WOMEN'S studies or GENDER studies?

[Chris Beckwith]

I think Kenneth Allen Hyde has hit the nail on the head.  The reason I
found GALA to be an exciting idea is that--I thought--it was going to be
devoted to the study of gender and language. Since I've been working in a
linguistically-centered subfield of this field for some years, but have
never found a really appropriate outlet for my work, it seemed to me that
GALA and its proposed journal would be a good idea.  If it is going to
be just another one-sided, agenda-dominated organization, why bother?
Those who would like an organization and journal open to a diversity of
views and approaches would just have to start a GALA II.  Why not do it
right the first time?  As I said before, there is no danger that the
organization will be taken over by avowed misogynists--the organizing
committee and the great majority of those participating in the debate are
after all women, mostly admitted feminists--and the identifiable men who
have written in all seem to be "feminists" too.  (In fact, there seems to
be more than a little misanthropy lurking in some of the comments; maybe
partly because this is a group interested in gender and language?)  It
would seem that the ONLY reason to openly declare GALA to be a
"(pro-)feminist" organization, and the journal-to-be an avowedly
"feminist" publication would be to exclude, or at least warn away, anyone
who does not adhere to a "feminist" point of view or is working on some
area of gender and language that is only marginally of interest to
"feminist" scholars.  Kenneth's remarks bring up another aspect of all
this that should not be ignored:   Although declaring this to be a
"(pro)feminist organization & journal would not necessarily mean
that all male scholars would necessarily feel excluded, it's a good bet
that most would, no matter how strong their sympathies are for feminist
causes in general.  Think about it:  How many women would feel welcomed to
contribute to a journal of Gender and Language studies that openly
proclaims itself to be "masculinist" AND is edited by an overwhelmingly or
exclusively male board AND is published by an overwhelmingly or
exclusively male organization?  It does not seem possible to have "gender"
without at least two of them, which means it is necessary to study both
(or all) of them from as many perspectives as seem useful, no?  We often
say it is difficult to see the forest for the trees, but it is worth
noting, while we're in the woods, that there are many kinds of trees in a
forest.

Okay, now I'm sure I'll get flamed again...

Chris


On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Kenneth Allen Hyde wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Alice Freed wrote:
>
> > This approach admittedly abandons the worthy ideal of having everyone
> > participate in getting the organization started but it doesn't seem to
> > be working.
>
> Hear, hear!
>
> >      What I would like to suggest is that we/you/someone take a
> > position on the sort of organization GALA (or whatever we choose
> > to call it) will be and then see who wants to join. As they said
> > in the movie "Fields of Dreams" -- build it and they will come.
>
> Actually, given the discussion so far, it shouldn't be that hard to come
> up with a fairly coherent blueprint for an organization which everyone can
> be happy about.
>
> As I see it, the only thing that has really been a major bone of
> contention (if such it can be termed) has been the issue of whether to
> make this organization a "feminist" one as a matter of policy.
>
> > But that doesn't mean that we can't have a feminist orientation as do
> > most women's studies organizations and journals.
>
> Okay, here's a question.  Suppose someone was working exclusively on the
> language behavior of men in homosocial contexts.  Or even masculine
> behavior in heterosocial contexts.  Clearly, this would be an example of
> Gender and Language research, but would it be "feminist"?  Would this sort
> of research be outside the pale of GALA, if we chose to make this an
> explicitly feminist organization?  This is not simply a pipe-dream
> situation, either.  Most of you will be familiar with the MBU scenario
> which was reported by Susan Herring, Deborah Johnson, and Tamra
> DiBenedetto in "Participation in Electronic Discourse in a 'Feminist'
> Field" (in 1998 _Language and Gender: A Reader_, Jennifer Coates (ed.)
> Oxford: Blackwell).  The debate that is reported and analyzed in this
> paper was started when the idea of "men's literature" was challenged
> as being innappropriate or unfeminist.  I'm not prepared to argue about
> that (although I tend to lean towards agreeing that there is something
> inherently "non-feminist" about "men's literature"--although I should add
> that I don't think that "non-feminist" means "bad").  However, it seems
> that many people are.  My one real worry, which I have stated before (and
> many of you are probably sick of hearing *grin*) is that by making GALA a
> "feminist" organization, we either open ourselves even more to these sort
> of divisive debates, or we artificially preempt them by excluding any
> masculine-focused research.  At which point, we are no longer an
> organization for research about "gender" and language, we are an
> organization for research about women and language.
>
> >      For me, "feminist" means something related to both theory
> > and practice. The theoretical: the pursuit and creation of new
> > knowledge resulting from the investigation of new questions and
> > diverse experiences that have been neglected by traditional
> > scholarship because these were established according to male norms.
> > (white, heterosexist male norms.)
>
> I think that calling this "feminist" is a bit limiting.  After all,
> studying gay men and taking their experiences as valid objects of study
> certainly would fall into this definition, but it wouldn't be "feminist,"
> would it?  For that matter, studies of any marginalized group would fall
> into this definition.
>
> > The practical: This knowledge should be used to create a world in
> > which issues related to sex and gender difference are minimized
> > (eliminated?) and equal opportunities and possibilities exist for
> > everyone. (How could anyone disagree with this?!)
>
> Well, apparently, there are some poor benighted souls who do disagree (can
> you say "fundamentalists," boys and girls?).  However, I agree that this
> is a great ideal to strive for.  And it is certainly something that I
> think this group, if it is to be worthy of it's name, should reify.
>
> Maybe I'm being essentialist (if that term can even be applied to semantic
> notions in a meaningful way), but "feminist" seems to me to center study
> on "women" or the feminine and exclude anything else from this central
> position.  It always seems, to me, to encode an out-of-balance, one-sided
> view of human experience.  "Gender Studies" on the other hand seems to
> place the focus on the system of categorization that gives us both
> traditional masculine and feminine ways of being, as well as the
> potentially vast number of other genders.  Maybe it's just a personal
> quirk of mine (okay, some people have said it's a massively annoying
> obsession of mine), but I think that the systems are generally more
> interesting than the objects.
>
> >      4. What I would most like to see beyond the sorts of things
> > outlined above is a journal that deals specifically with rigorous
> > theoretical and/or data-based work on language, sex and gender.
> > No such journal presently exists.
>
> I agree whole-heartedly.  The question that I have is whether this
> research is being done frequently enough, and on large enough a scale to
> support a journal?  Although, I suppose, if we have the journal, it might
> encourage more people to do this sort of work.
>
> Kenneth Allen Hyde     |  No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife
> Univ. of Delaware      |  between the shoulder blades will seriously
> Dept. of Linguistics   |  cramp his style  -- Old Jhereg proverb
> kenny at Udel.Edu         |  A mind is a terrible toy to waste! -- Me
>
> //www.ling.udel.edu/hyde/prof/ken.html
>