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This article considers the recurring criticisms of Women's Studies. The desire for the demise of Women's Studies is not new yet recent demands for its end have come from Women's Studies scholars themselves. I review the arguments for and against the termination of the field and, although the arguments against Women's Studies are compelling, I argue for its continuation. This paradoxical conclusion is reached by reconsidering the "for and against" debates through Wendy Brown's use of Jacques Derrida's "spectre" and Walter Benjamin's "angel of history." Thus, despite the seduction of the discourse of conventional argumentation performed through the deconstructive critique of women's studies, the article reposes the question of how to retain Women's Studies – founded on the incoherent category of woman – whilst simultaneously subjecting the field to radical interrogation and re-organization.

The Women's Studies Program was an interdisciplinary program enabling the student to select courses dealing directly or indirectly with women, including the development of feminism, women's changing roles in the family, religion, the labor force, and politics. The collection is composed of Women's History Month material, Woman of Distinction Awards Tea material, sponsored programs and material describing the Women's Studies minor.

The authors consider the "naming debate" in Women's Studies and the implications of the current tendency to broaden the scope of Women's Studies by including terms such as "gender" or "feminist" in the name. To this debate, they contribute an analysis of how neoliberal ideology attempts to contain Women's Studies within the policies and discourses of the corporatization of universities. This paper calls for renewed connections between feminist academics and social justice and women's movements in order to sustain the transformative politics that have always been part of the feminist project. ; Les auteurs prennent en considération le «débat sur le nom» en études sur les femmes, ainsi que les implications de la tendance actuelle d'élargir l'envergure des études sur les femmes, en incluant des termes tels que « genre » et «féministe» dans le nom. Ils contribuent à ce débat une analyse sur les essais de l'idéologie néolibérale de contenir les études sur les femmes au sein des politiques, et des discours sur les tentatives de transformer les universités en corporations. Cet article appelle au renouvellement des connexions entre les universitaires féministes et les mouvements de justice sociale et féministes, pour maintenir les politiques transformatives qui ont toujours fait partie du projet féministe.

Dangerous Ideas explores sex and love, politics and performance, joy and anguish in a collection of essays focused on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement and one of its offshoots, Women's Studies, in Australia and around the world. These are serious matters: they are about tectonic changes in people's lives and ideas in the late twentieth century, too little remembered or understood any longer. 'Feminism', this book suggests, 'is always multiple and various, fluid and changing, defying efforts at definition, characterisation, periodisation'. Nevertheless, Dangerous Ideas tackles some hard questions. How did Women's Liberation begin? What held this transformative movement together? Would it bring about the death of the family? Was it reorganising the labour market? Revolutionising human reproduction? How could Women's Studies exist in patriarchal universities? Could feminism change the paradigms governing the world of learning? In the United States? In Russia? In the People's Republic of China? It is great fun, too. This book tells of Hobart's hilarious Feminist Food Guide; of an outburst of creative energies among feminists – women on top, behaving badly; of dreams and desires for an entirely different future. And, always unorthodox: it finds hope and cheer in a history of the tampon. ; Susan Magarey

Dangerous Ideas explores sex and love, politics and performance, joy and anguish in a collection of essays focussed on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement and one of its offshoots, Women's Studies, in Australia and around the world. These are serious matters: they are about tectonic changes in people's lives and ideas in the late twentieth century, too little remembered or understood any longer. 'Feminism', this book suggests, 'is always multiple and various, fluid and changing, defying efforts at definition, characterisation, periodisation'. Nevertheless, Dangerous Ideas tackles some hard questions. How did Women's Liberation begin? What held this transformative movement together? Would it bring about the death of the family? Was it reorganising the labour market? Revolutionising human reproduction? How could Women's Studies exist in patriarchal universities? Could feminism change the paradigms governing the world of learning? In the United States? In Russia? In the People's Republic of China? It is great fun, too. This book tells of Hobart's hilarious Feminist Food Guide; of an outburst of creative energies among feminists – women on top, behaving badly; of dreams and desires for an entirely different future. And, always unorthodox: it finds hope and cheer in a history of the tampon.

