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This document provides information about the contributors to the Journal of Women's History. The contributors are scholars and professors from various universities and research institutions, specializing in different areas of history and gender studies. Their research interests include topics such as tradeswomen of African descent in colonial America, humor against fascist leaders, transnational feminism, LGBTQ+ studies, and the history of sexuality. The contributors have published books, articles, and essays in reputable academic journals and have received recognition and awards for their work. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the work and impact of Susan Stryker, a prominent figure in the field of Transgender Studies. It highlights her contributions to the development of the field and her efforts to make transgender lives more livable. Stryker is recognized for her scholarship, activism, and mentorship of junior scholars and activists. She has also been involved in various projects, including the publication of books and the production of a documentary film. Stryker's work aims to humanize and educate non-academic readers, while also challenging societal norms and hierarchies. [Extracted from the article]

This article offers a close literary and feminist reading of the Acts of Thecla (A. Thecl.) and the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena (A. Xanthipp.). Although the former is ubiquitous among Christian apocrypha and feminist studies, the latter has received relatively little scholarly attention despite the fact that both stories share interest in ascetic practices and conflict with patriarchal institutions, albeit in strikingly different ways. By focusing on the views expressed and actions taken with regard to ascetic practices by the female protagonists, I argue that A. Xanthipp. can be read as a response to A. Thecl. and as evidence of the regendering of women's ascetic renunciation, but also as an indication of competing ideas and intra-Christian disputes over marriage, ascetic practices, and the role of women in late antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cathy McClive's book, "The Art of Childbirth: A Bilingual Edition," provides a comprehensive analysis of a previously unpublished manuscript written by French midwife Marie Baudoin in 1671. The book includes an introduction to Baudoin's life and work, an annotated translation of the French text, and a transcription of it. McClive's introduction explores the historical context of midwifery practice and childbirth theories in the early modern period, as well as Baudoin's personal relationships and her role in managing disputes at the hospital where she worked. The manuscript itself is unique, as it includes Baudoin's discussion of autopsies performed by female midwives and her use of surgical instruments during childbirth. McClive's book contributes to the understanding of early modern midwifery and challenges the idea that male practitioners dominated the field. The bilingual edition is an important addition to the study of women's history and healthcare. [Extracted from the article]

This article engages the earth-body, or Silueta (Silhouette) (1973–80), works of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta to signal the Western limits of ecofeminist discourses and imagine a human-earthly relation beyond them. Ecofeminist thought has gained traction in feminist studies, especially given new materialist interventions which mark its ability to think a non-anthropocentric feminism in a time of environmental crisis. I recognize the potential of ecofeminism, and explore the ways it informed Mendieta's practice. Yet, drawing on decolonial feminist theory, I argue that a global South context and the "coloniality of [her] being" (Maldonaldo-Torres 2007) shifted Mendieta's engagement with the ecofeminist project. I read Mendieta as enacting an "aesthetics of re-existence" (Alban Achinte 2013) in response to a dehumanizing colonial context, using her art to "re-member" (Anzaldúa 2015) the negated dimensions of her existence in the Americas. Doing so reveals a persistent Western humanist lens that underwrites mainstream ecofeminist understandings of human-earthly relation, and also thinks with the African and Indigenous cosmologies Mendieta incorporated into her Siluetas about alternative modes of human relation to the earth. As Mendieta re-membered her own colonized being through her art, she helps us re-member ecofeminism's relation to the earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Daniella Cádiz Bedini b Daniella Cádiz Bedini is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. B Maylei Blackwell b Maylei Blackwell is professor and vice chair of Chicana/o and Central American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. B Jessica Hurley b Jessica Hurley is assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty in Native American and Indigenous studies, cultural studies, and women and gender studies at George Mason University. [Extracted from the article]

