All quoted material from “Passion and Politics in Women’s Studies
in the Nineties.” Renate D. Klein. In Sheila Ruth, ed. “Issues
In Feminism,” pp. 37-44.
Sheila
Ruth’s introductory essay on Women’s Studies would be a
hard act to follow, but Ruth finds someone who she can feel comfortable
with — Renate D. Klein, a professor at Deakin University in Australia.
Klein is concerned with moving Women’s
Studies forward in the 1990s. As she puts it,
Passion and politics, in interaction with a politics of curiosity and
a politics of responsibility, are magic ingredients in the creation
and distribution of the sort of feminist knowledge/vision that has the
potential to move Women’s Studies (WS) — and its participants
with it — “out of the margins” in the 1990s and beyond (Klein
37).
Klein traces the history of the
Women’s Studies programs to the “Women’s Liberation Movement”
in the late sixties and early seventies. According to Klein, Women’s
Studies was intended as the educational arm of that movement.
Above all, WS [Women’s Studies] is an active force: women
are both (and often simultaneously) subject and object of the knowledge
generated and transmitted, thus creating a dynamic interaction
exemplary of the WS movement per se (Klein 38).
For her doctoral dissertation, Klein
surveyed 158 Women’s Studies professors (“practitioners”
in Women’s Studies jargon). She reports the professors were ideologically
diverse though racially homogenous — as she puts it, Women’s Studies
suffers from “white dominance” (Klein 39).
Klein then goes on to subdivide
feminists scholarship into three separate categories/stages. First up
is “reaction, re-vision.” This involves assessing women “in
relation to the pervasive masculinism in existing scholarship: it is a
critique of androcentricity and focuses on absence and distortion of women
from the non-feminist structure of knowledge” (Klein 39). Note that
masculinism is not a hypothesis to be tested but an assumption to be made
about all areas of knowledge. By definition if it exists within
the framework of the traditional university, it is “masculinist.”
The second branch of feminist research
is “action, vision: assessing women with a gynocentric world view.”
This involves the interdisciplinary aspect of Women’s Studies which
feminists always talk up. This aspect leads to a transformation, “The
androcentric framework ceases to be the point of reference: what happens
is a paradigmatic shift, creating new theories and methodologies for teaching
and research” (Klein 40).
Finally, there is the last and,
to Klein, the most ambitious form of Women’s Studies scholarship,
“revision/vision, re-action/action combined.” This “conceptualizes
WS research and curriculum as synthesizing revision and vision i.e., as
both critiquing androcentric scholarship as well as making an “imaginative
leap” towards the creation of knowledge (vision, action)” (CITE).
These three processes could be
restated far simpler. First, a political objective is identified. Second,
a new political theory is created. Third, a new political action plan
is issued. As we saw with Ruth’s essay, what this involves is the
wholesale rejection of traditional notions of truth and even attempts
at any sort of objectivity.
In fact endeavoring to be objective
and forgetting to engage in overtly political acts can be a detriment
for the Women’s Study professor. In a footnote, Klein comments on
the perceptions students have of such professors,
The lesser involvement of WS teachers in feminist activism created
a considerable amount of tension for many WS students in my study.
They were disappointed that in some cases the teachers’ feminism
remained aloof and removed from women’s “real lifes”,
in particular with regard to the various forms of violence against
women and feminist resistance against it in the form of anti-pornography
campaigns or shelters for battered women. (Klein 43).
What these students apparently complained to Klein about is also what
Ruth described in her opening essay as a pitfall of Women’s Studies
— that feminists may turn away from political activism in favor of scholarly
undertakings. Ruth’s response, as well as Klein’s, seems to
be to forestall this by overtly politicizing academia.
For Klein, like Ruth, the solution
is a variation of consciousness-raising. The stodgy old ideas of doing
scholarship aren’t nearly as exciting as direct political action
in the classroom. Ruth describes the role of this sort of activity.
Needless to say, WS classrooms often bristle not only with the dynamics
of intellectual excitement, but also with emotional energy. WS courses
challenge participants to critically evaluate all knowledge and draw
conclusions that often necessitate changes in our political/personal
lives. (Klein 39).
Specific political issues the Women’s Studies “gynagogy”
must deal with include,
… the problems of cross-cultural similarity and diversity; white
dominance; heterosexism; the relationship between WS and the Women’s
Liberation Movement; the hidden curriculum (e.g., hierarchies, power
differences, grading); men in WS. (Klein 44).
An area Klein is especially concerned about is the growth of women’s
studies programs across the world. Klein makes several claims about the
condition of women worldwide which she never bothers to back up.
While WS may be getting stronger and stronger globally, and more
diversified, the feminization of poverty and women’s illiteracy
are increasing worldwide. Sheer survival is getting tougher: women’s
nutrition, and consequently women’s and children’s health
is worsening, and male violence against women, be it incest, sexual
harassment, date rape, rape in and outside marriage, criminal assault
at the home, pornography and prostitution — and with the latest toy
of technopatriarchy, the crimes of gene and reproductive technology
— are all increasing (Klein 41).