"For its fortieth birthday, Women's Studies has been given the gift of an impasse. What established, tenured Women's Studies professors, the 'foremothers' turned academic powerbrokers, should do now with their own creation has snowballed into a discourse of crisis. Many Women's Studies professors continue to support their departments and students. Yet there are a growing number of established scholars who are currently arguing, within a crisis discourse, that the project of Women's Studies is no longer relevant or even possible. Women's Studies scholarship has been framed as stagnant and naïve, based on identity politics and revolutionary ideals that no longer make sense in our post-modern, theory-based academy (i.e. Brown, Halley)." This paper addresses these issues with examples of student advocacy and a call for more student focused participation within the academic field of Women's Studies.

Outside women's studies classrooms, discourses of white masculinity under siege are proliferating with devastating consequences for women and people of color. Indeed, in each of the most reactionary domestic political events and trends of the past five or so years the social group most united in the support of reaction has been young white men, from the 1994 "Republican revolution," to California's propositions 187 and 209. Yet, against the backdrop of globalized labor markets and diffusing corporatization, the manifest destiny of being young, white, and male in the United States now seems to many like a cruel promise; in the face of this uncertainty, it makes a kind of sense that white guys could feel powerless, experiencing social policies like affirmative action and political projects like feminism (and "identity politics" generally) as antagonistic to their self-actualization. Nor is it any surprise that Hollywood films like Falling Down, the four Lethal Weapon movies, and Die Hard depict the angry return of the vanquished white male (usually at the hands of affirmative action, immigration/ greedy foreigners, or an uppity woman). At the same time, though, a new, highly commodified, kick-ass "feminism" has emerged on the popular culture horizon. Here, seemingly more transgressive images like those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Terminator 2 blend with the Spice Girls and Nike ads to imply that liberation requires only individualistic attitude adjustment as opposed to reconfiguring institutional power relations.1 These are just some of the features of gender relations as they appear in a few registers of contemporary U.S. social life, but they are enough to evoke the daunting stakes faced by students and teachers of women's studies.

Recent scholarship in the historiography of feminism has sought to challenge certain received histories of the movement which seem likely to obscure the social, intellectual and political complexity of the past, and indeed of the present. With good reason, such research has often preferred to focus on general intellectual currents rather than individual cases. This paper, however, focuses on some common constructions of one feminist in particular: philosopher and theologian Mary Daly (1928-2010). I hope to demonstrate that an analysis of one individual's positioning within feminism's history, as well as in relation to a conception of correct intellectual practice for women's studies, can prove useful for broader attempts to make more complex our conceptions of feminist chronology, as well as for scholarship seeking to interrogate the institutional factors feeding into such stories. Through readings of both Daly's own texts and those of her critics, this paper seeks to understand Daly's positioning both in a common history of feminist progression, and in a concomitant story about the type of intellectual work appropriate to women's studies. The central claim is that, in the constructions of Daly I examine, she is positioned as spatially external to the community and conversation of women's studies as academic discipline, as well as temporally behind that conversation. This positioning is not unilateral, but itself feeds off as well as into Daly's own self-positioning in relation to women's studies. The constructions of Daly I am figuring are therefore not impositions but rather works of communal construction to some extent, since both Daly and her critics are intellectual agents who produce, maintain and modify stories about feminist history as well as women's studies as discipline.

Women's organizing as a subject of study privileges women's agency and encourages students to redefine themselves as political actors. It offers a unique opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of often inaccessible debates in feminist theory, for example, about fluid identities, feminism as process, and contextual analysis. This article explores four ways of examining women's organizing that provide entry points into theory: the disaggregation of women's organizing and feminist organizing; the emphasis on context and strategic relativism; the move from identity politics to strategic alliances; and the differentiation of international, global and transnational organizing. ; L'organisation des femmes comme sujet d'etude privilegie les agences feminines et encourage les etudiantes a se redefinir comme acteures politiques. Ceci offre une occasion unique de demontrer la pertinence des debats souvent inaccessibles dans la theorie feministe, par exemple, au sujet des identites fluides, le feminisme en tant que processus, et l'analyse contextuelle. Cet article explore quatre facons d'etudier les organisation feminines, qui donnent des points d'entree dans la theorie feministe; la desagregation des organisations feministes; l'accent sur le contexte, et le relativisme strategique; le changement des politiques d'identite aux alliance politiques; et ladifferentiation de l'organisation internationale, globale et transnationale.