B Joseph Coppola b is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in cinema and media studies, with certificates in Media Policy at the Annenberg School of Communication and Legal Studies at UPenn Carey Law School. B Emily Holloway b is a PhD candidate in geography at Clark University. B Maria Liliana Ramirez b is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. [Extracted from the article]

As US universities and colleges increasingly identify with neoliberal discourses of students as human capital and higher education as a direct investment in earning potential, the liberal arts and humanistic fields of study are valued only for their capacity to train students in "multicultural communication." The minimization of their intellectual project marks these fields as susceptible to terminal budget cuts, a long-standing trend intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some humanists have responded to this devaluation by defending the humanities as sites that produce knowledge for knowledge's sake. Such reflections defend the older venerable humanistic traditions often at the expense of newer and lesser humanities, namely, Black studies and feminist studies. In a recent Forbes article, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni argues that core language and humanities courses (e.g. writing, US history) should be protected, but "expensive fluff" courses should be eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. This "fluff" in fact represents the only significant epistemic challenge to the unreflective valuation of the Enlightenment project that birthed both scientific and humanistic traditions of study. This article analyzes recent COVID-related medical research to demonstrate how Black and feminist studies reject the assumptions of the Western canon in both humanities and STEM courses. Investing in these fields does not merely invest in students' communication skills, but in their ability to critically engage their home disciplines, fields of work, and political systems. Rather than defunding the interdisciplines, we urge institutions to model undergraduate studies more broadly in line with these fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides brief biographical information about four contributors to the journal Configurations. Sushmita Chatterjee is a professor at Colorado State University, specializing in postcolonial studies, animal studies, and queer-feminist theory. Aaron R. Hanlon is an associate professor at Colby College, focusing on English literature and the intersection of science, technology, and society. Huan He is an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, researching Asian American literature and culture, digital studies, and critical game studies. Banu Subramaniam is a professor at Wellesley College, with expertise in feminist studies of science and the relationship between science and religious nationalism in India. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the attention paid to two- to four-year transfer in college, much less is known about four- to two-year transfer. This study finds that 17 percent of four-year beginning students transfer to a two-year college within six years. Using eight years of state administrative data and the distance to two-year colleges as an instrumental variable, I found higher associate degree and certificate completion rates for transfer students relative to non-transfer students. There are also gains in the probability of employment for female transfer students, who tend to enroll in health-related programs and have a higher degree completion rate than men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a crucial intervention into feminist pedagogy by critically interrogating one of the foundational aspects of the modern-day university system: the way we grade. Based on our combined two decades of teaching in feminist studies, as well as the work of Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire, and Michel Foucault, we argue that, because of its disciplinary functions, grading cannot be a feminist practice. While much has been written about how grades discipline students, we argue that the grading regime implemented in US universities and colleges also disciplines individual faculty members as well as their programs and departments. Grading is one way in which a rhetoric of excellence is perpetuated, a rhetoric that enforces a capitalist ethic of production and profitability. Grading is also a means through which the liberatory power of social justice–oriented programs and departments is co-opted by the neoliberal university. The article concludes that a feminist approach to teaching and learning requires a move toward alternative modes of learning assessment as part of a larger reconfiguring of the university. It closes by inviting the readers to join the authors in an organized movement against grading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active in the wider academic world, Dara served on numerous committees - in the last year alone, she had served on the Delegate Assembly of the MLA, the board of the Latin American Studies Association, and on the Women's Caucus board of the Association for Jewish Studies. Dara Goldman gave voice to this overflowing, recognizing at once the need for roots and the desire to leave isolation in favor of dialogue. On May 13, the University of Illinois community received the tragic news of the premature departure of one of our most respected colleagues: Dara Goldman. [Extracted from the article]