It’s difficult to make a point by point rebuttal of Klein’s
claims since she simply asserts them, but a few such as the claim about
women and children’s nutrition is clearly false based on data from
the United Nations and the Food and Agricultural Organization.
But the real problem on the horizon
for Women’s Studies is the rise of something called Gender Studies.
The problem with gender studies is that “gender is such a neutral
term” (Klein 41) that even a man can do it. Gender Studies insists
on “studying women and men in relation to one another: a much narrower
aim than WS’ claim to study the whole world from a feminist perspective”
(Klein 41).
In other words, two competing political
ideologies disguised as legitimate academic exercise thrashing it out
for supremacy. Yawn!
What is interesting about Klein’s
critique of Gender Studies is that its advocates seem to emphasize something
that strikes fear in the heart of feminists — exploration of differences
between men and women. Apparently this “difference” virus is
catching on faster than feminists can react. Klein complains that “theories
of sexualities, especially lesbian sexuality, are now celebrating eroticized
power differences among women and ridiculing sexual relations based on
equality” (Klein 41). She quotes from a researcher Diane Hamer who
dares praise this sort of change (Klein 41).
The focus on difference leads to the ultimate
feminist heterodoxy — discussion of individuals rather than the collective.
“There is much talk about ‘individual pleasure’ promoted
under the guise of ‘choice.’ Political thought and action is
‘out,’ ‘in’ is a libertarian ideology that fosters
individualism and is centered around ‘difference’.” (Klein
41)
The barbarians are at the gates unleashing
the individualistic hordes! Somebody man (er, people) the walls.
It’s getting so bad that some “sexual
liberals” are even coming out pro-pornography, which only
… defuses the inherent women-hating nature of patriarchal power and
one of its cornerstones, pornography, in the making of which real
live women are hurt, indeed sometimes killed. The students’ sense
of dignity and their/our embodied ‘right’ to integrity of
body and soul may be destabilized and numbed: the beginning of another
generation of woman-hating ideologies with a tyranny of tolerance
— anything goes as long as somebody ‘desires’ it — at
the expense of their own freedom? (Klein 42).
Jean Jacques-Rosseau, that great forefather of both fascist and democratic
ideologies, famously wrote that some people simply had to be forced to
be free. With a flourish about the “tyranny of tolerance” and
criticizing some women for having the gall to seek their own pleasure
and desires, Klein walks in Rousseau’s footsteps.
But Klein goes further. She sneaks in
genetic engineering and other reproductive technologies, deconstructionism
and sees a new zeitgeist that threatens the entire Women’s
Studies project.
… [it] is a serious threat to everything that is connect, that is interactive
and whole, that wants and insists on continuities and commonalties
— which are, in fact some of the cherished values of feminism and
WS. Instead, the cutters with words and knives prefer difference.
This not only splits women into non-entities, thereby seriously damaging
a woman’s sense of self and sense of identity; it also splits
women from each other; one of patriarchy’s best tools to keep
women from forming a join resistance movement (Klein 42).
Like some strange version of the collectivist Borg aliens from Star
Trek, any interruption of the feminist hive mind apparently threatens
the destruction of women everywhere.
Klein has a solution — make Women’s
Studies even more political. Women’s Studies professors and
students should be,
Recognizing how the increasingly cruel global technology machine
is numbing us, swallowing us, killing some of us. Resisting such necrophilic
politics with passion, with alliances among women around the globe.
Working together if this is what all want, or respecting our different
priorities by supporting one another’s actions, if this is preferred.
(Klein 43).
The solution is to ignore differences and emphasize similarities.
Looking for commonalties instead of differences: it is bonds, not
divisions, which will make us powerful. For women to disown another,
I think is suicidal politics. (Klein 43).
Instead women should be feminist lemmings in their attempts to “acting
with truly radical, passionate politics will contribute to real
change for the better in the lives of real women globally, which
is, after all, what WS set out to do” (CITE).
A related problem preventing the
unity in Women’s Studies that Klein wants to see is the presence
of men in the classroom. Like Ruth, Klein generally sees men’s presence
in Women’s Studies courses as a wholly negative phenomenon, but for
reasons which would likely be celebrated in any other part of the university.
… they (men) usually manage to attract undue attention, divide
the women on the course and, importantly, change the climate from
one where female students take risks in speaking out to a hetero-relationally
controlled atmosphere. (Klein 44).
This feminist fear of dissent is itself indicative of a weakness of the
entire Women’s Studies edifice. Apparently a few men in a few classes
can disrupt the whole project.
As the reader will see in examining the
essays in Ruth’s book, this fear of dissent is well warranted —
much of what passes under the banner of Women’s Studies doesn’t
stand up under even the most cursory scrutiny. But this is a problem with
Women’s Studies practitioners and authors, not the people in the
classes who notice the factual errors, logical fallacies and inconsistencies.