These are my notes on The Impossibility of Women's Studies by Wendy Brown.
Most of the stuff in parenthesis is my opinion or reaction. I've tried to use quotation marks where I took Brown's words directly, but since these were just handwritten notes for my own use, I can't guarantee that I did that accurately or consistently.
Questions about women’s studies – is it too political? Too theoretical? Why are fewer scholars drawn to it in recent days (I think the 90s)? Etc.
To what extent is it still a tenable field of study? What are its intellectual premises today?
Theory and method classes often seem isolated.
Existing curriculum displayed a desire for disciplinary status through a distinct theory and method, and by institutionalizing the racialized challenge to women’s studies in the curriculum.
What should be included? How to make it rigorous and coherent? Every proposed approach seemed arbitrary.
Student interests didn’t seem to match up with faculty areas of expertise (students are more interested in psychological side, pop culture).
“Why was the question of what constituted the fundamentals of knowledge in Women’s Studies so elusive to us?”
Divisions between women’s studies and feminist theory, between women’s studies and ethnic studies, between feminist theory and queer theory. Call it cultural studies?
Feminist scholarship isn’t unified – it happens in different domains that are themselves infrequently engaged with each other.
There’s a risk of resisting anything that blurs or disrupts the category of “woman.” Other big question – what counts as a women’s studies course? Does it have to focus on women? Does it have to be taught from a feminist perspective?
(The general consensus in our recent discussions seems to be that it needs to acknowledge and take into account difference, whether race, class, gender, etc. What do you mean by “feminist perspective”? I would argue that yes, since to me a feminist perspective means keeping an eye on all of the factors that contribute to subjects’ places in the world).
Disciplines tend to be founded through necessary exclusions. (One of the hard things that I find as a feminist is trying to keep everything in mind while thinking about / discussing things. It seems really really difficult to sometimes come up with an idea or theory when you’re trying to take into account every single social influence that’s affecting the subject).
It’s a field organized by social identity, not genre of inquiry. It’s vulnerable when the coherence of its object of study is questioned or challenged. (Exactly. Once you start thinking about things like this it’s really hard to make ANY kind of generalization about women. Is it worth, then, always trying to make the distinction – being more specific about WHICH women you mean? While later on, in the “Tejana lesbian” example, that’s shown to be problematic as well, is it a step in the right direction? We can’t come up with theory that addresses every individual ever, so there have to be generalizations made. How do we delineate the categories in which we make those generalizations so that our research is still useful and meaningful? How do you create a field of study that is as inclusive as possible without over-generalizing your scholarship / findings?).
If gender is a critical, self-reflexive category, is women’s studies not a coherent field of study? (I’m not sure what she means about gender as a critical, self-reflexive category. Is it about the meaning we attribute to gender? Gender expression?)
Subjects are created through different kinds of powers. Powers of subject formation aren’t separate from the subjects themselves.
They’re not links, overlapping spheres, degrees of privilege. They’re not linear or additive. We’re not oppressed, but produced through these categories. (Interesting – challenging the language of victimhood?)
Content and method of the powers that produce gender, race, etc are specific to each production – they’re often not comparable.
It’s not like gender exists and then it’s regulated – gendered subject emerges through gender regulation.
Foucault – no sharp distinction between what is produced and what is regulating. Power is often conceived as a neutral way of gaining privilege, as something held by various individuals or groups. This conception of power lets us talk about forms of oppression in an additive or interchangeable way. In this view, subjects exist in a field of power, but we don’t see how the field itself produces the subjects. Discrimination law
Discrimination in various categories aren’t regulated with the same legal strategies.
Debate about the value of rights.
Critical legal theorists – look at the role of property rights in producing the homeless. Rights entrench and mask inequalities.
Critical race theorists – concerned with enfranchising historically rights-deprived members of subordinated racial groups. Rights are vital symbols of personhood and citizenship.
Neo-marxist – formal legal equality converges with naturalized class inequality. Race theory – rights discourse emphasizes who’s a member of society.
These are two different forms of power.