Based on a roundtable discussion convened at the 2017 National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) annual conference, "Forty Years After Combahee," this discussion addresses the fraught relationship between Black feminist thought and doctoral training in gender, women's, and feminist studies (GWFS). While intersectionality is nearly ubiquitously claimed as central to training in GWFS PhD programs, its institutionalization can serve to defang and dehistoricize the centrality of Black feminisms and womanisms, as well as marginalize, exclude, and/or fetishize Black feminists training and teaching in such programs. Participants critically examine the ongoing realities of a white-centric canon, the disingenuous and racialized division of academia and community activism, struggles for Black-affirming spaces, anti-Black peer microaggressions, white fragility, and lack of mentorship, isolation, and "pushout." The authors reflect on their experiences transitioning from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and non-HBCU undergraduate programs to GWFS PhD programs and post-PhD faculty life; the importance of mentorship and community-building; Black intellectual and embodied navigations of institutional structures under white supremacy; racialized affective labor; and the place of GWFS PhD training in the futures of Black feminist thought and field (re)formation. The resulting written collaboration serves as part wake-up call, part warning, and part "truth telling" about the realities of being a Black woman intellectual navigating GWFS PhD training and post-PhD faculty life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Flint Women's Study is a large community-based participatory qualitative study designed to create and inform community initiatives to serve Flint-area women by exploring their needs, challenges, hopes, dreams, assets, and thoughts about solutions. This article describes the study goals, processes, and lessons learned. Methods: We conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 100 Flint-area women or human service providers serving area women. Participants represented diverse professional backgrounds, life experiences, ages, races, and ethnicities. Community members participated in developing the qualitative interview guide, participant recruitment, qualitative coding, analysis, publication, and creation of initiatives based on results. Lessons Learned: Partnering in discovery and in identifying solutions provides a strong foundation for building trust and mutual capacity. The coding experience helped community partners to hone marketable qualitative research skills, which can elevate community's voice in research. Conclusions: Efforts to benefit women should ensure their representation in every step of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the affects that circulate in and around libraries from a perspective informed by feminist cultural studies and Black feminist theory. I situate the library as an institution devoted to the cultivation of sentiment and the creation of virtual publics. Though flush with the promises of freedom and equality, this legacy remains fraught with contradiction: for those promises are implicated in the oppressive structures of capitalism and patriarchal white supremacy. And new rationalizations of old forms of state-sanctioned violence and neglect, though targeted specifically at the most vulnerable, constitute an existential threat to us all. Yet the proper subject of such promises—the liberal subject of racialized and gendered privilege—has failed, again and again, to imagine how the world might turn out otherwise than this. In the hopes of practicing forms of accountability to the wisdom of others, I situate myself, as a beneficiary of structural oppression, vis-a-vis the melancholy that troubles the profession of liberal (or library) sentiments with what haunts the present and threatens the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that representations of jellyfish in the work of modernist poet and novelist H. D. offer insights for approaching the problem of multispecies justice in the context of Anthropocene seas. Drawing on work in the blue humanities and feminist science studies, I suggest that in H. D.'s interwar writings, especially Notes on Thought and Vision (1919) and Palimpsest (1926), her use of the jellyfish body as an epistemological metaphor for seeing double serves as an instructive model for managing the ambiguous and dissonant meanings the figure of the jellyfish implies for multispecies belonging in the Anthropocene present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brandzel was deeply committed to the theory, praxis, and formation of feminist and queer studies. To address racial disparities in birth outcomes and medical racism among healthcare providers, the authors collaborated with local organizers to also reconceptualize feminist methods and pedagogical practices. In 2006 Amy became one of the first graduates of the Feminist Studies doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. Feminist and LGBT activists working for NGOs in China are frequently involved in larger social movements for justice, working to advance the rights of socially marginalized groups in the nation. [Extracted from the article]

A biography of historian and author Susan Groag Bell is presented. She was born in the Sudetenland in 1926 and applied for the doctoral program in history at the Stanford University. However, she was not admitted due to her age and hence earned her master's degree at the Santa Clara University, California. Susan was part of a group of female scholars who shared her interest in women's studies at the Center for Research on Women, Stanford. Her book " The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies" is mentioned.

