Gender and women's studies critical terrain second edition

As we thought about this introduction, we were reminded of these two quotations, the first by Arundhati Roy, who describes herself as an “Indian novelist, activist, and world citizen,” and the second by American feminist activist and journalist Gloria Steinem. Roy opens us up to the transformative potential of social justice and solidarity by prompt- ing us to hold fast to the belief that another world is possible, that there are alternatives to inequalities that are deepening the new global world order. We have to keep alive visions of gender and economic justice; they can move us, inspire us, sustain us, and galvanize us as thinkers and activists, as global citizens and as members of local communities, working for change. Steinem’s words signal that the road ahead is not easy, that it involves a process of critical examination of many of our most taken-for-granted truths and belief systems about the world around us. It is through unlearning as much as learning that we begin to see how inequalities have been created and hence how they can be challenged and undone. Unlearning and learning are intertwined in a continual, connected

process: the unpacking of prior knowledge and assumptions is important in making space for new versions and visions of social realities.

This volume engages with these practices: unlearn- ing/learning and envisioning change. We aim to offer a broad selection of writings from a range of authors and perspectives to help introduce you to a field that is at the forefront of critical thinking about inequalities and social justice. This introduction provides students with an entry point to consider what gender and women’s studies involves, how it has changed in recent years, and why it continues to be a meaningful and socially relevant area of inquiry. In what follows, we focus mainly on gender and women’s studies in the North American context, which itself has been shaped by broader global shifts within both feminism and the political and eco- nomic landscape. We discuss some of the main goals and theoretical developments of gender and women’s studies, and highlight key features of this book. We conclude with some thoughts about the process of crit- ical thinking and how it might apply to your reading of the material in the text.

INTRODUCTION

Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies

Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

—Arundhati Roy, War Talk (2003, p. 75)

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. —Gloria Steinem, “‘Women’s Liberation’ Aims to Free Men, Too,” Washington Post (1970, p. 192)

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Gender and Women's Studies, Second Edition : Critical Terrain, edited by Margaret Hobbs, and Carla Rice, Canadian Scholars, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umanitoba/detail.action?docID=6318365. Created from umanitoba on 2020-10-19 22:04:15.

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2 Introduction Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies

WHAT IS GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES?

As students coming into gender and women’s studies introductory classes, you will have different ideas of what to expect. While some of you may have been introduced to gender and women’s studies perspec- tives through a course, extracurricular involvement at high school, conversations with family and friends, or social media and popular culture, for many of you this is your first conscious engagement with this field. You likely have many questions: What is this field variously called “women’s studies,” “women’s and gen- der studies,” “gender and women’s studies,” or other similar names? (For a brief discussion of the shift from women to gender in the title of many programs see Hobbs and Rice, 2011a.) How does what I learn here differ from and add to what I am studying in my other courses? How relevant is gender and women’s studies to my own life and to my future? Will these perspectives be useful to me in the workforce? Will the topics and approaches introduced in this class reflect or revise my understanding of local and global social relations and structures? How might my values and world view be enriched? What is feminism and do I have to be a feminist to take this course?

As you begin this journey, you should know that gender and women’s studies is not one thing. It is not one perspective or one analysis but many, expressed differently by scholars and activists whose ideas and approaches differ from one another, shaped by their own backgrounds, interests, training, experience, and understandings of the world. Not surprisingly, then, introductory courses in this field are also diverse. Some professors might choose to introduce you to the field through a few specific themes, perhaps highlighting gendered analyses of popular culture or recent writings from the “third wave” of feminism. Some might engage more with international contexts and others with North America, and some focus mainly on the present while others explore women’s historical experiences as well. Most introductory courses, however, aim for fairly

broad fare, taking you through gender and women’s studies across a range of themes, issues, and contexts.

Despite the differences in our approaches and perspectives, there is considerable overlap in what instructors in North American universities and col- leges are trying to accomplish as they introduce you to what has been, and continues to be, a powerfully influential and transformative field. A number of years ago, we conducted an informal survey of course outlines and website descriptions of introductory gender and women’s studies courses. The following list highlights some commonly shared goals guiding the teaching of entry-level courses in gender and women’s studies:

• To introduce students to women’s/gender studies as a broad, dynamic, interdisciplinary, and global field of inquiry, and to familiarize students with some of the major issues, debates, and approaches in gender and feminist scholarship and activism

• To complicate commonly presumed understand- ings of concepts like “women,” “sex,” “gender,” “race,” and “disability” by examining how these categories have been “constructed” (or created by society) and how they shape ideas and experiences of human difference

• To analyze and challenge hierarchical and inter- secting relations of power influenced by gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, ability, and other categories of difference

• To understand how power relations are embedded in institutions and in everyday, taken-for-granted social relations, practices, and values

