(Inter)Disciplinarity and the Question of the Women's Studies Ph.D.

Author(s): Susan Stanford Friedman

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, Disciplining Feminism? The Future of Women's
Studies (Summer, 1998), pp. 301-325
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178699 .
Accessed: 18/06/2014 19:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 (INTER)DISCIPLINARITY
AND THE QUESTIONOF THE
WOMEN'SSTUDIES PH.D.

SUSANSTANFORD
FRIEDMAN

I am of two minds about interdisciplinarydoctoralprograms in

women's studies. Mostly, I oppose them, but second thoughts
unravel many of my objections, leaving me to wonder about
grand futures and how we might get to them. My ambivalence
is rooted in theoretical, pedagogical, pragmatic, and ethical
concerns that arise out of the creative interaction between the
disciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of women's studies.
From the beginning of feminist reform in the academy in the
late 1960s, the claim has been made that women's studies
must be interdisciplinary, an insistence supported by the
transgression of traditional disciplinary boundaries in faculty
research, teaching, and service and in governance structures of
women's studies programs. Yet however much their work is
informed by interdisciplinarity,most of the people making this
claim have been firmly anchored in a discipline, trained and
institutionally based in one of the traditional fields that wom-
en's studies-in its politics and interdisciplinarity-sets out to
transform. This contradiction has been richly productive for
women's studies. It also underlies and complicates the issue of
doctoral degree programs, all the more so because both disci-
plinarity and interdisciplinarity are constantly changing phe-
nomena reflecting the evolving nature and function of the
academy itself. I want to sketch in the institutional setting out
of which I have formed my views, lay out the case against the
interdisciplinary women's studies Ph.D., and then raise ques-
tions about the limitations of this opposition.

Feminist Studies 24, no. 2 (summer 1998). ? 1998 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
301

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
302 Susan StanfordFriedman

WOMEN'S STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF

WISCONSIN-MADISON
As a well-established and relatively well-funded program
founded in 1975, the UW-MadisonWomen's Studies Program
appears to be just the kind of programthat would already have
or ought to be developing a Ph.D. degree program. The fact
that there is no support for such a developmentin our program
is significant in itself, especially in the context of doctoral pro-
grams in women's studies currently being developed at similar
institutions, such as the University of Iowa and the University
of Washington. Comparedwith many other programs,we have
had considerable institutional support from the beginning, a
situation that has allowed us to establish a relatively stable
faculty base and a broad interdisciplinarycurriculumcovering
the biological sciences as well as the social sciences and the
humanities. The program's annual operating budget runs
about $550,000, and course enrollments reach about 2,300 per
year with another 2,000 students turned away. Fourteen pro-
gram faculty members have budgeted joint appointments (20
to 50 percent), all but one with a tenure "home"in a depart-
ment.' An additional forty-three faculty are program members
and affiliates, serving on committees, teaching or administer-
ing in the program on a released-time basis, or teaching femi-
nist courses in their departments, many of which are cross-
listed in the Women's Studies Program. The program offers
twenty-eight courses of its own, including three interdiscipli-
nary introductorycourses, four interdisciplinary intermediate-
level courses, a feminist theory sequence, a capstone seminar
for majors, a research seminar for graduate students, and a
number of discipline-based courses.2Additionally,the program
cross-lists approximately twenty-five departmental women's
studies courses. In any given semester, students interested in
women's studies can choose from about eleven to fourteen pro-
gram courses, eight to ten cross-listed courses, and a substan-
tial array of un-cross-listed departmental courses that focus on
women and/or gender. There are about 180 to 200 women's
studies majors and an additional 75 students earning certifi-
cates equivalent to a minor.
At the graduate level, the program offers a twelve-credit
Ph.D. minor in women's studies. There is substantial support