Drawing upon feminist postcolonial technoscience, I examine how neoliberal legal orders of patent ownership and benefit sharing are producing new notions of recognition as structured through gendered and racialized colonial pasts. Central to this inquiry are struggles over the patenting of Hoodia gordonii, a succulent plant in Southern Africa used for generations by San peoples to stave off hunger and then patented by South African scientists in 1998 to treat obesity. In response, San peoples negotiated a benefit-sharing agreement in 2003, whereby scientists agreed to give them a percentage of royalties from future Hoodia sales. Through historical, ethnographic research, I examine how South African scientists and Indigenous San peoples, through claims for patent ownership and benefit sharing, simultaneously reinforce and contest racialized and gendered histories related to colonial bioprospecting of Hoodia and historical constructions of San peoples as Other. In doing so, I consider how South African scientists and San peoples are mediated in similar, yet unequal, ways through the cultural, historical, material, and socio-legal structures of the political economy of plant medicines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I draw on Postcolonial, Muslim, and Western feminist theories combined with self-reflexivity as a feminist research method to reflect on my experiences as a professor of English and a feminist educator at a state university in Southern Punjab, Pakistan. Using the self-reflexive approach from a feminist standpoint, I unpack the institutional feelings, reactions, emotions, responses, and reception practices that the teaching of Feminism and Women's Studies entail in this context. The goal of the research reported here is to theorize institutional feelings and reactions to further our understanding of how these gendered ideologies and discourses--promoted through discursive and coercive measures--might not only impede feminist epistemology and praxis within this context, persecute feminist academics as Westernized and irrelevant, but also lead to the curtailment of general academic freedoms and violation of women's human rights in similar other Third World contexts. Furthermore, this essay theorizes the ways in which feminist bodies are read, interpreted, and silenced within institutional spaces that are shaped by historical forces of state-sponsored Islamization campaigns that are built upon the bodies of women. The article illustrates how feminist bodies and the work that they do disrupt historically constructed hetero-patriarchal spaces structured by Islamization ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts recent legislative and administrative pressures to close the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, a senior comprehensive public institution in the state university system experiencing a period of instability marked by budget mismanagement, austerity cuts, and diversity initiatives that appear to serve as cover for a noticeably anti-diversity moment in the history of the institution, leading to an eventual vote of no confidence in the university's chancellor. Working at the intersection of queerness and emotional disability and routing my story through selected ideas from lesbian-trauma theorists Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, and Heather Love, the article conveys the personal toll exacted by the work of tilting the tower and asks whether the discipline of women's studies offers any reprieve, revisiting meta-disciplinary disavowals of crisis rhetoric, melodrama, and besiegement mentalities that might foreclose such a narrative along the way. Moreover, the article introduces two critical terms to the field of diversity/ university studies--"befuddlement" and "circumlesbianlocution"--to encapsulate affective strategies that derail conversations about queerness in this particular location and more generally in higher education today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a roundtable meeting between professors including Katie Bashore, Heather Berg and James Bliss. Topics discussed at the meeting inclued corporate university, feminism and higher education. Other topics including neoliberalism, globalization and women's studies are also mentioned.