From the Introduction: When feminism is defined in such a way that it calls attention to the diversity of women's social and political reality, it centralizes the experiences of all women, especially the women whose social conditions have been least written about, studied, or changed by political movements. When we cease to focus on this simplistic stance "men are the enemy," we are compelled to examine systems of domination and our role in their maintenance and perpetuation. Lack of adequate definition made it easy for bourgeois women, whether liberal or radical in perspective, to maintain their dominance over the leadership of the movement and its direction. This hegemony continues to exist in most feminist organizations. Exploited and oppressed groups of women are usually encouraged by those in power to feel that their situation is hopeless, that they can do nothing to break the pattern of domination. Given such socialization, these women have often felt that our only response to white, bourgeois, hegemonic dominance of feminist movement is to trash, reject, or dismiss feminism. This reaction is in no way threatening to those women who wish to maintain control over the direction of feminist theory and praxis. They prefer us to be silent, passively accepting their ideas…(T)here has been a shift within the women's movement whereby critique no longer focuses merely on patriarchal social structures but also on white middle- class women's perpetuation of them to the detriment of other women and possibly to the demise of the women's studies movement in its entirety. Such a juncture has created a tragedy like that of the Medusa. In this Greek myth, an originally lovely woman turns monstrous because of her foolish act of aspiring to be a goddess. We see a parallel between this classical myth and the transformations within women's studies. Facing the Medusa tragedy that has befallen the women's studies movement due to the hegemonic aspirations of its members is so frightening that to join its ranks or to consider taking on such a movement from within could prove death-dealing. The ultimate fear when facing the Medusa for women's studies scholars is that they might prove what their male detractors have been saying--that she was a monster all along.

As we move beyond the third wave of feminism, some question the need for separate departments and degree programs focused on the study of women. This paper argues that Women's Studies programs are necessary to the academy. This argument is made through a review of the literature on the history and development of Women's Studies programs in order to examine the past, and a survey of the presence of Women's Studies and LGBT programs in 159 colleges/universities in 2012 in an attempt to examine the present. The battle Women's Studies has fought and continues to fight in order to assert itself as a valid field of study in the university, complicated by the struggle of establishing itself as an entirely new discipline rather than a branch of a larger one has resulted in an identity crisis surrounding issues of purpose and disciplinary canon. I argue that the biases and prejudices built into the structure of the university are still at play, and though they are subtler, they are no less insidious than before. Considering this structure is important for academic librarians who often work as liaisons for departments that each have internal and external structures and politics to navigate while working to provide the best possible service to faculty and students.

From the Introduction: (I)nstitutions of higher learning are being transformed by the discourses of economic rationalism and the marketplace so that many practitioners are discovering first-hand how readily Women's Studies programs become vulnerable to arguments made against maintaining allegedly "useless" and "non-vocational" areas of study (see Griffin 1998, Kessler-Harris and Swerdlow 1996). The reconfiguration of higher education within a broadly consumerist logic and growing rates of unemployment and underemployment among university graduates in many western societies also mean that not just administrators, but students (and their families) are now inquiring into the vocational relevance and the long-term "rewards" of specific teaching programs (see Skeggs 1995). Indeed, given these shifts in educational, fiscal, and political priorities, we suggest it may become increasingly difficult for teachers and researchers, especially those in public institutions, to continue fostering Women's Studies programs and their students in the absence of clear understandings of students' vocational aspirations, their post-graduation experiences, and the changing environment in which important educational and vocational decisions are being negotiated. Beyond the immediate career and vocational context, such considerations also offer significant opportunities for reflecting on the connections between our professed teaching and learning objectives and our students' needs, desires and aspirations, as well as opportunities for learning more about what brings students into our classrooms and the visions they have for their lives beyond graduation. In what follows, we discuss some interim findings of on-going research conducted among enrolled Women's Studies students and among prospective employers.