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
SusanStanfordFriedman 303

and a plan for an M.A. degree, but insufficient resources to

develop it at present. Consequently, the program does not
enroll its own graduate students; feminist training at the
graduate level takes place primarily within a departmental,
discipline-based structure. The History Department, for exam-
ple, offers a Ph.D. in women's history as part of its American
history degree, and the English Department offers a special-
ization in women's writing and feminist literary theory. The
university's requirement of a Ph.D. minor has been a boon to
the many graduate students interested in interdisciplinary
women's studies; at any given time, about forty to fifty gradu-
ate students are enrolled in the Ph.D. minor in women's stud-
ies. Many students get further women's studies training by
becoming teaching assistants and/or lecturers in the program,
attending Research Center activities, and serving on commit-
tees, learning firsthand the difficult curricular,budgetary,and
governance issues facing women's studies programs.
All in all, graduate students who want to become women's
studies teachers and scholars can get excellent training at
UW-Madison,and they come to the campus in large numbers
to do so. But not through a Ph.D. degree offered by women's
studies. Why not? And why hasn't this program moved more
quickly to establish graduate degrees of its own? There is no
lack of commitment to feminism, no lack of academic credibili-
ty. The university has been on the whole quite proud of the
program's national and international stature, acknowledged
through many research and teaching awards. Nor have we
faced the kind of factionalization that has hampered the
growth of many women's studies programs. The relatively few
discussions we have had about instituting a women's studies
Ph.D. leave me with little to report-except for the significance
in and of itself that such a large, well-funded programhas not
moved in this direction. Although I cannot speak for everyone,
I believe there is general consensus on theoretical and prag-
matic reasons for not instituting such a degree.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
304 Susan StanfordFriedman

THE CASE AGAINST: PRAGMATICS, THEORY,

AND PEDAGOGY
The pragmatic reasons for not attempting at this point to
establish a Ph.D. programin women's studies are material and
ethical-both immediate and painfully real.3 First, I worry
about newly graduated students eagerly grasping their inter-
disciplinary Ph.D. degrees in hand and even more eagerly
entering the job market. Who hires a Ph.D. in women's studies?
For the most part, not sociology,literature, history, political sci-
ence, or economicsdepartments.None of the traditional depart-
ments is likely to hire a feminist teacher-scholar who is not
trained in a "regular"discipline. It is difficult enough, especial-
ly in the social and biological sciences, for a feminist scholar to
get a job in this time of shrinking markets. Specializations
such as women's history, feminist theory, or gender studies do
appear in job announcements, but most hiring follows tradi-
tional categories for specialization, such as historical period in
literary studies or a subfield like international relations, area
studies, or constitutional law in political science. Feminists
often get their jobs by demonstrating how their feminist work
is integrated into common departmental categories. Whatever
the acknowledgmentand support for women's studies in a par-
ticular setting, the overwhelming number of feminist teachers
and scholars are hired by and must survive in traditional
departmental and disciplinary structures.
The loophole, of course, is the women's studies department
that does its own hiring (subject to approvalby deans and oth-
er higher-ups). But how many women's studies departments
are there in the U.S. academy? Equally pressing, how many
such departments would want someone with an interdiscipli-
nary degree instead of a Ph.D. in sociology or history or eco-
nomics with a feminist specialization and some interdiscipli-
nary experience?How many deans or campuswide tenure and
promotion committees are eager to support someone with an
interdisciplinary degree? And although the number of depart-
ments that serve as tenure homes (especially 100 percent
tenure homes) for women's studies faculty is slowly increasing,
this number still remains very small.4 The most common
administrative structure for women's studies still overwhelm-
ingly relies entirely or partially on traditional departments for

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 305

the hiring and tenuring of faculty. Most such programs have a

small budget that supports a faculty coordinator,an adminis-
trative staff, and one or two interdisciplinary courses that sup-
plement departmentally funded courses listed with (but not
controlledby) the program.Less common than these programs
but more common than departments are those women's stud-
ies programs (like my own) that have joint-appointment facul-
ty whose tenure resides in home departments. Such programs
have more substantial budgetary and curricularindependence,
with significant input in hiring and tenuring; but even in these
programs, faculty must fulfill the needs and expectations of
their home disciplines.
In sum, the hiring and promotion patterns for feminists in
the American academy today are such that it would be very
difficult for people with interdisciplinary Ph.D.'s in women's
studies to succeed on the academic market. I recognize that
people have used this same argument against the formation of
undergraduate majors in women's studies, asking what kind of
a job a women's studies major can expect to find. This issue
does not, it seems to me, pose the same kind of ethical prob-
lem. Although some people think that a B.A. or B.S. ought to
be more narrowly career oriented, the liberal arts tradition of a
broad-based education remains alive and well in the United
States, and an undergraduate degree in women's studies ful-
fills this mission just as well as other majors. But Ph.D.
degrees in the United States are another matter entirely: they
constitute professional training for teachers and/or research-
ers, much as law school or medical school trains lawyers and
doctors. Students invest enormous amounts of time and money
in such professional training and have a right, I believe, to
expect a job in higher education at the completion of the Ph.D.
Women'sstudies offers no exception to the responsibility of any
graduate program to attempt to place its students in jobs. The
number of women's studies departments with the institutional
independence to hire and promote their own faculty (subject to
administrative approval, of course) remains too few in number
to absorb significant numbers of job candidates with Ph.D.'s in
women's studies. Given the far greater prevalence of women's
studies programs that rely on joint appointments or nonbud-
geted faculty, I do not believe we can fulfill that responsibility