The history of what we now call "academic feminism" did not take place exclusively in colleges and universities. Rather, a range of infrastructure facilitated the production and dissemination of feminist knowledge in the decades following the institutionalization of the first women's studies programs in the United States. This article looks specifically at the infamous 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality to trace the multiple trajectories through which feminism was gradually academicized and institutionalized in the university. This conference is a particularly instructive case study because it already exists as a locus of anxiety in which histories of grassroots activism, feminist thought, and proto-queer theory collide. The article, then, provides an archivally driven account of the conference, from its planning stages through its political fallout, with an eye toward the infrastructural and personal networks that weave inside and outside of the academy. Because knowledge production is a collaborative process, the article argues that we end up with oddly skewed accounts of feminist field formation when inclusion is dependent on proximity to recognizable forms of feminism in the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the context in which precarity is unevenly distributed in today's corporate university, it is important for women's studies to consider its role in bringing about higher education policy reform. Reporting on the findings of a national survey of chairs and directors of women's studies departments, this article suggests strategies for performing "affective activism" within the university through research and action, guided by feminist theory--including collaborative organic theater, institutional discourse analysis, and the drafting of position statements. Drawing from a range of experiential and discursive primary-source materials, the essay suggests strategies and examples for how institutional norms can be made available for interrogation and transformation. In this work, emotion can provide a lens by which to see the institutional situation of women's studies and its intervention in the new status quo of the corporate university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity politics within the institution and within sexuality studies conspire to produce me, a queer Black woman, as a specimen--that is to say, a commodity, static and rare. That this feeling comes from two sources that are often assumed to speak opposing languages--one of liberation and the other of the corporation--is no longer surprising, given incisive critiques of the university and identity politics. Rather than rehearse these arguments, this article teases out the affective currents that underlie these overlapping forms of objectification. Using critical autobiography, it maps out the emotional and physical work that I perform in three different loci: university rhetoric on diversity and inclusion, women's studies' insistence on intersectionality and visible difference, and the dynamics of the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which various topics within the issue are discussed which includes women' studies, oppression and feminism.

We know the numbers: 76 percent of faculty in US universities is contingent. We are captivated by the viral news pieces--"Thesis Hatement," "Academia's Indentured Servants," "Death of a Professor," and "The PhD Now Comes with Food Stamps"-- and we follow hashtags on Twitter--#NotYourAdjunctSidekick. But in what ways does women's studies' relatively precarious place within academia fit into these conversations? How do feminists working in a variety of disciplines reconcile their feminist labor politics with the need to grow their programs and departments under the edicts of the corporate university, particularly when relying upon contingent labor to do so? These questions were at the heart of three collectively organized sessions on feminist contingency at the 2014 annual National Women's Studies Association Conference (NWSA) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the highlights of which are presented here. This article hopes that the lessons learned in this historic event--lessons about silence-breaking and collectivizing, but also about inequity, privilege, shame, and guilt--will be used in women's studies classrooms, departmental meetings, and beyond, contributing to the growing conversation about this important issue, and perhaps even offering action steps toward solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the authors' experiences as Black queer women teaching undergraduates and receiving graduate education, ultimately reflecting on these from their current professorial positions. It explores how graduate teachers and junior faculty who are Black queer women navigate the process of creating and maintaining feminist pedagogy in the college classroom while simultaneously negotiating universities that have very little space for queer women, Black women, and those at these intersections. The article asserts that feminist classrooms are arenas for discovery, liberation, and resistance of hegemonic structures, and attempts to construct these spaces both in- and outside of women's studies departments. This task is particularly challenging when the instructor holds the very marginalized identities that exist in the content of the class and their education. Ultimately, the article argues that their unique experience has been under-theorized, even by them, and necessitates specific strategies that would not be addressed by a focus on Black women who are assumed to be straight or queer women who are assumed to be white. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical genealogy of the shifts and transformations in the field of women's studies amid a longer trajectory of radicals and freedom fighters who have consistently challenged US empire and the co-opted elements of academic institutionalization. Conjoining archives of anti-colonial and Black feminist movements of the 1960s and '70s with contemporary debates in feminist theory, the article argues that critiques of sexual empire that were often located within women's studies have long laid the foundations for the most radical visions of sexual and gender revolution-- movements generated through global militant anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anticapitalist, Black, and antiracist struggles of the mid-to-late-twentieth century. And yet, it is precisely such analyses and visions that have been consistently disciplined, devalued, and silenced within the academy, particularly through the institutionalization of women's studies. This collective article challenges the institutional amnesia that comes with problematic promises of inclusion. It is simultaneously attentive to the corporeal effects of these histories on global landscapes and lives. It demystifies the violence and social stratifications inherent in the institutionalizations of the field. In so doing it lays bare the sharp contradiction between the logics of war and profitmaking and the collective justice projects of decolonization, freedom, and revolution that compel our deepest dreams and desires for just futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the fiction of writers Cora Sandel and Jean Rhys, focusing on Sandel's relevance to feminist modernist studies. Through their work, they share interests related to female development and interpersonal relationships. It states that Sandel and Rhys have explored the destructiveness of shame and self-expression in gendering.

