“The Possibility of Women’s Studies” by Robyn Wiegman
Academic feminism has gone apocalyptic; political optimism has been replaced by anxiety, anger, and fear.
Apocalyptic narration sees academic feminism’s institutional success as a political failure (sell-outs?).
Theory kills activism, unity of women fragmented by “identities,” individual professionalization kills collective commitment.
Positioned as academic against feminism; institutionalization as betrayal of political beginnings.
Reacting to Brown and her view of the failure of academic institutionalization.
According to Brown, individual differences haven’t robbed us of coherence, and returning to social movement won’t revitalize programs. The problem of women’s studies is conflating the academic with the political.
Trying to define feminism’s future now institutionalizes NOW as all the future will need to know.
This is arrogant but also desperate, since we’re in the middle – between revolutionary beginnings and triumphant arrivals. We’re stuck with the criticism and demeaning views of women’s studies today.
We don’t need to fix the problems, but to explore them.
Wiegman is going to trace the history of the apocalyptic narrative. She’ll focus on “The Professor of Parody,” by Martha Nussbaum, which is critical of the work of Judith Butler.
Sidebar:
Poststructuralism: the idea that the author’s intended meaning is secondary to the reader’s perceived meaning.
It rejects the self-sufficiency of structures.
It looks at binary opposites that constitute the structures.
Lacan, Foucault, Butler.
Criticisms: poststructuralism is too relativistic or nihilistic, too extreme or linguistically complex. Some see it as a threat to scholarly standards.
Nussbaum criticizes poststructuralism. She says that US academic feminism has abandoned politics and women’s suffering in order to “luxuriate” in theory. (My big problem with this is – and maybe I’m wrong – but isn’t the purpose of theory to get a deeper understanding of a topic, and then to apply that theory to concrete things? While I get the criticism about luxuriating in theory, or doing academics for its own sake, isn’t theory meant to be applied?)
Nussbaum wants to return feminist theory to concrete aims, such as changing laws and institutions.
Brown didn’t like the privileging of the political over the academic (said it aligned the anti-intellectual with women).
Wiegman will argue that women’s studies has to create the analytical perspective that will let us examine academic feminist discourse’s struggles with the forms and consequences of academic feminism itself. (So women’s studies has to give us the tools to examine the problems that academic feminism has with itself? I’m not sure I understand what that means).
I.
Feminism generally operates AGAINST. Therefore, it tends to come after, as a response. This reactivity conflicts with the desire to create and originate.
We fought for institutionalization, but are now seeing its limits. (I’m beginning to wonder if these articles aren’t positioning women’s studies as something too big. IE – the institution limits every kind of study. In literature you pick a period, a place, a genre, even an author. Same with history, philosophy. The institution limits everything – you can’t do everything.)
Our concerns about academic feminism today are often presented as the result of avoidable errors: theory abandoning politics, generations disregarding each other, the prioritizing of professional success over collective struggle. (Presented by whom? I’d be interested to see the language with which these criticisms are discussed – like catfights? Emotions?)
Narratives of the present feature academic feminism’s institutional power as betraying the modes of political work toward social movement.
Nussbaum’s “Professor of Parody” is a manifesto for a return to “old-style feminist politics.”
Critics say that Butler uses obscurity to create an aura of importance and to bully you into thinking that think you can’t figure out what’s going on, what’s going on must be significant. (Ok – is that typical of academia? Does she mean if you can’t figure out what’s going on in the world or in her argument?).
Nussbaum says that Butler doesn’t really understand how harmful social oppression is, and that her theory does nothing to help women. She even goes so far as to call Butler “evil.”
Nussbaum calls for feminism to follow a politically “real” imperative.
Nussbaum says the present destroys the future – it privileges the politics and theory of the past (there seems to be this focus on not imposing the present onto the future).
It pits the academic against the feminist. Because of academic feminism’s “symbolic” feminism, young feminists are told that they can “act daringly” without getting into the messy business of laws and stuff. (I definitely agree with that – it seems to follow the trend of “slacktivism” – writing impassioned Facebook statuses but not actually doing anything to further your cause).
