Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes / Doing Feminism: Teaching and Research in the Academy

Gender & Society; Thousand Oaks; Jun 1999; Karen W Tice;

Volume: 13
Issue: 3
Start Page: 416-417
ISSN: 08912432
Subject Nonfiction
Terms: Feminism
Higher
education
Womens studies
Abstract:
Tice reviews "Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes" edited by Liz Stanley and "Doing Feminism: Teaching
and Research in the Academy" edited by Mary Anderson, Lisa Fine, Kathleen Geissler and Joyce R. Ladenson.
Full Text:
Copyright Sage Publications, Inc. Jun
1999
Knowing Feminisms: On Academic Borders, Territories and Tribes. Edited by Liz Stanley. London: Sage, 1997, 216 pp., $65.00 (cloth),
$23.95 (paper). Doing Feminism: Teaching and Research in the Academy. Edited by Mary Anderson, Lisa Fine, Kathleen Geissler, and
Joyce R. Ladenson. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997, 269 pp., $24.95 (paper).
Among the most interesting questions raised directly, or implied, by the contributors to Knowing Feminisms are the following: Does
academic feminism have its own politics of exclusion? What organizational dilemmas challenge academic feminism? What challenges
confront those who practice women's studies? Has academic feminism ushered in a new elite and created borderlands? Has academic
feminism privileged certain knowledges and disciplines over others? What are some of the internal tensions within academic feminism?
How has the intensification of market and managerial imperatives within the university affected the practice of academic feminism? What
are the trade-offs that accompany institutionalization and professionalization of women's studies? Such provocative questions have been
more pronounced in studies of women's community-based activism but are far less prevalent in exploration of women's studies programs as
sites of feminist practice. Not content with a singular focus on tracing the impact of intellectual and political changes on the ideational
terrain of women's studies, authors of the essays collected in Knowing Feminisms examine questions of feminist practice within the
academy.
The strength of this collection of articles is that it travels widely across the women's studies spectrum and provides an unusually
comprehensive look at the practice of women's studies by inclusion of both applied fields and knowledges that are often relegated to its
margins.
With articles by teachers of social work, nursing, choreography, and dance as well as theology, history, law, sociology, psychology,
development studies, history, and philosophy, this book provides a wide lens from which to consider tensions and differences within
women's studies. In addition, biographical interludes offer a compelling backdrop to the origins and meanings of women's studies in the
lives of a number of contributors.
Although the editor's introduction to the collection is needlessly jargonistic and dense, the articles are accessible, thought provoking, and
indicative of a range of epistemologies and practices that characterize women's studies. The thread unifying articles is the navigation of
borders and frontiers, margins and centers, and disagreements and possibilities inside academic feminism as well as movements outside of
academic contexts. For example, Jean Orr, Sue Wise, Carol Brown, and Elaine Graham argue that academic feminism has itself perpetuated
hierarchies of knowledge claims and production that have marginalized a variety of ideas, approaches, and disciplines that arise from the
study of the sacred, the practitioner, and bodily movement. Sue Wilkenson not only looks at exclusionary practices of psychology with
regard to feminism but also explores the internal struggles among feminist psychologists. Liz Stanley argues in her conclusion that
academic feminism has developed its own canonical properties and processes and its ruling groups and ideas, yet academic mainstreams
and borders are never absolute and static. Despite a barrage of constraints, rebellions, and displacements within both the academy and
women's studies, the former remains open to thinking on "the wild side" and to providing a site for feminist engagements.
This collection of essays provides a good catalyst for continuing the process of critical reflection on the practice of academic feminism.
Although captivated by the title Doing Feminism, I found this collection of essays much less engaging for a variety of reasons. The essays
are drawn from a 1990 conference sponsored at Michigan State University titled "Re-Visioning Knowledge and the Curriculum:
Feminist Perspectives." Given the explosion of more recent feminist scholarship that wrestles with the myriad of topics covered in the
collection as well as the internal quandaries that confront academic feminism in the late 1990s as addressed by Knowing Feminisms, some
of the articles in Doing Feminism could have been enriched by attention to newer works. While the editors' introduction heralds the fact that
so many educators from elementary through university levels came together to explore "feminism's practical and conceptual implications,"
those teaching in higher education and specifically in literary studies, in fact, wrote most of the 17 essays.
There are few unifying threads that link the essays in this collection other than as examples of scholarship seeking to redefine disciplinary
knowledge. Interdisciplinary dialogue is rare. Included are essays on Flannery O'Connor, Margaret Fuller, British women's writers, older
women, physical education, quality control in women's studies courses, and the formation of the first feminist psychoanalytic institute.
Examples of experientially-based feminist knowledge include a lyrical piece fusing theoretical and literary accounts with personal
recollections on motherhood and a short story that narrates a feminist encounter with her androcentric colleagues in an English department.
A few noteworthy contributions do, however, travel well beyond disciplinary territories, including articles by Ruth Hubbard on feminist
science; Bonnie Thornton Dill and Maxine Baca Zinn on the overlapping effects of race-ethnicity, class, and gender; Mary Caputi on
postmodernism and feminism; and Phyllis Palmer on curriculum change. Had more of the articles in Doing Feminism been staged
explicitly to transcend disciplinary conversations, the collection would appeal to wider audiences. However, taken together with Knowing
Feminism, the books challenge us not only to problematize hierarchies and exclusions within our disciplines but also within women's
studies. [Author note]KAREN W TICE University of Kentucky