In the past thirty years, great strides have been made to diversify the curriculum in women's and gender studies in terms of race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality; however, linguistic diversity, perhaps not surprisingly, often remains an inherent stumbling block. What Adrienne Rich famously characterized in the 1970s as "the dream of a common language," unfortunately often defaults to English in feminist classrooms throughout North America. This article argues that women's and gender studies, as a discipline, needs to reflect more fully on the limitations of classroom discussions conducted in English and to develop more instructional strategies to engage multilingual voices. To this end, the article suggests that lessons based on multilingual and vernacular poetry by women can be used to disrupt the desires for a transparent univocal language, and to transform the widespread perception that multilingualism fosters disengagement and miscommunication. A key aspect of the approach involves using vernacular English poems to introduce students to the borderlands between different languages. By focusing on classroom strategies, the article demonstrates the value of small-scale acts, in addition to broader curricular changes for transforming systems of oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyze the process of institutionalization of women's history through the creation of study centers, and the related publications in the Southern Cone. For that purpose we consider a selection of journals as examples of collective texts that played a considerable role in institutionalizing study centers and professionalizing the field, namely in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. In addition, we consider the advances in women's history, since it was one of the disciplines on which women's studies had a significant impact. In summary, we argue that due to the publication of specific journals, a more complex set of problems and questions arose, allowing the development of women's studies converging later to the wider thematics of gender studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author responds to various reviews and analyses of her book "Object Lessons" that are also found in the present issue of the journal. The book itself examines objects of study within academia that are focused on identity, such as women's studies and American studies, and its impact on social justice. The author explains the role played by psychoanalysis in the formation of her theory as well as the book's insights on the drawbacks of critique.

The article analyzes the abstracts of women's studies doctoral dissertations produced in the United States between 1995 and 2010 in order to develop an understanding of the nature of new scholarship produced in women's studies, and the potential of this knowledge to move the field forward. It examines 116 abstracts in an attempt to take the pulse of the field, to explore how the interdisciplinary field of women's studies is both widening and specializing in terms of scope and scale, and to illuminate some of the challenges that arise when writing research abstracts for a nonconventional field. The article discusses how these difficulties reflect the contestations and contradictions in the field of women's studies, testifying to the epistemic processes that envision social transformation and gender justice. In addition to considering the topic and methodological trends that these abstracts embody and how they relate to the future directions of women's studies, it examines the abstract as an independent genre of academic writing, evaluating its limitations and possibilities as a tool for facilitating knowledge production and dissemination in a burgeoning interdisciplinary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have paid ample attention to many of the effects of the institutionalization of the women's movement, but have not sufficiently attended to how such formalization has affected younger generations' perceptions of what it means to be politically active. The article uses interviews with an ethnically and racially diverse sample of Canadian university students who interned in feminist organizations to better understand their perceptions. The authors found the "feminist internship" to have predictable features that depress students' understanding of the kind of social change or challenges that are possible, and that train them to think of activism as another form of paid employment--a process the authors refer to as the routinization of political consciousness. Significantly, too, they found the likening of activism to work has also transformed social interactions among generations in the movement, replacing conflict and contestation about political goals and means with a script akin to employer/employee relations. Despite the trend towards formalization, students in the study most valued organizations in which staff members broke rules, attended to political ethics, eschewed hierarchy, strove for transparency, and openly debated ideas, signaling that de-professionalization may be a sound strategy for producing more movement adherents from emerging generations. Finally, the article reflects upon the role of women's studies units in brokering these relations between students and organizations, explicating how internships also lead students to revise their conceptions of women's studies curriculum as impractically critical and utopian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores two intertwined ideas: that the United States is a settler colonial nation-state and that settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. The article engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, highlighting five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women's studies. From problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections to questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession, responding to these challenges requires a significant departure from how gender and women's studies is regularly understood and taught. Too often, the consideration of Indigenous peoples remains rooted in understanding colonialism as an historical point in time away from which our society has progressed. Centering settler colonialism within gender and women's studies instead exposes the still-existing structure of settler colonialism and its powerful effects on Indigenous peoples and settlers. Taking as its audience practitioners of both "whitestream" and other feminisms and writing in conversation with a long history of Native feminist theorizing, the article offers critical suggestions for the meaningful engagement of Native feminisms. Overall, it aims to persuade readers that attending to the links between heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism is intellectually and politically imperative for all peoples living within settler colonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses topics within this issue such as Czech avant-garde artist Toyen, the 1937 photography book featuring images of Africa entitled "Deutsche Heimat in Afrika" taken by German photographer Ilse Steinhoff, and women in tobacco advertising in pre-revolutionary Russia.

