“Subject Positions”: Perspectives on Gender and Identity in the Academy and Beyond

In Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, Orr, Braithwaite, and Lichtenstein have overseen the publication of a stylish, informative volume, characterized by a wonderfully simple structure. Eighteen essays define and illustrate key terms from the fields of women’s and gender studies (WGS). The result is a fresh and lively work that never feels overly didactic or prescriptive. So much thought has gone into making this an accessible and readable text that even the table of contents is a delight, as each chapter effectively “advertises” itself there, in concise abstracts that read in some cases like mini manifestos. Astrid Henry’s excellent essay, “Waves,” for example, is presented as being about a metaphor which “is both descriptive and prescriptive, simultaneously offering a representation of feminism’s history and constraining our imagination of that history” (viii), while Jennifer Purvis’s contribution is more succinctly summarized: “Women’s and Gender Studies is always already queer” (ix). Rethinking is a descriptive title, then: in it, terms are rethought and revivified. But it’s not a carelessly iconoclastic volume. Instead, it acknowledges its forebears (Robyn Wiegman, especially) and maps the existing critical terrain. In one essay, for example, Susanne Luhmann vividly reminds her readers of, and then builds on, Carolyn M. Shrewsbury’s formative 1987 article “What Is Feminist Pedagogy?” to argue that “in the face of the categorical instability of the term ‘woman’ … it becomes increasingly politically and intellectually unintelligible to assume that WGS is about women, or that we know what ‘women’ are” (81).

Each one of the eighteen contributors uses first-person narrative to some extent. This is good: it’s the way that “theory” ought to be explicated and discussed, not functioning as some kind of erudite citadel to which most people can never gain access (indeed, why would anyone want to?), but as a grassroots phenomenon with direct and potent links to activism. The first-person approach makes abstract arguments “real,” but the contributors all stay on the right side of confessional mawkishness. Thus Bobby Noble’s chapter about the concept of “trans-” is informative and relevant. “I have a long feminist history as a white butch,” Noble writes, “and now, as a white man, where I understand the coherence between these two seemingly diametrically opposed subject positions being established through my whiteness” (286–87). Similarly engagingly, in a moving plea for diversity to be embraced in WGS, Martha McCaughey places herself and her own career firmly at the heart of her chapter, “Community.” The “points to ponder” that introduce each of the book’s five sections grated somewhat, but I can see classroom potential in them, along with the book’s infinitely versatile structure and welcoming voice. The intended audience for Rethinking, then, is clearly an undergraduate one.

The “real world” connection between theory and activism espoused in Rethinking is also very much in evidence in Anne Enke’s edited collection, Transfeminist Perspectives. Like Rethinking, this is a timely and energetically collaborative work, and I was pleased to see another essay by Bobby Noble, this time “Trans. Panic. Some Thoughts Toward a Theory of Feminist Fundamentalism,” again written in Noble’s characteristically accessible tone. “If I were to ask any ten feminist academics in and across my home university whether trans bodies are present, or should be, as trans bodies in women’s studies,” writes Noble, “I cannot help but worry that the answer will be a quiet or dumbfounded no” (47). And there, in a nutshell, is the problem. It’s an indictment of some aspects of WGS, yes, but it’s also a powerful case for the need for a volume such as the one Enke has curated. As WGS reflects on itself and rejects tired binaries, so too are traditional academic writing styles energized: Rethinking celebrated the first-person narrative, and Perspectives embraces the interrogatory, dialogic writing of Vic...