. Special Collections Division, University of Washington Library.
University of Washington. Department of Women Studies Records, 1962‐2002. Special Collections Division, University of Washington Library.
Works Cited
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DiMaggio, Paul and Powell, Walter. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48:2 (1983): 147‐160.
Gross, Neil. “Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher: Status, Self‐Concept, and Intellectual Choice.” American Sociological Review 67:1 (2002): 52‐76.
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Star, Susan Leigh and James Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.” Social Studies of Science 19:3 (1989): 387‐420.
van Vught, Frans. “Mission Diversity and Reputation in Higher Education.” Higher Education Policy 21 (2008): 151‐174.
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