The article pays tribute to feminist and anthropologist Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, with a particular focus on the author's experience as Kennedy's colleague in the women's studies program at the University of Buffalo during the 1970s.

The article argues that while introductory women and gender studies courses typically take social construction theory as foundational, their textbooks, supplemental materials, and teaching strategies simultaneously rely on a definition of "woman" that assumes particular body parts. Such a linkage elides the existence and particularities of transgender and gender-nonconforming bodies and subjects on the one hand, yet posits them as exceptions on the other. This combination stabilizes the normativity of hegemonic sex and gender embodiments by naturalizing nontransgender bodies. Rather than simply arguing for greater inclusion of trans subjects under the sign of woman or man, the article suggests that careful attention to the positioning of transgender bodies necessitates a broad theoretical reframing of how women's studies textbooks and curriculum are designed, and how gendered bodies more broadly are taught and conceptualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a year-long discussion among Ann Cvetkovich, Susan Fraiman, Susan Stanford Friedman and Miranda M. Yaggi on the topic of women's studies. The online conversation is a continuation of the forum "Feminist Theory Today: Its Margins in the Academy, Its Meanings in the World" at the 2008 18th- and 19th-century British Women Writers Conference. Fraiman talks about "New Women's Studies" and refers to 1980s when the topic was an accepted category but Friedman points out that the category had a continuing presence.