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
306 Susan StanfordFriedman

to graduate students as the academy is constituted today if we

encourage them to pursue interdisciplinaryPh.D.'s in women's
studies.5
The second pragmatic difficulty facing attempts to forge
ahead with a doctoraldegree programis budgetary.Where will
the faculty and money to support them come from to expand
women's studies, especially at a time when higher education is
facing increasing pressure to do more for less? Realistically
speaking, how can women's studies compete successfully for a
larger piece of a shrinking pie to support the development of a
Ph.D. programwhen there is no strong demand to hire people
with such a degree? If the money comes from reallocations of
current women's studies budgets, what will happen to existing
curricula, especially undergraduate majors, minors, and cer-
tificates? Given the breadth requirements for these degrees,
how can programs maintain needed courses and at the same
time develop a substantial graduate curriculum?What about
the mission of women's studies in general to reach a broad
base of undergraduatestudents, nonmajorsas well as majors?
Such questions invoke the current budgetary struggles of
higher education in general. Although these conditions take
shape quite differently in public and private institutions, the
academy is facing a period of tremendous transition as we
head more deeply into the cyberspatialized information age
and the increased competition of a transnational, globalized
market system. It is difficult to predict the future funding situ-
ations of the research-teaching institutions that produce
Ph.D.'s; some question how many will even survive, predicting
that research will move off campus, and distance education
will replace many residence programs at both undergraduate
and graduate levels. Private institutions face increased de-
mands to justify their huge fees by strengthening undergradu-
ate education. Public institutions must negotiate the mine-
fields produced by an ever-morehostile voting public and the
competing political interests in state legislatures. No women's
studies program can afford to stick its head in the sand by
ignoring these larger forces that lead to concrete budgetary
constraints. Debates about expansion into graduate degrees
must take into account the complicated interactions of all
these contexts.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 307

The situation in Wisconsin serves as a telling case in point,

particularly because we face a more favorable climate for pub-
lic education than many other universities. The state has a
tradition of strong support for the university, did not experi-
ence the recession of the early 1990s, and has a booming econo-
my with low unemployment. The University of Wisconsin sys-
tem has not experienced the draconiancuts that hit university
systems like those of New York and California. But Wisconsin
taxpayers are in no mood to support expansions in higher edu-
cation or increases in tuition. As in other parts of the country,
backlash against multiculturalism, feminism, and lesbian and
gay movements fuels attacks on the university as a hotbed of
"politically correct"radicalism, overspecialization, and over-
emphasis on research. Although faculty despair over increas-
ing student loads and struggle to keep up with their rapidly
changing fields, the public often perceives a dire abandonment
of the traditional curriculum and an erosion of commitment to
undergraduate education. Facing tax revolts, an enrollment
bubble of baby boomers' children in the coming years, and
reductions in external research support, the university has
had to downsize substantially and anticipates increasingly
powerful demands for faculty cutbacks and higher teaching
loads.
In this larger context, growth for the Women'sStudies Pro-
gram has hit a glass ceiling in spite of strong support from the
administration. Growingsteadily in size of faculty and number
of courses through the 1980s, the program has not been
allowed to expand in the 1990s, even with the tenacious efforts
of program administrators to make the case for more faculty
based on high student demand for courses and a large pool of
majors,certificate students, and Ph.D. minors. As it is, we have
far too few faculty, a situation exacerbated by their very suc-
cess and seniority, which has led to frequent leaves for
research and administrative posts. It would be short-sighted
indeed at a teaching/research institution like UW-Madisonto
discourage such leaves. Students have access to cutting-edge
work in women's studies precisely because the faculty actively
engage in research. Moreover, the administrative positions
that our faculty hold throughout the campus greatly forward
the program'smission to transform traditional disciplines and

