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136 5 Institutional Practice and the Field of Women’s Studies I N    , I was asked to co-convene a session at a national conference that brought together representatives of institutions that had launched autonomous PhD programs in the field of women’s studies. In my remarks at that session, I suggested that if women’s studies departments were planning to train students doing graduate-level work on international questions, these departments needed to think more systematically about the kind of preparation that students would receive. In particular, I suggested that women’s studies departments may want to consider ways to ensure that students received training (in coursework and research) on questions that were not focused purely on gender or women so that they had some depth of context—of place, history, culture—with which to frame research questions and intellectual agendas. To my surprise, this suggestion produced a significant negative response from several individuals in the audience. One senior feminist scholar grumbled that this amounted to a call to turn women’s studies into international studies. Such resistance stems from a presumption that a field of study designed to study women and gender in comparative or international contexts does not require a discussion of how to provide students with a broader empirical understanding of the places they would focus on. Exposure to the world may be provided through random course offerings but not as a systematic institutional organization of the field of women’s studies. More than ten years later, while calls and claims of global and transnational perspectives on gender proliferate and critiques of Western feminism abound through curricular and citational practices, women’s studies as an institutionalized field of study has not systematically changed the way in which the study of the world is organized through now-established PhD programs and through the organization of curricula practices for undergraduate majors. Women’s studies of course has a well-developed tradition of scholarship that has interrogated the relationship between power and knowledge. In fact, the preoccupation with this relationship and with the study of epistemology Institutional Practice and Women’s Studies 137 is one of the central emphases in women’s studies research and teaching. Moreover, one of the unique strengths of women’s studies as a field has been the way in which it has allowed for the intellectual space to engage in internal criticisms of its own constitution even as it has posed challenges to the limits of conventional forms of disciplinary knowledge. In many ways, the institutionalization of the field of women’s studies within the U.S. academy has been continually defined by the unsettling of its foundation. Just as women’s studies programs were gaining ground as a formal institutional presence, feminist scholarship was engaged in a passionate debate on the limits of the category of “woman.” The field of women’s studies thus emerged through a set of institutional and intellectual practices that sought to simultaneously assert its legitimacy in the face of resistant or skeptical university administrations , on the one hand, while engaging in internal debates on the question of its subject, on the other hand. Many of the major debates that emerged solely out of the formation of the field of women’s studies (as opposed to those that emerged through feminist conversations and clashes with the disciplines ) were focused specifically on the need to address exclusions based on race, nation, and culture that were being produced by this institutionalization of women’s studies as a formalized field of knowledge.1 As a result, the field of women’s studies has made significant inroads in its attempts to deepen its emphasis on international and transnational perspectives on women, gender, and sexuality. These trends have been evident in job searches, the content and marketability of scholarly books, the efforts of journals to focus on international issues through special issues, and individual submissions and citational practices in individual scholarly works and course curricula. These trends occur in a context in which women’s studies has increasingly become an institutionalized field through the rise of formal programs of study, the departmentalization of the field, and the expansion of autonomous women’s studies PhD programs. According to the National Women’s Studies Association, there are currently 652 women’s and gender studies programs in the United States (across the spectrum of community colleges, colleges, and universities).2 Meanwhile, numerous universities and some colleges have begun to offer graduate degrees in the field. The scope...

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