• To highlight affinities and differences among self-identified women and gender non-conforming people, both within North America and world- wide, and to analyze intersecting social, cultural, political, and economic systems that shape their lives and agency

• To explore the multiple pathways and forms of individual and collective resistance to injustice and inequities in the past and the present, and to

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Introduction Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies 3

analyze creative visions and strategies for change in local and global contexts

• To inspire and empower students to develop their knowledge of feminist scholarship and to engage critically in their communities at local, national, or global levels

• To develop students’ skills in critical thinking and analysis, reading, and writing, and to create classroom environments that support learners’ respectful debate and disagreement

These goals reflect a vision of gender and women’s studies grounded in knowledge that is continuously shifting as the field develops and its insights deepen. Feminist scholars in the past and present have explored how ideas about gender work at interpersonal and institutional levels to shape social relations and the lived experiences of diverse people. Their explorations of gender, in relation to other social categories of iden- tity and other axes of power, have been transforming the so-called traditional disciplines such as history, philosophy, politics, psychology, biology, and sociol- ogy, while also producing new syntheses of knowledge that we call interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary.

When women’s studies courses and programs emerged in North America in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of widespread protest against social and economic injustices, they joined other scholars—for example, in Canadian studies, Native studies, and labour studies—who were similarly interested in pressing beyond the limits of the older disciplines. Like these other interdisciplinary fields informed by critiques of social inequalities and visions of social justice, women’s studies aimed to understand social relations in order to change them. You will notice from the goals summarized above that the field continues to offer tools, wisdom, and perspectives enabling a critical engagement with the world and its power structures. At the same time, gender and women’s studies offers pathways through which we can better understand ourselves, our diverse experiences and identities, and our relationships with others in the wider world.

CURRENT TRENDS IN GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES

Gender and women’s studies courses, and indeed this textbook, have been shaped in important ways by recent debates and new insights emerging from fem- inist scholarship. The ideas and the tools they suggest also come out of women’s and social justice movements, from diversely positioned and marginalized people and grassroots communities, locally and globally, at the forefront of feminist thought and action.

Below we describe four of these major trends that together are making gender and women’s studies perspectives more relevant than ever before in the critical task of understanding the world in which we live and the major challenges we face as a human community. This list is not exhaustive; there are many other trends shaping the field and the curriculum itself. Exciting feminist work is currently coming from disability studies, fat studies, and posthuman studies, and we anticipate that scholarship in these areas will significantly reshape gender and women’s studies over the next decade. In the meantime, it is important for instructors and students alike to reflect upon and engage with the following four distinct, though overlapping, trends:

1. The concept and practice of intersectionality 2. Queering gender and women’s studies 3. Indigenizing and decolonizing gender and

women’s studies 4. Globalizing, internationalizing, and transnation-

alizing gender and women’s studies

1. The Concept and Practice of Intersectionality

“Intersectionality” is a concept and an approach to understanding the lives and experiences of individuals and groups of people in their diversity and complexity. Emerging as a theoretically important and challenging term in feminist scholarship, intersectionality is often

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4 Introduction Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies

used to describe the idea that women, men, and gen- der variant people live multiple layered identities and simultaneously experience oppression and privilege. The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women explains an intersectional approach as attempting “to understand how multiple forces work together and interact to reinforce conditions of inequal- ity and social exclusion” (CRIAW, 2006, p. 5).

Intersectionality is not a new concept. The term itself was conceived in the early 1990s by African American feminists and critical race scholars Patricia Hill Collins (1990) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994), and the ideas associated with it have since been adapted, developed, and debated by feminist scholars, activists, and organizations in North America and elsewhere. Intersectionality critiques the limitations of perspec- tives that look narrowly at social relations through a gender lens alone, and encourages a wider view focused on the multiple components of identity and intersecting “axes” of power that constitute individuals’ experiences in the world (Karpinski, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Intersectional theories and methods work, for example, to explore the specific ways in which factors such as gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, class, race, disability, geography, refugee and/or immigrant status, size, and age interact to shape people’s social positioning. Such differences are also examined in the context of the larger social and political forces and institutions that create unequal access to power and privilege. Colonialism, capitalism, neo-liberalism, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and social welfare policies are all important examples. By examining the complex- ities and specificities of identities and social locations, intersectionality explores how women, men, and gender non-conforming people occupy many different and contradictory positions in social relations of power.