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
308 Susan StanfordFriedman

departments. As a consequence,however,the programhas had

to hire many lecturers (mostly dissertators) to staff its courses.
They have done a superbjob, but such staffing patterns are not
good for long-term stability. Compounding these problems is
the reluctance of many programfaculty to teach the interdisci-
plinary core courses; they prefer to teach women's studies
courses based in their home disciplines.
Realistically speaking, UW-Madison'sWomen'sStudies Pro-
gram faces a very difficult struggle just to maintain what it
has. The development of even an M.A. degree program, let
alone a Ph.D., seems like a luxury we can't affordwithout seri-
ously gutting the undergraduate curriculum-and this, in a rel-
atively large and well-supported women's studies program on
a campus committed to its research as well as its teaching mis-
sion, in a state economicallywell-off with a tradition of strong-
ly supporting its university. What is the picture, I wonder, at
universities where women's studies still faces an uphill battle
for academic legitimacy or significant budgetary resources,
where feminist faculty are scarce, or where regional economies
are languishing?
Enough on pragmatics. What about theory and pedagogical
practice?Given sufficient resources,is an interdisciplinarydoc-
toral program in women's studies intellectually viable as the
academy is currently structured in the United States? I have
grave doubts. This (ambivalent) oppositionshould in no way be
equated with doubts about interdisciplinarity.I am firmly com-
mitted to interdisciplinarity in general and to the particular
interdisciplinarity of women's studies. Moreover,I have exten-
sive experience in interdisciplinary research and teaching in
both women's studies and literary studies.6Instead, my doubts
center on the admittedly contested and changing meanings of
disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity,the interactive symbiosis
between the two, and the place of women's studies within this
terrain. The establishment of doctoral programs in women's
studies as a form of professional training for future academics
requires in my view some grapplingwith how academic knowl-
edge is organized and taught within institutions of higher edu-
cation.
What is an academic discipline?Michel Foucault'sanswer in
such books as Discipline and Punish, Archaeologyof Knowledge,

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 309

and The Orderof Things taps the negative connotationsof "dis-

cipline" to define it as an institutional organization of knowl-
edge characterized by a discursive system with regulatory,
coercive effects that confine knowledge within certain sets of
limiting boundaries.Within this view, disciplines function ideo-
logically and are subject to the transgressive acts of those who
refuse to be confined to or excluded from the disciplinary guild.
I prefer a locational approachthat acknowledgesthe potential-
ly positive as well as negative effects of knowledge boundaries.7
The word's resonance with systematic, sustained, and highly
skilled labor,even craftsmanship, is as significant for me as its
association with punishment. Academic disciplines not only
regulate and certify but also enable expertise and depth of
knowledge.
In agreement with Foucault (among others), I furthermore
stress that academic disciplines are not static essences in-
scribed in the heavens with some a priori, Platonic rightness
(or wrongness) of fixed being. Instead, as somewhat arbitrary
categories for organizing knowledge and inquiry, they are cul-
tural formations with historically specific conditions of origin,
expansion, change, transformation, decline, and demise-all
processes that necessarily engage the power relations of the
academy,itself an immensely significant institution within the
larger society for the production and dissemination of knowl-
edge. As such, I regard an academic discipline as a form of
intellectual work with the following minimum components:(1)
a specific focus of inquiry and commonly asked questions; (2)
an ever-expanding body of knowledge open to challenge and
change; (3) a specialized discourse fostering advanced work
and communication; (4) methodologies specifically related to
the focus of inquiry and broadly related to shared research
strategies in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, or cre-
ative and performing arts; (5) a collective body of scholars and
teachers trained in-and training new generations in-the disci-
pline; (6) professional organizations and societies; (7) an insti-
tutional base within the academy; and (8) relations with insti-
tutional organizations outside the academy for funding, dis-
seminating, and regulating knowledge.8In sum, academic dis-
ciplines do establish boundaries, functioning as a form of pro-
fessional guild. In advancing the development of some knowl-