Nussbaum thinks that this is self-involved and too easy. (I have written under this “Very American” – I don’t know if that’s my note or was originally in the article). “Professor of Parody” talks about social change – it pairs suffering with building laws and institutions. It gives old-school feminism the authority of the relationship of justice to women. (I’m not sure what that means).
Nussbaum critiques Butler’s and US’ narcissism, but doesn’t address her own focus on the US. She criticizes new feminism for not working outside the US, but admits that the old feminism didn’t either. (shouldn’t she be criticizing new American feminism for that? It seems like she’s implicitly privileging American feminism by letting it be the understood version of feminism).
She talks about concrete problems that new feminism has abandoned, says that, for instance, in India feminist theory is closely tied to practical matters. She says that old-school US feminism was like this, as if by this association she hopes to resuscitate old-school feminism.
But – postcolonial feminist agendas in the third world resist the globalizing discourses of US feminism. (I’m not really sure what that means).
American academic feminists may sound good championing the third world’s needs, but how do they KNOW?
More stuff I’m unsure of: Nussbaum’s essay believes that present and future feminism should be faithful to its past, and shows despair for any show of power that goes beyond activism and politics. However, she doesn’t mention that it has power because it was the “first.”
According to Nussbaum, old feminism is authentic and will be the foundation for global feminist agency. (Is this just the academic or political version of “I like their earlier albums better”?)
Another part I’m not sure about: Nussbaum reiterates the idea of social change connected to the state. But doesn’t address critiques of the state as end goal of reform. (So Nussbaum thinks that social change at the larger level should be the goal, but she doesn’t address critiques of that belief?)
To Nussbaum, new feminist theories are antithetical to the political. So, she doesn’t look at the difference between feminism as national political movement and feminism as a politicized knowledge project. (I’m not sure my notes here are accurate. If she’s saying that theory is the opposite of political, wouldn’t that mean she’s not looking at the difference between theory for the sake of theory and theory as a politicized knowledge project?).
Nussbaum says academic feminism depoliticized feminism – BUT, she’s defining old feminism against the institutional interventions that it itself started in the US. (So, old feminism got us into the institution through political means, but now that we’re here, we’ve abandoned the political.)
She makes theory and knowledge an enemy to the “real”.
II
Nussbaum’s model of feminist knowledge production sees feminism in the academy as fulfilling its political mission by reproducing social activism.
You judge the success of the field by the movement of knowledge in and out of the academy – from the theoretical to the real.
Nussbaum is upset that academic feminism fails in its obligation to politics. However, Brown believes that if you privilege the political, you make the deep intellectual basis for Women’s Studies unimportant. (I guess one of the big questions surrounding women’s studies as a field is how do you reconcile those. I’m still unsure as to why those are seen as such disparate things. Again, political theory – nobody’s questioning its usefulness, even if the people studying it aren’t directly involved in politics).
Brown is concerned with the question of whether what got us here can keep us here. (everyone seems very invested in this idea that feminism and women’s studies needs to change, and that the present and past shouldn’t over-influence the future. But nobody’s coming up with actual suggestions. This is almost ironic, especially for the ones who are arguing that we need to move from the theoretical to the real).
Brown sees much feminist research as separate from women’s studies.
Women’s studies WAS politically important, but IS politically incoherent and conservative.
Brown isn’t calling for existing Women’s studies programs to be dissolved.
1. We need to avoid “new degree-granting programs” – all hope for feminist knowledge production shouldn’t be placed in women’s studies.
2. Core curriculum needs to be taught in other disciplines.
3. Curricular projects need to be adjusted to recognize that being organized around a single identity fails to account for the complexities of the subject.
The fragmentation within the legal system shows:
1. Social powers are neither compatible nor evenly distributed.
2. This problem is made worse by programs of study that focus on and make primary one dimension of power.
The model of power will never line up with a living subject. People tend to agree with that.