Women's Studies is first introduced in Indian academia in the 1970s. There are now more than 150 centres conducting research on women and gender as well as numerous teaching programmes on these topics in India. Research on sexualities and non-heterosexual identities and practices, while less developed, also emerged in the 1990s. As in any academic field, research on Women's Studies, gender, and sexuality has been marked by epistemic debates, in particular "terminology debates" (i.e., debates about the proper concepts for discussing gender and sexuality in India). Using a corpus of academic texts, course syllabi, and other academic documents as well as 15 interviews with academics involved in Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and/or research on sexuality in India, this article examines two of these terminology debates. The first concerns the use of the term "Gender Studies" rather than "Women's Studies", and the second looks at the relevance of terms such as LGBT and queer to designate non-heterosexual individuals, groups, and practices. In both debates the question of North/South domination and (post)colonialism are central and are also connected to issues of gender, class, and caste domination. Moreover, both debates question the link between academia and feminist/LGBT/queer activism. This article shows that the process of defining the subject of academic knowledge is highly political and embedded in complex power dynamics that are both localized and globalized. It also highlights the epistemic creativity of the knowledge produced in India to discuss women, gender, and non-heterosexuality.

International audience ; Women's Studies is first introduced in Indian academia in the 1970s. There are now more than 150 centres conducting research on women and gender as well as numerous teaching programmes on these topics in India. Research on sexualities and non-heterosexual identities and practices, while less developed, also emerged in the 1990s. As in any academic field, research on Women's Studies, gender, and sexuality has been marked by epistemic debates, in particular "terminology debates" (i.e., debates about the proper concepts for discussing gender and sexuality in India). Using a corpus of academic texts, course syllabi, and other academic documents as well as 15 interviews with academics involved in Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and/or research on sexuality in India, this article examines two of these terminology debates. The first concerns the use of the term "Gender Studies" rather than "Women's Studies", and the second looks at the relevance of terms such as LGBT and queer to designate non-heterosexual individuals, groups, and practices. In both debates the question of North/South domination and (post)colonialism are central and are also connected to issues of gender, class, and caste domination. Moreover, both debates question the link between academia and feminist/LGBT/queer activism. This article shows that the process of defining the subject of academic knowledge is highly political and embedded in complex power dynamics that are both localized and globalized. It also highlights the epistemic creativity of the knowledge produced in India to discuss women, gender, and non-heterosexuality.

Institutionalisation of Women's Studies (WS) in India although started in the 1970s, it took a decade further to cross the threshold of Northeastern States. The isolation which the Northeast of India has always faced in the social, economic and political spheres was also reflected in the case of establishment of the Women's Studies Centres as the then Vice Chancellor Dr. Deba Prasad Barooah had to struggle against the University Grants Commission for establishing it in Gauhati University. Again, the narrative of WSRC, GU do not find mention in the book Narratives from Women's Studies Family: Recreating Knowledge where experiences of 17 centres from across the country are illustrated. This paper investigates all such structural difficulties, negligence and struggle faced by one of the first Women's Studies Centre of Northeast India, established in Gauhati University (GU), since its conceptualisation to inception in 1989 till the present. It attempts in revealing the experiences of the Directors, yielding the efforts behind the setting up of the centre, the role played by different individuals both internal and external of the University towards the establishment of the Centre, the catalysts that prevented the premature decay of the Centre and most importantly the struggle for space, identity and recognition the constraints faced to obtain them. To achieve these goals oral history method was applied to explore the experiences of the previous directors and the author (2nd author) herself. The narratives illustrate the history of struggles, challenges and the subsequent development over a span of more than twenty five years. The paper documents the support the University provided despite being a patriarchal institution for fostering of the WSRC, which in gradual years took steps to produce the Department of Women's Studies. It will also look into the progressive role Women's Studies played not only in the varsity internally but also at the external front through research and advocacy by inducing new panoramic view towards and discussion of women's issues in a multidimensional framework.