Because the powers that form class and race are so different, it makes sense that they have such different relationships to legal categories. But what do you do if you’re dealing with race and class in a single subject? Throw in gender and it’s even more complicated.
Sodomy statutes (as relate to gay people) don’t have a parallel in the making of race, class, or gender. There are no taboo practices that identify and criminalize via race, gender, and class. (Is this assuming that all gay people practice sex in similar ways? What about lesbians? I’m not sure I fully understand this point).
There’s no analogy to the same-sex marriage ban or legal gay parenting. (Would this have been true back when interracial marriage was taboo? Or is that different because interracial marriage would have called attention to race but not defined it in the same way that same-sex relationships define homosexuality?)
For women, there’s no parallel to maternity or sexual/physical vulnerability. Reproductive rights. (Gay men might not be sexually or physically vulnerable but they could be seen as sexual or physical targets? Same with various minority groups throughout history.)
The debate about “born this way” or “choice” has no parallel – although debate isn’t really about whether there is or is not a gay gene, but more about which argument better serves gays. (wow. I wonder to what extent this is true. I’ve always felt that this issue does have a lot to do with how gay people are perceived, legislated, etc, but to see it in black and white is a little jarring. I’m sure there are gay people to whom this is more than just a legal issue.)
Another example – privacy. For feminists, the idea of privacy has been used to depoliticize things like domestic violence and unpaid household work (I’m not sure I agree with this, as issues of birth control and legal abortion are about making the private public, not about treating “private” issues as ones that can be ignored by legislation). However, if you’re concerned with ideas of sexual freedom or the “rights to bodily integrity” denied to racially subjugated groups, privacy seems like a good thing.
Socially marked subjects are formed in very different ways – these ways contain different histories and technologies, affect different aspects of their lives, etc. It’s hard to work on laws for more than one identity at once. It’s hard to imagine a legal subject who isn’t monolithic.
White women are superordinated within women’s studies because of the primacy of the gender category. Therefore, women’s studies relates to race with guilt, no matter how much diversity training you do. There’s lots of guilt and blame about race because of women’s studies original subordination of race to gender.
Subject construction works differently for every category, and not in discrete units by category. Not every “middle-class Tejana lesbian” will feel represented by the attributions made to those categories. Plus, when you try to be all specific like that, you “fix” the categories in place. Also, this kind of specificity sees power as strictly hierarchical; as either oppressing or privileging.
We need to analyze subject-producing power, and “genealogies of particular modalities of subjection that presume neither coherence in the formations of particular kinds of subjects nor equivalence between different formation.”
Formations aren’t cause and effect, linear, intersections. They may be at odds or converge – power may vary in weight for different kinds of subjects.
It seems that the arguments for women’s studies programs are largely political in nature. This seems to see as unimportant a serious intellectual basis for women’s studies. (Is political science or political theory seen as less important? Although I guess since those aren’t arguing for a particular end, ie, women’s liberation, etc, it’s more accepted. Although in some ways feminist studies do act in the same way – although I probably see that from my point of view as a feminist, and it wouldn’t be seen the same way by an MRA).
If you privilege the political and institutionally strategic over the intellectual, then you’re saying that women’s studies doesn’t necessarily belong on the same plane as other university fields of study.
It affirms this non-intellectual mission as something totally identified with women. If the mission is primarily political, who’s going to teach it?
Many women’s studies programs are staffed by less-academic, more political people (is this true?). Often, feminist scholarship is coming from non-women’s studies places, and women’s studies faculty are resistant, even hostile toward it. (Why are they resistant? Because they feel that someone who hasn’t “committed” themselves to the cause is claiming to understand it or is benefitting professionally from it?)
Women’s studies work is often seen as defined by anti-intellectualism.
Women’s studies once served to legitimate and support feminist scholarship. Now it gives feminist scholars a place against which to define themselves.
Can you reconfigure a women’s studies program without sacrificing feminism?
Could we move “intro to feminism” and “history of women’s movements” to the mainstream, and then reconfigure the women’s studies program?
We could also make sure feminist theory students were familiar with theoretical antecedents (Marx, Freud, etc).
It would be cool if these background knowledges could be developed.
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