Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still be Feminists?
Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still be Feminists?

Author: Joan D. Mandle

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0826262228

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Annotation When Joan Mandle accepted the position of Director of Women's Studies at Colgate University, she had specific goals in mind - to make the program stronger, more academically rigorous, and publicly open. The program would resist becoming the captive of identity politics and would refuse to allow itself to become marginalized on the campus. It would reach beyond the negative stereotypes of feminism on campus by appealing to and challenging all students and faculty interested in gender issues and social change. Just as Mandle anticipated, she faced obstacles during the transformation. Among her critics were feminist students and faculty whose views of a successful program directly contradicted Mandle's. While the new director called for outreach, they insisted on isolation. While she set forth a policy of inclusiveness, they sought to maintain an exclusive community. These individuals preferred the former model of the women's studies program, despite its tendency toward separatism. Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists?explores women's studies from Mandle's perspective as a program director, feminist activist, and scholar. She offers a vivid account of being forced to grapple with fundamental issues of what women's studies is and should be. Her strong commitment to feminism and women's studies does not prevent her from voicing her concerns; instead, it compells her to share the story of her directorship in hopes of shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and triumphs of women's studies as an academic discipline. Through her examination of the battles involved in creating an academically significant and ideologically open program, Mandle provides insight into a possible avenue of change for feminism. By showing how the program at Colgate University was able to encourage campuswide discussions on feminism, Mandle demonstrates that women's studies can succeed as an inclusive and rigorous field. This enlightening memoir provides readers with a window on important debates concerning feminism and women in academia.

Fractured Feminisms
Fractured Feminisms

Author: Laura Gray-Rosendale

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0791486494

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This advanced analysis of gender issues in higher education represents a significant new turn in feminist thinking. Fractured Feminisms resists and reshapes boundaries by investigating how gender studies' intersection with race and ethnicity, class, postcoloniality, sexuality, globalization, interdisciplinarity, technology studies, and administration exposes the "silenced other" of feminisms themselves. These crucial conversations about feminisms depend upon facing the perplexing rhetorical problems within feminist debates, yet work within these fractures to discover newly emerging, productive feminist practices. This book contends that it's important to better understand the ways in which feminist rhetorics both empower and constrain and the kinds of identities feminisms afford as well as deny.

Professing Feminism
Professing Feminism

Author: Daphne Patai

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2003-02-04

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0739159631

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Feminists have often called Women's Studies the 'academic arm of the women's movement.' But Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge charge that the attempt to make Women's Studies serve a political agenda has led to deeply problematic results: dubious scholarship, pedagogical practices that resemble indoctrination more than education, and the alienation of countless potential supporters. In this new and expanded edition of their controversial 1994 book, the authors update their analysis of what's gone wrong with Women's Studies programs. Original chapters feature interviews with professors, students, and staffers who invested much time and effort in Women's Studies, and new chapters look primarily at documents recently generated from within Women's Studies itself. Through critiques of actual program mission statements, course descriptions, newsletters, and e-mail lists devoted to feminist pedagogy and Women's Studies, and, not least, the writings of well-known feminist scholars, Patai and Koertge provide a detailed and devastating examination of the routine practices found in feminist teaching and research.

Troubling Women's Studies
Troubling Women's Studies

Author: Ann Braithwaite

Publisher: Canadian Scholars’ Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1894549368

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The four essays in this collection present a multifaceted conversation about what is at stake in passing on the institutionalised project of Women's Studies at this historic moment. The authors come to this conversation from a diversity of histories, commitments and investments in Women's Studies. Framed by the argument that Women's Studies is a project fraught with uncertainty, the authors explore one might respond to it - intellectually, emotionally, politically, institutionally and pedagogically.

Who's Afraid of Women's Studies?
Who's Afraid of Women's Studies?

Author: Mary Frances Rogers

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780759101746

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A highly accessible overview of the central themes of women's studies, suitable for introductory reading in undergraduate courses or for a more general audience's introduction to the meaning of feminism and its relevance as a progressive force in society. The authors tackle six broad topics that dominate the field and are key to understanding women's experiences and prospects: women's bodies, anger & desires, sexuality, internal backlash, feminist methods, & identity politics. The authors consider why there is a resistance to the development of American feminism and women's studies in the academy, with their continuing representation of marginalized, excluded, and silenced voices.