2. Queering Gender and Women’s Studies

Recent developments in gender, queer, and trans theory and activism across North America have placed a spotlight on gender and sexuality as socially

created constructs. In response, women’s studies, which initially placed women squarely—some say narrowly—in the centre of analysis, is broadening its focus, and engaging more fully with issues and explorations of masculinities, queer and sexuality studies, and “transfeminism.” At their heart, gen- der and queer theory involve critically analyzing the binary (either/or) categories of woman/man and femininity/masculinity by calling into question “the notion of two discrete tidily organized sexes and genders” (Scott-Dixon, 2006, p. 12). This rich theory base has arisen out of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans (GLBT) studies, itself a fairly new area of academic inquiry that seeks to understand and contextualize gendered and sexed bodies/identities and erotic desires and practices in different times and places (Meem et al., 2010; Stombler et al., 2010). GLBT studies, along with gender studies, has done much to explore sexual diversity, showing how dominant ideas and norms about sexuality, sexed bodies, and sexual practices and identities are not rooted naturally in the facts of biology, but are socially constructed in various ways by different soci- eties. Queer theory goes further, aiming not only to interrogate sexuality norms, but also to turn upside down the very idea of “the normal”; namely, “every- thing in the culture that has occupied a position of privilege, power, and normalcy, starting with het- erosexuality” (Bacon, 2006, p. 259). Adding another layer of nuance and complexity, transfeminism has emerged at the intersections of feminist and trans theory as a vibrant gender-inclusive field dedicated to ending the oppression of all gender crossing, gender diverse, gender non-conforming, and gen- der independent people (Scott-Dixon, 2006). At the same time, Indigenous thinkers who self-identify as “Two Spirit” and queer have worked to reclaim their bodies and erotic lives from colonial systems that attempted to impose sexist structures as well as sexual and gender norms onto Indigenous peoples as an integral part of colonization processes (Driskill et al., 2011).

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Introduction Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies 5

3. Indigenizing and Decolonizing Gender and Women’s Studies

The increased attention to decolonization and Indigenization in gender and women’s studies comes from the proliferation of Indigenous scholar- ship and activism, and the critique of the historical marginalization of Indigenous perspectives in much of North American feminist thought and practice. “Indigenizing” involves the integration of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives into what counts as knowledge. As such, it goes well beyond the additive approach of writing Indigenous women in to existing Western theories, or squeezing their experiences into one or two classes in a gender and women’s studies course. Instead the challenge for gender and women’s studies teachers and students is to centre Indigeneity more fully by weaving it through and across studies of particular themes and issues; by valuing Indigenous knowledge forms; by analyzing colonialism and its continuing legacies for Indigenous women, men, and Two-Spirit and queer people; and by understanding the diversity of their lives and perspectives.

The closely related concept of “decolonizing” refers to the anti-colonial project of critiquing Western world views and challenging the oppressive power structures that they uphold. According to Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), decolonizing, “once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government, is now recognized as a long-term process involving bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic, and psych- ological divesting of colonial power,” including in the academy (p. 98). For Davis (2010), decolonization of gender and women’s studies means displacing white, Western subjectivities from the centre of course texts and topics, and disrupting Eurocentric, First World privilege through an examination of colonial relations from the perspectives of colonized others. Indigenous feminists, including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) (2011), Emma LaRocque (Métis) (2007), and Joyce Green (Ktunaxa/Cree- Scots Métis) (2007) see such anti-colonial feminist

approaches as critical to grasping urgent issues faced by Indigenous women today. For example, Sarah Hunt (Kwagiulth) (2016) argues that because sexual violence has been used as a weapon of colonialism to destroy and assimilate Indigenous peoples into a white, racist, sexist hierarchy, anti-violence and anti-colonial struggles cannot be separated if femin- ists hope to end violence against all women.

4. Globalizing, Internationalizing, and Transnationalizing Gender and Women’s Studies

These terms themselves, as well as the practices they entail, are the subject of considerable debate. Sometimes they are used interchangeably. Increasingly, however, the language of global feminism, and hence calls for “globalizing” the curriculum, is giving way to the pol- itics of “internationalizing” and/or “transnationaliz- ing.” For many, the term global in relation to feminism is too reminiscent of the condescension and denial of differences evident in past Western feminists’ schol- arly and activist approaches to women in the “Third World” (Grewal & Kaplan, 2006; Mohanty, 1991; Shohat, 2001). Internationalization is often employed as a broad umbrella term encompassing various prac- tices and methods, extending feminism’s focus beyond the Western world. Such endeavours, however, if not accompanied by a self-reflective critique of the limits of Western world views, can produce knowledge that reinforces, rather than challenges, dominant cultural stereotypes and misunderstandings.

Mohanty, for example, described three models for internationalizing gender and women’s studies. She critiqued the “feminist as tourist” approach, which simply adds “Third World” and Indigenous women into existing analytic frameworks, stereotyping them as either hapless victims or romantic heroines. The “feminist as explorer” model can be problematic by focusing on women’s lives in specific geographic contexts (through courses such as “Women in India,” “Third World Women,” etc.) without a sustained

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6 Introduction Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies

analysis of structural power relations. Mohanty (2003) instead encouraged a third alternative approach, “feminist solidarity,” which recognizes differences and hierarchies of power within and across borders while building on affinities and common interests. Increasingly a transnational lens (as opposed to an international one) is promoted as a richer way to “teach students how to think about gender in a world whose boundaries have changed” (Kaplan & Grewal, 2002, p. 79). Transnational approaches emphasize the movement of money, labour, information, and culture across national borders; they draw out how histories of colonization and, more recently, global- ization structure inequalities; and they explore the possibilities for solidarity among women and social movements organizing across geographic boundaries. In a transnationalized gender and women’s studies curriculum, Canada and the United States can still be examined, but they are not centred (Mohanty in Dua & Trotz, 2002).

