At many universities, women's 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, women's studies has begun to
lose its critical purchase. Feminism, the driving
political force behind women's studies, is commonly
regarded as a vestigial or irrelevant political position
to today's students, and activism is no longer central
to women's studies programs on many campuses.In
''Women's Studies on the Edge'', leading feminist
scholars tackle the critical, political, and
institutional challenges that women's studies has faced
since its widespread integration into university
curricula. The contributors to ''Women's 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 women's studies; about the
ongoing difficulties of articulating women's 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 women's studies in
identity politics authorized by personal experience. In
''Women's Studies on the Edge'' there are conflicting
interpretations that 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 feminism's ethos and its
aim. |
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