Letters to the Editor
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WS is one of the biggest loads of crap...
...you could ever dream-up.
It has to be the only field in which the conclusion is always known before you start any research, and the conclusion never changes: "It's all men's fault."
The ONLY intellectual work ever required in the field is using your imagination to make everything men's fault. And the more indirect the blame which can be cast onto men, the more brilliant the analysis is judged to be. A more blatant example of backwards reasoning is difficult to find.
I work in academia, and you can spot the WS majors a mile away: they're intellectually lazy to the core and the only skills they learn are how to write papers for other WS majors. Almost every other department regards it as a complete joke. I advise ALL of my students to avoid WS classes like the plague beause they systematically replace your brain with a simple-minded ideology.
It really is no wonder that so many feminist academics spent most of the '90s taking the wrong side in the Science Wars. You read the garbage from the WS departments in which they gripe that the sciences are all a bunch of "white male departments" which are "hostile to women and people of color" and then you actually GO OVER to the physics departments 10 minutes away and you see the labs are full of Chinese and Indian women who didn't seem to get the message that they aren't welcome there.
PAH-thetic.
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Irrelevance is a fantasy -- but a dangerous one
It's old-school anti-intellectualism, trying to reduce the value of education to a simple matter of pounds and pence.
To further this line of thinking, it's important to consider the productive relationship that feminist scholarship has always had with critical theory, of which it remains a vital underpinning.
The idea that modern philosophy and the study of power and social change has somehow become irrelevant is a fantasy of the troglodytes who long for a return to (or reinvention of) a time when the terms of acceptable academic discourse were well-regulated, and most students were content to be stapled, stamped, and ushered quickly out of the academy and into the professions.
The only danger to this kind of hyperventilation about the demise of actual scholarship is that, as Tedra Osell points out, the people who are prone to it also tend to have access to the levers of institutional decision-making. "Students don't want to be studying this" becomes code for "We don't want students to be studying this," and thence turns into department cuts and and so on.
Unfortunately, they have as their allies a generation of parents who believe that the sole merit to higher education is in improved pay grades. Academic feminism as a discipline is as productive as it's ever been — maybe now is a good time for a broadening of the concept of consciousness-raising to include the revival of academia as a whole.
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Oh, good lord.
"And if being a feminist doesn't lead to a job, doesn't that suggest that society is still perhaps just a wee bit patriarchal?"
No, it suggests that getting a job requires a whole lot more than a political position.
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Where's Women's Studies? Right Here!
"British and American societies are no longer patriarchal and oppressive 'male hegemonies'" while claiming in the next paragraph that perhaps, on the other hand, the real problem is that "young women have shied away from studying feminist theory because they would rather opt for degrees that more obviously lead to jobs."
I have to say that I completely disagree with the first part of the quote... I wish that gender equality was a non-issue, but the word "feminist," much like the word "liberal," has been so maligned by the opposition that no one knows what these words actually mean.
But I think the second part of the quote sounds fairly accurate... and I say that's a good a thing! I'm glad that the days of college as merely a hunting ground for husbands are gone and that women are able to pursue majors that correspond with their career choices.
I enjoyed a few of the Women's Studies courses I took, which were great settings for intellectual discourse and presented varying theories. But unless I planned on pursuing my career in academia (and women's studies in particular) there was simply no reason for me to major in it.
There's still plenty of discussion to be had on the topic of gender equality and I don't think its going the way of the dodo bird. Just look at Broadsheet! As infuriated as I get with a majority of the posts -- particularly the ones fervently alleging that society is "anti-male" -- I'm glad that this topic still has the ability to stir such passions. If it didn't, we'd know that feminism (and women's studies, too) was truly dead.
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An Embarrassing Article, On So Many Levels
First of all, Christina Hoff Sommers is a feminist. If you decree that everyone who doesn't agree with your particular agenda for feminism is not a feminist, then that gives the lie to the oft-repeated mantra that it's a pluralistic, varied cultural movement. Sommers is a gender feminist, not an equity feminist. She's said so many times.
If women's studies is "predictable, tiresome and dreary," perhaps that's because only one monotonous view is allowed, all others are silenced, and therefore one knows without asking exactly what response the program will have towards any given cultural issue.
Secondly, how on earth do you make the leap from the death of women's studies (isn't dead now? what percentage of schools in the U.S. still maintain a women's studies program?) to the death of feminism? Were there no feminists before the mid-70's?
If I understand this article, feminism only exists when deemed so by "approved" feminists, and it can only be sustained if college campuses maintain vigorous women's studies programs. If that's the case, the movement had best be put on life support ASAP.
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should not be independent academic department
I don't really see that Women's Studies, Queer Studies, etc., need to exist as full-fledged academic departments when they are not quite academic disciplines. Students who wish to concentrate on topics relevant to feminist interests should do so within real departments like economics, English, history, religion, etc.