These theoretical and political shifts have chal- lenged gender and women’s studies to develop more nuanced theories and methods for understanding social relations and differences. Many instructors and students have taken up that challenge by becom- ing more inclusive of gender and queer theory (see Enke, 2012, in this volume); by better integrating Indigenous feminist thought, issues, and activism (St. Denis, 2007); by focusing on the gendered genesis and impacts of colonization and globalization in Canada and around the world (Mohanty, 2003); and by questioning their own positioning and implicated- ness in current conditions (Blyth, 2008; Dion, 2009). Most feminist educators believe that a sustained focus on sexism is still necessary in gender and women’s studies classrooms, especially in the face of deepening global gender inequities. At the same time, the theor- etical insights offered by gender and queer theory, Indigenous feminism, and transnational feminist thought and activism have led many to radically rethink the subject and focus of gender and women’s studies. In this book, we invite you to engage with

new knowledge and methods emerging from the field and contribute to conversations about the challenges we face in our local and global communities.

FEATURES OF THIS BOOK

Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain grew out of a familiar annual ritual for many introduc- tory course instructors: the quest to find the perfect text that will engage and inspire students while guiding them skillfully through the dizzying array of concepts, theories, issues, approaches, histories, and contexts that constitute contemporary feminist and gender scholarship. We have a confession: we have never really liked textbooks. As undergradu- ate students, we had many occasions to throw our textbooks against the wall—once we awoke from the snooze induced by boredom. What, then, are we doing collaborating on our own introductory textbook in gender and women’s studies?

Over time, we have come to appreciate how a textbook can help instructors and students navigate the dynamic and swiftly changing terrain of gender and women’s studies. A text provides students with a concrete tangible work that they can hold in their hands as a guide. At its best, it can provide intellectual glue that makes more readily apparent the themes and flow of the course, as well as the interconnections between topics and the context within which par- ticular pieces should be read. A textbook can include important learning and research aids such as guiding questions, relevant websites, and definitions of key terms. Textbooks that include a diversity of feminist authors introduce learners to multiple perspectives and current debates about topics related to women, gender, feminism, and social justice. We believe it is valuable for students, beginning in first year, to sharpen their analytic skills and develop their own positions in relation to a multiplicity of ideas and arguments.

Of course, the perfect text does not, and cannot, exist. Even with a more modest goal in mind, our

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Introduction Mapping the Terrain of Gender and Women’s Studies 7

own attempt at an introductory textbook has proved challenging, and certainly humbling. One of the most difficult parts of the process has been trimming to a reasonable size our initial wish list of wonderful feminist writings. By editing many pieces for length, we have been able to assemble a broadly representa- tive sampling of works. Critical Terrain contributes to the growing list of innovative texts on the North American market by offering what we hope you will find to be an appealing collection with several unique characteristics and tools for students and instructors. We present below some of the main features of both the first and second editions of this book. These were inspired by a wide reading of existing textbooks, an appreciation for both classic insights and new theoretical developments shaping the field, and a recognition of the diversity of readership.

• Multiplicity of disciplines and fields: Because gen- der and women’s studies is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, we provide writings that give you, as students, exposure to feminist scholarship from across disciplines as well as within the newer interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary gender and women’s studies stream. Sociology, psychology, history, philosophy, Indigenous studies, litera- ture, cultural studies, biology, science studies, Canadian studies, political economy, and an- thropology are some of the areas represented in this text.

• Historical and contemporary contexts: Many gender and women’s studies texts lean heavily on pres- ent-day concerns and circumstances. We chose selections that balance contemporary analyses with historical ones. To address broader soci- ety’s historical amnesia, we aimed for readings that build a strong foundation in the history of women and other marginalized groups (such as Indigenous and racialized people, people with disabilities, and gender and sexual minorities).

• Diversity of authors: We think that it is import- ant to feature work by a broad range of authors

from various social, economic, and geographic identities and locations. Different viewpoints from diversely located writers can generate crit- ical debate about issues such as the relevance of gender and women’s studies, men’s relation- ship to feminism, gender and sexual minority and trans perspectives, gendered and racialized beauty ideals, impacts of globalization on women workers, and reproductive technologies. Thus, we highlight the richness of the literature and the diversity of gendered experiences, perspectives, and analyses. We include voices from the margins as well as the centre.