Comment on this article
Beyond Women’s Studies
A name change and a reorganization of the 20-year-old women’s studies program reflect the evolution of a discipline born of the politics of feminism. Now, women’s and gender studies is asking broader questions about what we mean when we say “man” and “woman.”
December 1998
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Next month, sociology professor Joshua Gamson will make Yale history. In an era marked at Yale and around the world by “first women” (as in “first woman astronaut,” “first woman attorney general,” or “first woman provost”), Gamson will become the first man to chair Yale College’s women’s and gender studies program. While Gamson’s appointment itself is far from earth-shaking—it is a one-term acting position—it is an apt symbol of the evolution of what was until this year called “women’s studies.” As a gay man, Gamson represents the expansion of the field to encompass broader issues of gender and sexuality—and to attract students with a wider range of interests.
Born of the women’s movement of the 1960s, women’s studies was intended originally as a corrective to what feminist scholars saw as academia’s inattention to the role women played in the study of literature, history, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. “Our early attempts were about restoring something to the curriculum that had been overlooked,” says women’s and gender studies director of undergraduate studies Laura Green, “and that was merely the lives of one half of humanity.”
But all this new attention to the place of women in the past and present led to an interesting development, says Green. “Once there’s been a systematic effort to restore consciousness about women, it becomes easy to recognize that it is not only women who have gender,” says Green. “You start to notice that ideas of gender shape the lives of men as much as women.”
Scholarship in what has become known as “gender studies”—the interdisciplinary study of societal notions of what “male” and “female” mean—has joined more traditional work in women’s studies at universities across the nation. Meanwhile, the links between gender and sexuality have made women’s studies departments a receptive home for the nascent field of lesbian and gay studies. Accordingly, last year Yale’s women’s studies program changed its name to women’s and gender studies and unveiled a new structure that allows students to choose one of three tracks within the major: women’s studies, gender studies, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies.
“We’re trying to repackage what we’ve been offering all along,” said current chair Margaret Homans of the name change. “This is really our presentation catching up to the reality of our program.”
Along with the name change, the program announced another sign of its growing stature last spring, when social psychologist Marianne LaFrance of Boston College was appointed professor of women’s and gender studies and of psychology, becoming the first professor to hold a tenured position in the program. (The rest of the tenured faculty who teach in the program are appointed by their respective departments.)
The expansion of the program comes despite the continued protests of some traditional academics and political conservatives, who portray women’s studies and ethnic studies programs as academically soft and politically correct. “Universities are often reacting to elements that the society is concerned with and not focusing on what our students need to learn,” said Donald Kagan, Hillhouse Professor of Classics and History, when the reorganization was announced.
Still, the popularity of the program is growing, along with other interdisciplinary major programs at Yale that transcend the University’s departmental structure, and offer students alternative ways to focus their liberal educations. Managed by interdisciplinary faculty councils, the programs draw from a number of the University’s humanities and social science departments. The most established of these programs are the literature major, the humanities major, and American studies (where women’s studies began 20 years ago as a track); more recent programs include African American studies, Judaic studies, and the five “area studies” programs that look at regions of the world.
Laura Green, who is teaching the introductory women’s and gender studies course this year, says it is a challenge to address philosophy, psychology, literature, history, and other disciplines in one course. “The wonderful thing, though, is that it helps the students begin to see that the disciplines are all related,” says Green. “Despite different methods and vocabularies, they’re addressing the same questions.”
Because students come to the program—which Homans says usually graduates six to eight majors each year—with a wide range of interests, they are given the latitude to design their own majors to a certain degree, although they must take a series of core courses, choose a track, and identify a concentration. Some concentrations are in departments such as English, history, or sociology, but others are thematic focusing on gender and violence or gender and development in Latin America.
Homans’s own work has evolved from feminist literary criticism (Like Green, her faculty appointment is in the English department) to a broader interest in the role gender plays in cultural history. Her upcoming book, Royal Representations, deals with how Victorian England viewed its queen in a time when women lacked political representation. Looking at Victoria’s own writings and at the way she was represented by others, Homans asks the question, “What did it mean for British culture to have a queen?”
Much of the work in women’s studies has been devoted to answering such questions and to unearthing the often hidden history of women’s lives. But increasingly, attention is being paid to more basic questions about the nature of the categories we call male and female. At the core of recent scholarship in gender studies is Simone de Beauvoir’s famous contention that “one is not born a woman; one becomes one.” Scholars are trying to sort out which accepted gender differences are the result of biology and which are “socially constructed,” to use a favorite term of the discipline. While no one denies that there are, with extremely rare exceptions, two sexes—that is, people can be classed according to two different kinds of reproductive organs—much of the rest of what constitutes gender seems to be in flux these days. In exploring how and why we assign particular roles to men and women, scholars in gender studies are naturally drawn to the exceptions to norms—what Joshua Gamson calls “category disruptions.”
“One way to see how gender is socially constructed is by looking at transgendered people, those who change their gender identification through their dress or by having their bodies surgically altered,” says Gamson, who teaches a course called “Sexual Diversity and Social Change.” “It’s an opportunity to think about the notion that gender could be organized differently. The same is true with bisexuality, which can make trouble for the idea that all we’ve got are ‘gay’ and ‘straight.’”
Gender studies also means applying some of the particular attention women’s concerns have received in various disciplines to men’s as well. Green says that women’s studies, with its attention to gender issues, has awakened literary critics to the idea of looking for themes about masculinity in literature where they might have been overlooked before. “So much of Moby Dick seems to be about norms of masculinity—what it means to be a man. But before feminist theory, we might only have said that it’s about how to be an individual.”
