Women's Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics (review)

Whether affiliated with an established or struggling women's studies program or department, or thinking of proposing one, readers will find much food for thought in Women's Studies for the Future. Editors Kennedy and Beins set out on their comprehensive survey of Women's Studies in North America not to prescribe, but to describe, "exploring the ideas and issues that are shaping the field of women's studies" (3). Their project grew out of a conference in 2000 celebrating 25 years of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. Many of the selections, including those on activism, explore what this complicity with the academy means to of women's studies departments at a time when most U.S. programs and departments have become institutionalized, some to the point of offering Ph.D.s.

The editors arrange the contributions in five areas: the subject of Women's Studies, shared and disputed politics, interdisciplinarity, activism, and changing pedagogy. Part I investigates the subjectivity of Women's Studies and the constant tension between standpoint and poststructuralist epistemologies. Bonnie Zimmerman proclaims "that standpoint epistemology has enabled women's studies for thirty years and that, carefully used and always self-critical, it can continue to inspire students, produce useful knowledge, and change the world" (31). Other contributors, such as Nan Alamilla Boyd, argue that queer studies, gender studies, and other emerging studies have "challenged women's studies to move beyond the identity politics implicit in its origins" (98). Boyd is joined by others who proclaim that the standpoint or identity politics of the early women's studies years has failed to recognize the multiplicity of identities. Their positions confirm the discipline's need to constantly examine its assumptions.

These multiple identities inform the next two parts of the anthology as the editors and contributors grapple with the politics of alliance and difference as well as interdisciplinarity. Women's Studies' goal of including the marginalized can ignite frictions among constituencies competing for scant resources in the institutions. One approach for cementing the interstices between these fields is offered by Janet R. Jakobsen who advocates interstructure whereby minority and women's studies disciplines "dynamically interrelate these programs" (139) through team-teaching, concentrations, and other such methods. For example, concentrations would allow students of Women's Studies to concentrate in minority studies and vice versa.

In Part IV, "What is the Continuing Place of Activism in Women's Studies?" Julia Balen begins her essay "Practicing What We Teach" with a comment on the pressures on Women's Studies to become complicit with the dominant forces of the university:

Feminist scholars exist in paradox. For those who inhabit this position negotiating the paradoxes can be something of an art form. We teach about oppression in the midst of privilege, fight for greater recognition even as it often means greater co-optation. . . . We work for change within institutions while in the process of "becoming" the institutions—being produced by them.

(272)

Of growing interest to Women's Studies is the issue of globalization. Two articles, Chandra Talpade Mohanty's "'Under Western Eyes' Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles" and Miranda Joseph, Prita Ramamurthy, and Alys Eve Weinbaum's "Towards a New Feminist Internationalism," warn against the "form of feminist globalization with deep ties to older forms of colonialism and imperialism" (214). Both articles encourage feminist scholarship that subverts capitalist globalization and incorporates the "bodies and labor of women and girls that constitute the heart of these struggles" (92). Mohanty illustrates her point by citing feminist scientist Vandava Shiva's work with practitioners of indigenous medicine and their fight against the World Trade Organization's intellectual property rights agreements. Particularly helpful for the women's studies instructor who wishes to bring worldwide women into her classroom are Mohanty's Antiglobalization Pedagogies, which designate categories that exemplify how international feminism has been taught so far. Of the three models, Feminist-as...