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Article Excerpt
Metaphors
There are many ways in which to figure the nature of the world of higher education and developments within it. All are metaphors, although often they are so embedded in the language we speak every day that we regard them as simply descriptions of "how things are," the discourse of common sense. The pursuit of knowledge is imaged at some times, particularly in the sciences, as colonial exploration and heroic discovery; at others, particularly in such fields as communications technology, computing, or gene technology, as ingenious invention and manufacture; at yet others--and such metaphors are to be found in the humanities and social sciences, too--as a boom in a building industry, with foundations being laid and frameworks being constructed. The metaphor most commonly used in the late 1990s about the pursuit of knowledge in any field was that of the identification of commodities that can be sold in an increasingly global market.
In this article, we want to extend first the spatial, and later the economic, elements of that metaphor. Because our subject is the state of womens studies, and--more broadly--feminist scholarship, in Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we want to organize our discussion under three spatial headings. The first is the local--a way of focusing on the development of womens studies specifically in Australian universities. The second image--the global--allows us to discuss the import-export nature of feminist theory and scholarship: the principal influences on work in Australia from other cultures; the prominent contributions that Australian work has made to Anglophone feminist scholarship in other cultures. The third, the regional, compels us to consider recent imperatives to rework womens studies curricula to take account of globalization and cultural diversity, and the challenges that those imperatives present.
Local
Any narrative about the origins of womens studies in Western democracies in the 1970s is likely to begin with its relationship to the broader womens movement of those times. As in many other places, women s studies in Australia began as a reflex of the social movement upon the world of learning. The exuberant and ambitious womens liberation movement of the 1970s was always an educational movement. Meetings of womens liberation groups were often informal classrooms, as women engaged in the dialectical process of consciousness raising, connecting reflections upon their own experiences to new understandings of the social structures of power. These structures in turn required a radical reconceptualization in order to accommodate emerging feminist concepts of patriarchal power and gender as a crucial form of ordering the social world. (1)
National conferences that were primarily political--on feminism and socialism, feminism and anarchism, feminism and Marxism, women and labor--inspired innovative scholarship, as well as new political analyses. It is hardly surprising that such energy and intellectual ferment should have turned to the universities (almost all, then, fully funded by the Australian government) as the principal knowledge-producing and knowledge-controlling institutions in our society, demanding that they pay attention to our work, demanding that they honor their own liberal education principles by allowing us space, in their buildings and in their curricula, to cultivate our own forms of knowledge and inquiry-womens studies courses.
Additional pressure on the universities came from the thousands of women who flocked to university campuses as a consequence of the Whitlam Labor governments (1972-75) abolition of fees for university education. (Fees, in various guises, were not reintroduced until the mid-1980s.) They wanted courses that spoke specifically to them about their place in the world. They entered universities already fermenting with the beginnings of womens liberation and the legacy of protests against Australias role in the Vietnam War, as well as the radical education movement that drew on the teachings of Paulo Friere and was expressed in the "free university experiments and student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Womens studies drew on all the elements of this ferment to produce a heady brew of its own, one that challenged not only women-less and gender-blind accounts of society and culture but also academic authority and hierarchies. Womens studies was undisciplined in every sense of the word. Because Australian universities, particularly the older traditional universities (now referred to as the "sandstones"), still bore marked resemblances to the monastic Oxbridge colleges, or even the newer more technological and vocational English colleges, on which they had been modeled about a century earlier, they did not immediately open their doors to such new possibilities. The first course to be named "Womens Studies," established at Flinders University in 1973, gained approval only after opposition had been quelled; the professor of Spanish attempted to ridicule the proposal out of existence by proposing an alternative course on "tauromachy"--bullfighting. (2) A course in "Women and Philosophy" gained a place at the U niversity of Sydney only after a strike of both students and many of the academic staff over students rights to determine the content of their courses in 1973. The first womens studies course at the Australian National University found a foothold only in the wake of what was later, and euphemistically, called "The Student Education Campaign" of 1974, during which students occupied the universitys central administration buildings for a week. (3)
Because such programs necessarily took some of their shape from the surrounding environment of the institutions in which they endeavored to take hold, womens studies courses in the 19705 varied widely. Some discipline-based courses found crevices in traditional universities in which to grow without radically disturbing the sandstone walls around them. A course on "Women and Politics" at Adelaide University and an honors seminar on Women in English Society" at the University of Tasmania were both seen as specialties within the assumptions of particular disciplines, rather than as disruptions to them. But such courses played a role in leading students to ask why it was necessary to have a course focusing specifically on women, and where women were m the other courses they studied in mainstream history and politics. Questions like these, necessarily, led to a critique of assumptions and priorities in that mainstream. This positive focus on women, which was largely unprecedented in higher education, and the cha llenge it involved to long-established assumptions and practices of the sandstone disciplines, produced a strong sense among womens studies practitioners that they were involved in a dual intellectual process. This was reflected in the titles of two publications edited by Sneja Gunew and published in 1990 and 1991, Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. (4)
It has been a distinctive feature of womens studies in Australian universities since these early years that such feminist disciplinary critiques coexisted with interdisciplinary courses (usually initiated by graduate students). However, in many places it was not until the late 1980s that the interdisciplinary courses became programs with their own dedicated staff. Some of these have flourished and then declined. There have been two designated Chairs in Womens or Gender Studies, for instance, but that number was halved by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Similarly, there have been several Womens Centers, Womens Studies Centers, and Womens Studies Research Centers, but their number has also fallen by more than 50 percent. Nevertheless, thirty years since their beginnings, womens studies courses of some kind-- even if under the increasingly prevalent heading of "Gender Studies" (5)-- are to be found in almost all universities, and at least half of them have full undergraduate majors, while sever al offer graduate programs. (6)
Looking back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is possible to see the challenge presented by womens studies as part of a larger development which would produce even more extensive challenges, from within as well as without, to the conventions maintaining the traditional disciplines of knowledge. Challenges to those conventions from within the academy have produced what have been called "The Studies": fields of knowledge such as literary studies (rather than English language and literature), cultural studies, communications studies, Australian studies, and Aboriginal studies. In a volume of twenty-seven chapters devoted to "Discipline Surveys," in a review carried out by the Academy of the Humanities in Australia and published in 1998, no fewer than twenty of those chapters refer to "studies" rather than to the traditional sandstone disciplines. (7) The Academys report surveys an array of teaching and research activities far more varied, and far more political and theoretical, than would ha ve been thinkable even ten years earlier. They represent the development of postcolonial approaches in, for instance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies, or a new emphasis on multiculturalism in, say, European studies; and some make a clear case for their field being transformed by what one calls "theorization of the discipline" and interdisciplinary collaboration. In this respect, womens studies--and feminist scholarship--was on the crest of a wave that has broken across the humanities and social sciences in universities in this country.
Evidence of the pioneering role of feminist scholarship is also found in recent acknowledgments of feminisms influence on the development of other disciplines, old and new. Reviewing "Gender Studies and Womens Studies" for the Academy of the Humanities, Terry Thread-gold commented: "There is not a single discipline in the Humanities, and probably not in the Social Sciences, which has remained untouched by the feminist work of the past thirty years. Gender is now on the agenda of all of the disciplines." (8) Other sections of the Academys review acknowledge the transformative effects of feminist scholarship as well. The chapter on history announces: "Above all, Aboriginal history and womens history recast the study of Australian history"; that on English studies maintains: "Feminist Criticism" may be claimed as a movement that is genuinely redrawing the whole map of English literary studies; and the chapter on cultural studies states: "Feminist concerns...
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