Feminisms in the Academy

Series

• Women and Culture Series

Feminisms in the Academy explores the relationship between feminist scholarship and the other academic disciplines. Going beyond the conventional "mainstreaming" model which may tend to polarize and caricature positions, the essays employ existing epistemological and methodological tensions to generate productive dialogues within and among the humanities and social sciences, as well as in interdisciplinary areas such as African-American and Latina studies.

Part I, "Questioning the Disciplines," addresses the challenges that feminist scholarship poses to unexamined assumptions in four emblematic disciplines: philosophy, art history, psychology, and literature. The essays here demonstrate that such challenges have posed new questions and dilemmas for the disciplines, as well as for feminist scholarship. Part II, "Reading Differently," investigates the ways in which gender as an analytic tool transforms disciplinary knowledge and creates an opening to other categories of difference in literary criticism, sociology, and classical studies. The essays in Part III, "Feminism and the Politics of Intellectual Inquiry," explore the complex dynamics between feminist scholarship and the fields of archeology, French literature, and Spanish-American history and literature. Finally, the essays in "Dialogues: Feminist Scholarship and/in the Disciplines" expose the tensions between feminism and political science, sociology, and second- language acquisition. These essays, like several others in the volume, emphasize as well the transformation of women's studies itself through critique from the perspective of women of color.

Thus illuminating major themes within contemporary feminist scholarship across a broad range of disciplines, the collection demonstrates an appreciation of both feminist scholarship and the "traditional" academic fields, investigating the future possibilities of their mutual transformation and integration, and delineating a model for innovative knowledge in the academy for the twenty-first century.

Contributors include Margaret W. Conkey, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Claire Kramsch, Asuncion Lavrin, Helen Longino, Jeanne Marecek, Elaine Marks, Nellie Y. McKay, Sarah Pomeroy, Mary Poovey, Mary Romero, Virginia Sapiro, Judith Stacey, Ruth E. Tringham, and Linda Von Hoene.

Domna C. Stanton is Professor of French and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

Abigail J. Stewart is Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

Praise / Awards

• "Feminisms in the Academy is a rich collection of essays offering a range of diverse approaches to feminisms, while also, as a bonus, offering sane, reasoned insights on how to survive in the slough of misogyny and the thicket of multidisciplinarity."
  --Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University; Editor, American Literature; Coeditor, The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States and The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States; author, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan
  
• "Feminisms in the Academy makes a wonderfully rich addition to the Women and Culture Series. The collection is extraordinarily expansive, providing searching inquiries and fresh insights into the history and current state of women's studies. Its projections about the discipline's future in the academy are bold. Indeed they hold implications not just for women's studies, but for all who grapple with the powers and limits of 'disciplinary' knowledge."
  --Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia
  
• "Feminisms in the Academy is a state-of-the-art collection that will be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how women's studies and gender studies are positioned today, intellectually and institutionally. The essays do precisely what they are supposed to do--show us in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways the many and varied faces of contemporary feminist scholarship."
  --Sherry Ortner, University of California, Berkeley