Women's Studies on the Edge

At many universities, womens studies programs have achieved department status, establishing tenure-track appointments, graduate programs, and consistent course enrollments. Yet, as Joan Wallach Scott notes in her introduction to this collection, in the wake of its institutional successes, womens studies has begun to lose its critical purchase. Feminism, the driving political force behind womens studies, is often regarded as an outmoded political position by many of todays students, and activism is no longer central to womens studies programs on many campuses. In Womens Studies on the Edge, leading feminist scholars tackle the critical, political, and institutional challenges that womens studies has faced since its widespread integration into university curricula. The contributors to Womens Studies on the Edge embrace feminism not as a set of prescriptions but as a critical stance, one that seeks to interrogate and disrupt prevailing systems of gender. Refusing to perpetuate and protect orthodoxies, they ask tough questions about the impact of institutionalization on the once radical field of womens studies; about the ongoing difficulties of articulating womens studies with ethnic, queer, and race studies; and about the limits of liberal concepts of emancipation for understanding non-Western women. They also question the viability of continuing to ground womens studies in identity politics authorized by personal experience. The multiple interpretations in Womens Studies on the Edge sometimes overlap and sometimes stand in opposition to one another. The result is a collection that embodies the best aspects of critique: the intellectual and political stance that the contributors take to be feminisms ethos and its aim.Contributors Wendy Brown Beverly Guy-Sheftall Evelynn M. Hammonds Saba Mahmood Biddy Martin Afsaneh Najmabadi Ellen Rooney Gayle Salamon Joan Wallach Scott Robyn Wiegman