In this essay, I examine breast cancer dialogues among Caucasian, African American, and Latina women in texts (diaries, journals, poetry, and academic writing) that elicit varying interpretations and interrogations. These texts and new representations (phototherapy, visual art, and performance art) are analyzed to trace affinities in the lived experiences of women and to document the emergence of a new aesthetics of existence. Feminists and nonfeminists enter into a real dialogue, intimate connections, and disagreement while confronting the same predicament. In this coexistence of forces of chaos (breast cancer, treatment, disfigurement) and re-writing, new modes of corporality emerge. I also trace the unequal access to early screening, breast reconstructions, and quality health care that is available for marginalized women who have breast cancer that eïucidates the antihumanistic character of neoliberal governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of waning public funding and growing assumptions within the academy that gender has been integrated into curricula, Women's Studies Programs work under the monitoring eye of a corporate model of budget-slicing, bureaucratic, audit-culture accountability. Programs come under increasing assault on the grounds of obsolescence and cost-effectiveness. This article documents the institutional setting of a Women's Studies Program under threat and traces how program faculty have attempted to counter antifeminist obsolescence and individualist rhetoric, using as an example the struggle over institutional sexual harassment policy and its successor at the authors' state university. In participating in re-writing policy, the authors discovered possibilities and blockades in professors' and students' attempts to position the Program as more than a curricular remedy. We reveal the limitations of valuing departments solely on quantitative grounds and insist that feminist work in transforming academic culture is far from complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the development of Girls' Studies as a field of critical inquiry. Although scholars from across the academy and around the world currently conduct girl-centered research, considerable barriers prevented the coalescence of Girls' Studies until the late twentieth century. The first section of the essay explores the marginalization of girls in youth research and feminist scholarship prior to the 1990s, two fields where one would expect girls, girlhood, and girls' culture to be of interest. The second section focuses on transformations within and outside the academy that led to the rapid growth of girl-centered research in recent years. The third section provides a map of Girls' Studies scholarship to date, including a survey of topics explored in specific disciplines and those that deserve more attention, as well as an analysis of broader trends in such research across the academy over the past fifteen years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of the scholarly literature on African American author and thinker Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964). Among the works discussed are "Black Women in White America" (1972) by Gerda Lerner, Mary Helen Washington's essay in the "Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers" (1988) and Anna Julia Cooper, "Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction" (2007) by Vivian May. Cooper's book "A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman from the South" is discussed for its seminal contributions to black feminist thought.

This essay combines the experiences and participation of women's studies members from four campuses in New Orleans, Louisiana. It reflects both on the damage suffered by women in the academy and the strides that have been made in the post-Katrina environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the complexities of collaborative teaching, a practice often characterized by theorists as particularly consonant with feminist and anticolonial pedagogy. Interweaving the scholarship on collaborative teaching, feminist and critical pedagogies, with narratives from faculty who taught in an innovative, interdisciplinary general education program, our essay suggests that team teaching remains a more vexed process than is typically acknowledged, precisely because our teaching personas are deeply rooted not only in our conscious choices, but also in enduring, and at times unconscious, structures of self. These structures are themselves intertwined with what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has called "the politics of location": the various axes of power that define the modalities and expressions of hierarchy in specific institutional contexts. Indeed, team teaching foregrounds conflict and differences—interpersonal, intellectual, and internal—that can become the very ground of learning. Focusing on the politics and psychodynamics of team teaching, we seek a revision of what constitutes a successful team-teaching experience, and of what makes it a promising site for the implementation of feminist and progressive pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored responsiveness to women's and gender studies (WGS) in a large sample of students (519 women and 143 men) enrolled in one of 48 WGS classes offered at one of six colleges in a large Midwestern urban area. Our results revealed that, as a group, students felt far more empowered by their classes than distressed or angry, developed positive relationships with their WGS teachers and fellow students, and changed during their classes toward greater awareness of sexism. Women began their classes with greater awareness of sexism and openness to diversity in gender roles than men, but men showed as much change toward feminist attitudes as did women by the end of the semester-long classes. Although women reported more positive classroom relationships and greater feelings of empowerment from their WGS experience than men, men were not more distressed or angry about their classes. African Americans had greater awareness of sexism than Asian Americans or Euro-Americans as they began their classes, but the latter groups had caught up to the African Americans by the end of class. Asian Americans were less open to gender diversity than Euro-Americans and African Americans, but Euro-American, Asian American, and African American students changed equally over time on this dimension. Students who began their classes with more feminist attitudes experienced by the end of class more feelings of empowerment and, when ceiling effects were minimized, showed more change toward awareness of sexism and flexibility in gender roles than students who began with less feminist attitudes. The development of positive classroom relationships served as a medium through which these changes came about. Pedagogical and research implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on some theoretical insights of Native women organizers engaged in social justice struggles about feminism. The author states that writings on Native women and feminism often rely on essentializing claims that Native women cannot be feminists. He contends that the theorizing produced by Native women scholars and activists makes critical and transformative interventions into not only feminist theory, but into a wide variety of theoretical formations as well.