Similarly, psychology has evolved because of research into gender differences. Marianne LaFrance says that psychologists have for years defined good psychological health according to male standards. “In psychology, 'universal' behavior was once synonymous with male behavior,” she recalls. “But if we’re going to understand the species, we need to look at women.”
LaFrance’s role in that endeavor has been a close examination of nonverbal communication in women’s interactions with each other and with men. “I have always been interested in how facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, and gesture affect interactions,” she says. To that end, she has set up videotaped experiments in which “we bring people together to have 'getting to know you' conversations or listen to jokes. Then, afterwards, we look at the videotapes in excruciatingly obsessive detail.” In a recent experiment, for example, she found that women who listen to jokes may report being offended to an interviewer afterwards, but their facial expressions indicate enjoyment while listening to the joke.
LaFrance says that from her early attention to women, she has moved into more general questions: What role does gender play in social psychology, and when does it play it?”Now, questions are being raised in psychology about maleness: the costs of emotional suppression, the repercussions of competitiveness and inexpressivity.” She cites research into the development of facial expression that shows that children of both sexes up to the ages of 4 or 5 are able to express more and more emotional states. But while girls continue to expand their range of expressions, boys “shut down” as social norms begin to regulate their behavior.
Like women’s studies and African American studies, the relatively new field of lesbian and gay studies grew out of a civil-rights movement. And like those fields, its scholars often tend to develop their work in response to life experiences as members of the group in question. Josh Gamson, for example, developed the idea for his recent book when a chorus of public figures ranging from Book of Virtues author William Bennett to Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman began decrying many talk shows for their sensationalistic fascination with sexual deviance. While many liberal-minded citizens agreed, Gamson had a different reaction. While he has no illusions about the motives of the shows' producers, he saw in them a rare chance for people with different sexual or gender orientations to be heard, even if in distorted ways.
“They just bring on ‘weird’ people and let them tell their stories,” says Gamson. “As a gay man, hearing people say these shows should be shut down sounded very different to me than it might to someone else. How is this different from ‘don’t ask, don’t tell?’” Gamson’s reaction to the debate was the beginning of his book Freaks Talk Back, an examination of television talk shows “as a scholar and as a viewer.”
Yale’s academic position on lesbian and gay studies was made clear last year, when playwright and activist Larry Kramer '57 revealed that the University had turned down his offer to leave his estate to Yale to support two endowed chairs in lesbian and gay studies. (Kramer’s original proposal called for professors of “gay male literature,” but he amended it at the urging of faculty.) The University rejected the gift, according to provost Alison Richard, because the field is too new to warrant the commitment of permanent funds. The University tried to persuade Kramer to fund an existing series of visiting professorships instead, but to no avail.
Those visiting professorships, which are funded by a gift from Stephen T. Baker '67, are administered by the seven-year-old Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies Committee (FLAGS). Chair Charles A. Porter, a professor of French, says the committee was formed to direct the spending of a small endowment for research grants, but that it soon “became a focal point for lesbian and gay academic activities.” When Baker’s gift and others came in, the committee was able to fund undergraduate research, establish a small office, and, most important, hire a visiting professor to teach an introduction to lesbian and gay studies and other courses. The group also puts out a guide it calls the “Pink Book” that lists courses dealing with lesbian and gay themes.
“At the same time women’s studies was seeking to transform itself, FLAGS was considering what kind of program we should be aiming toward: building an independent program or infiltrating regular academic departments,” says Porter. “The majority of the committee preferred the former.” FLAGS helped the women’s and gender studies program devise the lesbian and gay studies track.
While lesbian and gay studies may seem like a more permanent part of the landscape because of the new track, Porter says its future is uncertain because of financial questions. The funding for the Baker professorship, which is held this year by Alexandra Chasin of Boston College, runs out at the end of the year. So FLAGS has begun a fund-raising drive that relies heavily on members of Yale’s Gay and Lesbian Alumni organization (GALA). The goal of the Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Studies is $1.5 million, enough to fund the visiting professorship for another ten years.
“We’re now a major track, which makes it more important to support the professorship,” says Porter. “If we don’t get new money in the fund, that required course is in jeopardy.”
Many conservative critics continue to dismiss women’s and gender studies—along with African American studies and other culturally based programs—as academically suspect bastions of leftist politics. While faculty within the program defend the academic rigor of their scholarship and teaching, they don’t deny that politics plays a role in the discipline.
“We did emerge out of a political movement,” says Green. “It is impossible to divorce ourselves from that history. It is impossible not to teach it as a discipline that is interested in change—in the same way that physics is committed to increasing our understanding of the physical world.”
Joshua Gamson agrees, but says it’s a mistake to assume that academia has traditionally been politically neutral. He suggests that all teachers—and all disciplines—bring a set of social and political assumptions to their studies, whether it be English, classics, or international studies. “The critics think we’re politicizing the University, when in fact all teaching is inherently political,” he says. “But because we’re making it more explicit in our work, the politics are more visible.”
Green says that students don’t have to accept the feminist theory they encounter in her class. “It is important to me to make a broad variety of students comfortable dipping their toe in here,” she says. “Students don’t have to agree with what they read, but they must try to figure out why these people felt as they did.”
While Green says Yale is a relatively supportive place for women’s studies, there is still doubt about the program among faculty and alumni. She says this doubt, along with the belief that the discipline still has a great deal of work to do to redress the underrepresentation of women (and scholarship about women) in academia, led to the decision to keep “women” as part of the program’s name. (Other schools have gone with simply “gender studies.”)
“It seemed important not to bury the history,” says Green. Marianne LaFrance is more blunt. “Any time the word 'woman' disappears,” she warns, “we must be wary.”  |
