Brown, Wendy (2006), ‘The Impossibility of Women’s Studies’, Edgework: Critical Essays on
Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 116-135
Women's studies was constantly questioned, critiqued and harangued as a course that churned out students who weren't really well-versed in any one area.
Brown and her colleagues were not scholars of the areas of study that the undergraduate students were looking to learn about.
"Almost all women's studies programs rely on faculty and curricular offerings in other departments, both because they are too small to do otherwise and because of the proud interdisciplinary undergirding the intellectual project of women's studies." p.84
"when peered at closely, the definitions of all disciplines wobble, their identities mutate, their rules and regulations appear contingent and contestable." p.85
"grasping subject construction for different forms of social subjection (class, race, etc) requires distinctive models of power, yet subject construction itself does not unfold according to any one of these models precisely because we are always more than one, even if we participate in the norms of some and the deviations of others." p.87
"the gendered subject emerges through a regulatory scheme of gender - we are literally brought into being as gendered subjects through gender regulation." p.87
"The forms of power that produce gender or class are themselves saturated with that production - they do not precede it." p.87
"Power is conceived as something held by particular individuals or groups, and this commodity status gives it independence from the bearer of it and the subject of power. It is this (mis)conception of power that allows various forms of oppression to be spoken of in additive and interchangeable terms." p.88
"clearly women need the "rights of man" in order to establish their place in humanity, yet, as countless feminist theorists have also pointed out, these same rights not only fail to address but will also mask many of the substantive ways in which women's subordination operates." p.89
Marx argued that "collectivization of the means of production was exactly such a condition for the working class, but even this possible parallel breaks down when the importance of collective ownership and control for workers is contrasted with women's need for individual control over their reproductive bodies." p.90
"Like rights themselves, depending upon the function of privacy in the powers that make and position the subject, and depending upon the particular dimension of marked identity that is at issue, privacy will sometimes be regarded as advancing emancipatory aims, sometimes deterring them; in some cases it will be seen to cloak the operation of inequality, while in others it will be seen as assisting in the elaboration of equality doctrine." p.90
"formations of socially marked subjects occur in radically different modalities, which themselves contain different histories and technologies, touch different surfaces and depths, form different bodies and psyches. This is why it is so difficult for politically progressive legal reformers to work on more than one kind of marked identity at once. This is why it is nearly impossible to theorize a legal subject that is not monolithic, totalized by one identity category, and cast as identical with other subjects in that category." p.92
"Power is not seen as producing the subject, but only as privileging or oppressing it." p.94
"There is an unimpeachable importance to the last two decades of developing scholarship, of feminist teaching across the university, and of feminist influences on administrations, all of which were incited by struggles centres on developing women's studies programs." p.96
http://www.sfu.ca/~decaste/OISE/page2/files/Brown-ImpossibilityofWS.pdf
Women's studies was constantly questioned, critiqued and harangued as a course that churned out students who weren't really well-versed in any one area.
Brown and her colleagues were not scholars of the areas of study that the undergraduate students were looking to learn about.
"Almost all women's studies programs rely on faculty and curricular offerings in other departments, both because they are too small to do otherwise and because of the proud interdisciplinary undergirding the intellectual project of women's studies." p.84
"when peered at closely, the definitions of all disciplines wobble, their identities mutate, their rules and regulations appear contingent and contestable." p.85
"grasping subject construction for different forms of social subjection (class, race, etc) requires distinctive models of power, yet subject construction itself does not unfold according to any one of these models precisely because we are always more than one, even if we participate in the norms of some and the deviations of others." p.87
"the gendered subject emerges through a regulatory scheme of gender - we are literally brought into being as gendered subjects through gender regulation." p.87
"The forms of power that produce gender or class are themselves saturated with that production - they do not precede it." p.87
"Power is conceived as something held by particular individuals or groups, and this commodity status gives it independence from the bearer of it and the subject of power. It is this (mis)conception of power that allows various forms of oppression to be spoken of in additive and interchangeable terms." p.88
"clearly women need the "rights of man" in order to establish their place in humanity, yet, as countless feminist theorists have also pointed out, these same rights not only fail to address but will also mask many of the substantive ways in which women's subordination operates." p.89
Marx argued that "collectivization of the means of production was exactly such a condition for the working class, but even this possible parallel breaks down when the importance of collective ownership and control for workers is contrasted with women's need for individual control over their reproductive bodies." p.90
"Like rights themselves, depending upon the function of privacy in the powers that make and position the subject, and depending upon the particular dimension of marked identity that is at issue, privacy will sometimes be regarded as advancing emancipatory aims, sometimes deterring them; in some cases it will be seen to cloak the operation of inequality, while in others it will be seen as assisting in the elaboration of equality doctrine." p.90
"formations of socially marked subjects occur in radically different modalities, which themselves contain different histories and technologies, touch different surfaces and depths, form different bodies and psyches. This is why it is so difficult for politically progressive legal reformers to work on more than one kind of marked identity at once. This is why it is nearly impossible to theorize a legal subject that is not monolithic, totalized by one identity category, and cast as identical with other subjects in that category." p.92
"Power is not seen as producing the subject, but only as privileging or oppressing it." p.94
"There is an unimpeachable importance to the last two decades of developing scholarship, of feminist teaching across the university, and of feminist influences on administrations, all of which were incited by struggles centres on developing women's studies programs." p.96
http://www.sfu.ca/~decaste/OISE/page2/files/Brown-ImpossibilityofWS.pdf
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