Brown sees in that a reason to suspend its institutionalization.
She sees the difficulty of creating this complex model of power as a reason to move it (is the “it” here women’s studies?) from the institution. However, the institution revealed the difficulty, and has an interest in sustaining its pursuit.
Why does the content have to match the mode of inquiry? Why do women have to be our only object of study? (I’m not sure anyone’s arguing that they do).
Maybe the fact that we can’t reproduce historical projects of women’s studies is what will lead us into the future. (but how? Defining by absence).
Brown’s solution – spreading women’s studies content across the curriculum – obscures the ways that the disciplines themselves form identities.
Weigman seems to think that by spreading the content around, Brown lets the other disciplines not be affected by the “problematic of affect” – they won’t be seen as anti-intellectual. (while I think I understand what she says about this later, I’m not sure if I understand this statement).
Brown doesn’t address how the problem is connected to the “history of national political struggle over higher education.” (I’m not sure she has to. Again, you can’t take EVERYTHING into account.)
III – look at the problem of disciplinary identity and its relation to social identity in the US university.
Brown sees the “women of color” course as trying to compensate (which it probably is, but is it a bad thing? I get that having a separate course for this implies that women of color aren’t part of the “regular” group of women, but this is the same argument for black history month or women’s history month. Until we’re able to fix the issue, is it harmful to make sure these groups are addressed, even if it’s reinforcing them as “other”?)
Brown thinks it’s impossible to not exclude – so, we should teach our curriculum outside our degree-granting program. (I’m not really sure what she means here).
Brown talks about how faculty is disappointed in students’ unpreparedness in the faculty’s field of expertise. Divide between student interest and faculty expertise.
Social relation of identity – produces political belonging through practical experience in women’s studies.
Intellectual formation of identity – comes from training in the discipline and academic construction of “expertise.”
Brown’s essay relies on a distinction between social and intellectual identity.
Intellectual is given priority in overcoming the limitations of social identity.
Identity studies critique university’s exclusion.
Identity studies rely on faculty trained in traditional disciplines – therefore, intellectual belonging is predicated on the authority conferred by disciplinary structures.
Knowledge production binds us to privileged objects of study and privileged modes of inquiry.
Forms of coherence are often arbitrary.
Wiegman argues that the disciplines won’t be able to address the complexity set forth in Brown’s essay. (duh).
We need to rethink who and what belongs to women’s studies as a field.
Wiegman agrees with teaching feminist courses in other departments, but not INSTEAD OF working on women’s studies programs themselves. (duh)
Brown wants to interrupt the assumptions of the past and reanimate feminist knowledge production. (does this just sound good? What does it really mean?)
We need to look at how we came to understand our object of study, AND at the system that reduces identity-based studies to their function as affect and not intellect.
We need to refuse the idea that an intellectual domain and its object of study are the same (I’m not sure I totally understand this point – does she mean that we need to distance the idea of women’s studies from the idea of women themselves?).
We need to commit ourselves to the idea that our field’s origins don’t have to control its future.
Academic feminism’s relationship to the university is insecure – the vocabulary for understanding the institutionalization of women’s studies is all very negative.
IV
Brown claims that having a degree-granting program based on identity actually inhibits critical thought about power and the actual living subject. (but what about all of the critical thought it enables?)
The future productivity of feminist knowledge will be more possible OUTSIDE the institution of women’s studies.
You don’t study philosophy, you are a philosopher – identarian.
We can’t end institutionalization (like Brown wants).
We have to refuse to give up the institutional site.
Fetishizing the “real world” as something that exists outside of a university makes it hard to see the university as a place for politics and for the future of academic feminism.
Feminism as an academic project is very different from the models of social movement that inaugurated it into the institution.
We have to refuse the idea that the past creates the future or that the future is always an embodiment of the past.
The future and our knowledge might now have a productive relationship. We don’t have to live in the present of some future academic time.
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