Column on Women’s Studies Simple-Minded

To the editors:

I am concerned by Travis R. Kavulla’s grossly generalized and unnuanced mischaracterization of the scholarly pursuits and academic interests that Women’s Studies encourages (Column, “Studying Women’s Studies,” Nov, 25). That the work pursued by women’s studies concentrators “fits into other disciplines” does not undermine the academic necessity or significance of women’s studies. Rather, it suggests that disciplinary borders are often constructed and reveals the need for increased fluidity across disciplinary lines rather than the more conventional discipline policing that fixed subject lines encourage.

Kavulla’s critique of the committee’s foundation courses is also without merit as he neglected to fully investigate the fact that students are engaged in grappling with the tensions that have been a part of feminist theory since its inception. Students are constantly examining the core questions that underpin feminist theory: how to define feminism, how to construct a theory and a praxis that is meaningfully inclusive, how to describe the subject of feminism, how to examine an array of areas of feminist inquiry (including motherhood, marriage and sexuality) and how to engage with the state to further feminist goals. Kavulla paints a picture of unintellectual “groupthink” without fully investigating the complex questions that undergird the discipline.

While Kavulla claims that women’s studies promotes a “tunnel vision” where students are encouraged to engage in ”feminist thought first,” the very notion of what constitutes “feminist thought” is problematized, interrogated and critiqued as part of the central project of women’s studies. This is not unlike the work that occurs in any other department. That is, history concentrators study history as they also grapple with what constitutes history, who crafts history, what methods are used to collect history, etc. Under Kavulla’s logic, the work that is occurring in any discipline is necessarily “tunnel visioned” by virtue of the fact that we read the core texts of our discipline before problematizing those texts and putting them into dialogue with the work occurring in other disciplines. That is, women’s studies does have a focus on women and gender as history has a focus on the historical (this hardly seems a potent critique). This does not render the work in the field uncomplex, unnuanced or unacademic. At its core, Kavulla’s critique seems to be that the work in women’s studies is somehow biased or unintellectual because of its focus on gender. Kavulla omits an analysis of the ways in which all approaches have agendas, all analytical lenses serve to foreground particular ideas, and all professors advance arguments which are, in some way, politicized. That particular knowledge is somehow neutral or objective and other knowledge is political or biased is simply a fallacy.

Women’s studies concentrators are required to engage in the project of theoretical and political positionality and to grapple with complex questions surrounding identity, subject position, intersections of social hierarchies, feminist methodology, etc. That Kavulla failed to represent any of this in his simplified caricature of women’s studies is a disservice to members of the community who have not yet taken a course in women’s studies and who take Kavulla’s representation to have merit.

Jennifer C. Nash ’01

Nov. 25, 2003

The writer, a third-year student at Harvard Law School, is a former women’s studies concentrator and a current teaching fellow for the Committee on Degrees in Women’s Studies.