Special Forum: Women's Studies in "Other" Locations

Thirty-five is a good age for some earnest self-reflection. Officially launched in 1970, Women's Studies has grown into an established discipline with hundreds of outposts throughout the United States and across the globe. A number of journal forums, anthologies, conferences, newsletters, web sites, and listservs have grappled with the complexity of Women's Studies' constituent parts, including the discipline's objects of analysis, its theories and methods, its origin narratives, its credentialing procedures, its relationships to other disciplines or fields of study, and the identities of its practitioners and constituents. Nowhere, however, have we found a systematic treatment of Women's Studies that captures the discipline's locational politics, that is, the differences in powers and practices that emerge from the various institutional contexts in which academic feminists do their work. It is this endeavor, a type of materialist analysis of Women's Studies, which was at the heart of our essay about our own liberal arts college location in the last issue of this journal. The point was to raise the specter of the discipline's class politics. As we put it: "we want to examine who can and does speak in the name of Women's Studies."

In this special forum, we continue to deepen the analysis of locational politics by presenting ten essays from authors who do Women's Studies work in vastly different contexts and, thus, in very different ways. In selecting these essays, we drew particularly (but not exclusively) upon contributors who work "in the trenches," the unglamorous, marginal, or even odd locations that those who assess the discipline might overlook when making statements in the name of Women's Studies. Drawing from the specifics of her or his institutional site, each author answers the question: How can the unique characteristics of this location add to our knowledge of Women's Studies?

That so many contributors found time to reflect on the location of their own women's studies practices suggests to us how necessary these authors feel their perspectives and voices should be in discussions about the state of the field. It seems that as Women's Studies has become more institutionalized in research-intensive locations, we have stopped accounting for this fundamental aspect of our own diversity. We are less likely to know Women's Studies if we base our assessments on the locations that demand and support research and publishing over teaching and service. Thus, our basic argument is that we should not ignore the work of the majority of the discipline's practitioners whose days are filled with heavy teaching loads, "high needs" students, and/or institutional mandates that limit the content and scope of what they can teach or write.

From community colleges to fraternity houses, historically black colleges and universities to museums, prisons to women's colleges, "red state" religious colleges to one-person programs, life skills courses for "welfare" recipients to the gambling capital of the nation, contributors to this special forum offer integral pieces of the mosaic that is the discipline of Women's Studies. More than just dispatching basic information or dwelling on the exotic tale about contexts with which readers might not be familiar, these authors grapple with the larger assessment questions: How does the discipline lend itself to exploitive or empowering labor practices? How do institutional structures (departments, programs, administrative arrangements) promote or inhibit effective pedagogy? How do racialized/nationalized/gendered identities affect assumptions about expertise or teachability? How does the discipline function in the institution's capacity to "market" itself to student-consumers or make itself palatable to state legislators?

Of course, it is impossible to understand Women's Studies from the perspective of all of its locations. What you see here is a modest beginning to a larger project that provides new perspectives on the discipline. Our next step will be to document and analyze Women's Studies in "other" locations in a forthcoming anthology titled Locating Women's Studies...