1st Edition
Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies Volume 2
The second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies addresses the complexities and inherent paradoxes within the expansive knowledge project known as Women’s and Gender Studies for audiences both inside and adjacent to the field. Each of the volume’s chapters identifies and critically examines a key term that circulates in this field, exploring how the term has come to be understood and mobilized within its everyday narratives and practices.
In constructing provocative genealogies for their terms, authors explicate the roles that this language, and the narratives attached to it, play in producing and limiting possible versions of the field. The ongoing aim of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, both in the original volume and this entirely new extension, is to trace and expose important paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the field – from its high theory to its casual conversations – that rely on these terms. Forging collective conversation and intellectual community from its thoughtful and critical lines of inquiry, the second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies remains bracingly original and full of fresh insight. It provides a perfect complement for Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses offered in Women’s and Gender Studies and related fields.
Introduction: Why Rethink Women’s and Gender Studies Now?
Ann Braithwaite and Catherine M. Orr
Section 1: Foundational Assumptions
Chapter 1: Indigenous Feminism
Ashley Glassburn
Chapter 2: Femininity
M. Nicole Horsley
Chapter 3: Citizenship
Amy Brandzel
Chapter 4: Inclusion
Ahalya Satkunaratnam
Chapter 5: Intersex
David Rubin
Chapter 6: Expertise
Heidi R. Lewis
Section 2: Ubiquitous Descriptions
Chapter 7: Belonging
Katherine Side
Chapter 8: The Ph.D.
Jennifer Musial, Leslie Kern, and Sonja Thomas
Chapter 9: Nation
Debjani Chakravarty
Chapter 10: Women
Heather Hewett and Meg Devlin
Chapter 11: Innocence
Erica Meiners and Jessi Lee Jackson
Section 3: Epistemologies Rethought
Chapter 12: Genealogy
Michael Eng
Chapter 13: Generation
Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Chapter 14: Critical
Agatha Beins
Chapter 15: Choice
Erika Derkas
Chapter 16: Self-Care
Wei Si Nic Yiu
Chapter 17: Consent
Elizabeth Groeneveld and Carrie Rentschler
Section 4: Silences and Disavowals
Chapter 18: Settler Colonialism
Beenash Jafri
Chapter 19: Asexuality
Ela Przybyło
Chapter 20: Cis
Megan Nanney
Chapter 21: Disability
Susan G. Cumings
Chapter 22: Nonhuman Animals
Jennifer A. Venable
Section 5: Establishment Challenges
Chapter 23: Humanitarian
Danielle Bouchard
Chapter 24: Sexual Violence
Amber Dean
Chapter 25: The Gaze
Kimberly Lamm
Chapter 26: Transdisciplinarity
Shannon Moore
Chapter 27: Transformation
Sal Renshaw and Renée Valiquette
Chapter 28: Branding
Karlyn Crowley
Conclusion: Continuing the Conversation
Catherine M. Orr and Ann Braithwaite
Works cited
Index
Biography
Catherine M. Orr, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita in Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College, where she worked for 22 years. She is co-editor of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies (Routledge 2012), co-author of Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies (Routledge 2017), and has published in Souls, Atlantis, Feminist Studies, NWSA Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Hypatia. She served as Conference Chair (2006-08) and Conference Co-Chair (2012-14) in the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and held a number of leadership positions on the organization’s General Council. Her scholarship, teaching, and professional development have always been about interrogating the contradictions of cultural and institutional histories, especially those in which she feels deeply implicated. She now works as a DEI consultant, serves on the board of Urban Triage in Madison, Wisconsin, and has become a passionate mixed-media artist who translates complexities about whiteness and its histories of violence to new audiences.
Ann Braithwaite, Ph.D., is Professor and Coordinator of Diversity and Social Justice Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. The co-author or co-editor of three books (Troubling Women’s Studies, Sumach Press / CPSI 2005; Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, Routledge 2012; Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies: Introductory Concepts, Routledge 2017), Dr. Braithwaite’s scholarly work examines the ways in which disciplines reflect a set of embedded ways of knowing, asking how these citational practices shape any field and elaborating on how attending to those questions matters. Both at UPEI and beyond, her passion is to engage others in exploring how to bring questions of inclusion and justice to the classroom and to curricular programming. She is the recipient of numerous teaching, educational leadership, and service awards at UPEI, including the 2014 AAU Anne Marie MacKinnon Educational Leadership award, and is a 2021 STLHE / SAPES 3M National Teaching Fellow.
Like Braithwaite and Orr’s first Rethinking project, this collection is a valuable resource for anyone interested in feminist studies and its ongoing academic transformations. Contributions both introduce and defamiliarize WGS keywords, routing them through diverse genealogies to activate new theoretical and political possibilities. This collection undertakes another round of “rethinking” that risks undoing what we think we know about Women and Gender Studies as an academic formation. A must-read for teachers and students alike.
S.Trimble, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream WGSI, University of Toronto
Not a recasting of its predecessor, Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies Volume II expands on the critical vision, personal stakes, and political calculus that inhabits the field, with broad implications for doing feminist work in an increasingly authoritarian global present. Diverse, insightful, and affectively powerful, the original essays gathered here demonstrate the vitality of contemporary feminist scholarship.
Robyn Wiegman, Professor, Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University