Encyclopedia of Social Theory
Encyclopedia of Social Theory

Author: George Ritzer

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2004-08-11

Total Pages: 1053

ISBN-13: 1452265461

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Click ′Additional Materials′ for downloadable samples The Encyclopedia of Social Theory is an indispensable reference source for anyone interested in the roots of contemporary social theory. It examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, presenting them in the context needed to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Theories covered include • Critical Theory • Enlightenment • Ethnomethodology • Exchange Theory • Feminism • Marxist Theory • Multiculturalism • Phenomenology • Postmodernism • Rational Choice • Structural Fundamentalism Led by internationally renowned scholar George Ritzer, the Encyclopedia of Social Theory draws together a team of more than 200 international scholars covering the developments, achievements, and prospects of social theory from its inception in the 18th century to the present. Understanding that social theory can both explain and alter the social world, this two-volume set serves as not only a foundation for learning, but also an inspiration for creative and reflexive engagement with the rich range of ideas it contains. Key Themes • American Social Theory • British Social Theory • Comparative and Historical Theory • Cultural Theory • Economic Sociology • Feminist Theory • French Social Theory • German Social Theory • Macrosociological Theories • Marxist and Neo-Marxist Approaches • Method and Metatheory • Network and Exchange Theories • Other/Multiple National Traditions • Politics and Government • Postmodern Theory • Psychoanalytic Theory • Schools and Theoretical Approaches • Symbolic Interaction and Microsociology • Theorists • Topics and Concepts in Social Theory Key Features • More than 300 entries from fourteen countries • Master Bibliography • Reader′s Guide • Extensive biographical coverage of major theorists • Extensive cross-referencing

What Price Utopia?
What Price Utopia?

Author: Daphne Patai

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780742522268

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This volume brings together for the first time more than two dozen of Daphne PataiOs incisive and at times satirical essays dealing with the academic and intellectual orthodoxies of our time. Patai draws on her years of experience in an increasingly bizarre academic world, where a stifling politicization threatens genuine teaching and learning. Addressing the rise of feminist dogma, the domination of politics over knowledge, the shoddy thinking and moralizing that hide behind identity politics, and the degradation of scholarship, her essays offer a resounding defense of liberal values. Patai takes aim at the unctuous and also dangerous posturing that has brought us restrictive speech codes, harassment policies, and a vigilante atmosphere, while suppressing plain speaking about crucial issues. But these trenchant essays are not limited to academic life, for the ideas and practices popularized there have spread far beyond campus borders. Included are two new pieces written especially for this volume, one on the bullying tactics of a famous feminist and the other on Islamic fundamentalism.

Acting Otherwise
Acting Otherwise

Author: Peiying Chen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-04

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 113593438X

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Acting Otherwise concerns the strategies of action that have been used by feminist scholars to attain the institutionalization of women's/gender studies in universities.

Domestic Subversive
Domestic Subversive

Author: Salper, Roberta

Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press

Published: 2015-03-12

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1681140403

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Domestic Subversive: A Feminist’s Take on the Left 1960-1976 is an intimate, riveting memoir about the making of a political radical during the upheaval of the 1960s. It is both a personal journey and an inside look at political movements that changed the world. We see Salper first in fascist Spain, next in the heart of the New Left, the early Women’s Liberation Movement, and the founding of Women’s Studies. Finally she is engaged in third world liberation struggles in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chile and the United States. As a Harvard-educated scholar, Roberta Salper was destined for a distinguished academic career. Instead she opted for a life of risk-taking, personally as well as professionally. Salper offers a unique look at marriage and family life within Spain’s fascist dictatorship before she decides to “go it alone” and in 1974 becomes a rare example of the single professional mother. Salper’s relentless search to define herself personally and politically is propelled by having experienced anti-Semitism in American suburban life in the 1950s. She sets out to explore the multiple meanings and functions of “outsider” and “insider” within her immediate social circles and in the greater political arena. What does it mean “to belong”? Roberta Salper became one of the pioneers of a new field of study that would be known as Women’s Studies. The tools of feminism were honed in the Women’s Caucus of the New University Conference (1968 to 1972). This until now little-studied socialist organization has had an impact on higher education that continues to be felt to this day. In 1970, she was the first full time faculty appointment in Women’s Studies in the first full-fledged Women’s Studies Department in the nation at San Diego State College (now University). Salper was part of the first generation of Second Wave feminists to recognize that, as educated women, their time had come. Doors were opening and they moved to take advantage of the moment.