Publications

WOMEN IN THE CURRICULUM

In the past decade a number of societal and institutional tendencies have converged to encourage the "internationalization" of women’s studies and the consideration of gender issues in international contexts across the curriculum. The processes of globalization--the restless movements of capital, technology, and the bodies, allegiances, and identities of individuals across national boundaries, and accompanying reconfigurations of power and processes of production--have led many U.S. institutions to question whether they are adequately preparing students for life and work in a "new global order." Sometimes these concerns are narrowly vocational or nationalistic; sometimes they are broadly philosophic. Though at many institutions "internationalization" has been more a buzzword than a reality (Goodman), the rhetoric has supported programmatic initiatives to revise the parochialism of higher education in the United States.

Women’s Studies itself has not been immune to parochialism. In the early 1970’s, Women’s Studies in the university had strong roots in and a sense of accountability to the women’s liberation movement. In its emphasis on the relation between the personal and political, and even in its debt to the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s and its reaction against the masculinist formations of the New Left, much early feminist thought in the United States was necessarily focused "close to home." Simultaneously, some key theoretical works in those years sought to explain women’s secondary position in society in universalizing terms, positing a universal "sex-gender system" (Rubin), or proposing that the subordination of "woman" to "man" is linked to the subordination of nature to culture (Ortner). Even in the early seventies, however, there were sites of inquiry where differences among women were posited and examined. Work by African American women focused on the "double jeopardy" confronted by women of color, and work on women and development implied that women’s issues were not the same everywhere (e.g. Cade, Boserup). Nevertheless, within Women’s Studies, this scholarship remained marginalized. Feminists in the academy tended to see work on women and development as politically enmeshed in the foreign policy agenda of the United States. Viewed as representing a form of imperialism and as not particularly relevant to the needs of local students, women and development appeared an inappropriate arena for engagement.

Thinking internationally about women and gender requires questioning categories that are sometimes taken for granted and making clear the import of particular word choices. For that reason, selecting and legitimating one’s word choices in teaching international materials is a daunting task in itself. Terms like "international," "transnational," "local," "global," "western," "nonwestern," "eastern," "northern," "southern," "third world," "developing," as well as "nation" and "gender" revealed themselves as power-laden designations with shifting meanings and different valences for different scholars and constituencies. The term "third world," for example, has been rejected by some scholars and activists as implying a tertiary, marginal experience for a majority of the world’s people, who are collapsed into a false monolith acquiring ontological status only in relation to a "first" and "second" world. Others have defended the term as representing a "political coalition" of "colonized, neocolonized, or decolonized nations and ‘minorities’ whose structural disadvantages have been shaped by the colonial process and by the unequal division of international labor" (Shohat and Stam 25). Some faculty have found it useful to present an array of such terms to students for interpretation and critique. Cindy Himes Gissendanner has indicated that she has become aware of the need to introduce "early and often" issues of language. She created a handout identifying key terms and "the history of their usage as an entree into discussing the role of language in shaping and reflecting the interactions of systems of distinction based on gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and sexual orientation" (101).

Obviously, bringing international perspectives and sites of inquiry into thinking and teaching about women and gender should not be the province of a single department or even a single interdisciplinary program like Women’s Studies. The Women’s Studies/Area Studies/International Studies initiative was an effort to link those academic programs, and Ethnic Studies as well, in a common endeavor. Such linkages, however necessary, are not always easy to initiate and sustain. The origins of Area Studies lie in the Cold War era, when U.S. policy-makers sought more knowledge about unfamiliar and potentially hostile regions; their mission and intellectual history have been quite different from those of the openly progressive programs in Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies. (see Burton, et al.). In addition, faculty who are area studies specialists have long years invested in attaining competency in the language(s) of their regions of specialization, and often--with some justification--view those without such competencies as ignorant of the complexities of local and regional cultures. Such faculty can be resistant to curriculum transformation efforts, sometimes seeing them as diminishing their hard won expertise and as infringements on their curricular turf. Yet real possibilities exist for collaborative encounters between the deep local knowledges afforded by Area Studies and the understanding of gendered and raced global processes fostered in Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies. Edna Acosta-Belen, for example, explores the way in which Latino/Latina Studies is becoming an enterprise that links the insights of Ethnic Studies, those of Latin American Studies, and those of Women’s Studies, in a necessary effort to understand the migrations, border-crossings, and transnational exchanges that shape the economic, cultural, and political experiences--the gendered experiences--of Latino/Latina men and women. American Studies, itself an Area Studies, has increasingly, as a glance at its recent conference programs suggests, moved from an almost exclusive focus on North America, especially the United States, to a revised vision of what constitutes "American". It has been deeply influenced by Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies and by the scholarship which takes as its province the complex histories and contemporary exchanges that link North America with the rest of the world in uneven flows of power, capital, and cultural interchange.

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