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
310 Susan StanfordFriedman

edge, they close doors to other kinds of knowledge. As bound-

aries, they should be transgressed. But to be transgressed,
they must exist.9
What then is interdisciplinarity? Within a Foucauldian
framework, interdisciplinarity represents resistance to the
policing effects of disciplinary regulation. This has led some to
regard interdisciplinarity as the panacea to the academy's
coercions. Although I agree that disciplinary boundaries must
continually be crossed, my locational approach addresses the
changing specifics of interdisciplinarityand recognizes its limi-
tations as well as its benefits. Interdisciplinarityis as much a
cultural formation subject to change and politics as disciplinar-
ity. As a form of intellectual, methodological,and institutional
hybridity,interdisciplinarity depends for its meaning upon the
prior existence of disciplinarity.As a kind of umbrella category,
interdisciplinarity refers to various forms of disciplinarytrans-
gressions and the mixing of disciplines. But like debates about
hybridity in general, there is considerable disagreement about
whether interdisciplinarityinvolves a mingling of disciplines in
which differences are retained or an integrated fusion of differ-
ent disciplines into something entirely new. The term "multi-
disciplinarity"often appears in reference to the combinationof
different disciplines that remain distinct, and the term "inter-
disciplinary" is often used in a more specific sense than its
umbrella meaning to indicate fusion.'0
Motherhood,for example, is a topic in women's studies that
demands interdisciplinarity in its broad sense. A multidiscipli-
nary approach might bring together feminist biologists, psy-
chologists, historians, art historians, political scientists, sociol-
ogists, literary critics, and economists to shed different discipli-
nary lights on aspects of motherhood. An interdisciplinary
approach (in the narrow sense of the term) would attempt to
integrate the knowledge of the different disciplines so as to
develop an understanding of motherhoodthat no single disci-
pline could produce on its own. Complicatingthe distinction is
the question of whether individuals are attempting to be inter-
disciplinary or multidisciplinaryor whether a team of people is
working collaboratively to produce the integrated knowledge.
The challenge of integrating or combining disciplines is differ-
ent for individuals and groups, and the issue is of vital impor-

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
SusanStanfordFriedman 311

tance for women's studies curricula, faculty, and degree pro-

grams of all kinds."
Where does the debate about doctoral programs in women's
studies fit in this shifting terrain of disciplinarity and interdis-
ciplinarity?No one questions the imperative for women's stud-
ies to be interdisciplinary, although people advocate various
forms and conditions of its interdisciplinarity. The issue is
whether women's studies programs or departments should
take primary responsibility for training future scholar-teachers
in a field spanning the humanities, social sciences, sciences,
and arts or whether such training should remain predominant-
ly in the disciplines, supplemented by interdisciplinarity and
bonded throughout by feminist theory.
The crux of the matter, I believe, lies in the debate about
whether women's studies is itself a discipline or an interdisci-
plinary field anchored in existing disciplines. In short, can and
should women's studies exist as a separate body of knowledge
and methodology,relatively autonomous and encompassing the
disciplinary components I have outlined? Or does and should it
exist only in sustained and interdependent dialogue with bod-
ies of knowledge and methodologies in existing disciplines?
Compoundingthe complexity of this question is the increasing
interdisciplinarity of many traditional disciplines as concepts
of specialization reform on the changing landscapes of knowl-
edge. For those who see women's studies as a discipline, the
formation of doctoral degree programs in women's studies is a
logical next step and a professional necessity. For those who
see women's studies as an interdisciplinary field that feeds off
of, juxtaposes, integrates, and fuses the more specialized in-
quiries within existing disciplines, doctoral programs in wom-
en's studies pose serious intellectual and pedagogical prob-
lems. The paradoxhere is that advocacyof a broadlyinterdisci-
plinary Ph.D. program in women's studies actually rests upon
the premise that women's studies is a new discipline deserving
and needing to train and certify its own specialists. In con-
trast, the belief that feminist scholar-teachersshould continue
to get Ph.D.'s in traditional disciplines remains rooted in the
view that women's studies should combine interdisciplinary
feminist perspectives with discipline-based knowledge and
methodologies.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
312 Susan StanfordFriedman

The part of me that sides against doctoralprogramsin wom-

en's studies has its center in a number of reservations about
their intellectual and pedagogic viability at this time. First, I
am concerned about the contradictions inherent in training
graduate students to do something that faculty themselves do
not and may not even want to do. On the current academic
landscape, the construction of a Ph.D. program in women's
studies as a discipline involves drawing upon interdisciplinary
approaches to any number of topics important to the study of
gender. Whatever its specifics, a women's studies doctorate
would require students (if not faculty) to cross existing discipli-
nary boundaries and bring to bear on the study of gender the
foci, knowledge, and methodologyof the humanities, social sci-
ences, sciences, and the arts. Most likely, the curriculumwould
be largely multidisciplinary,with an array of feminist courses
anchored in traditional disciplines supplemented by a smaller
number of interdisciplinary seminars in feminist theory,
methodology,cultural studies, or special topics. Most likely, the
faculty would continue to have a home discipline while the
graduate students would not. Faced with a largely multidisci-
plinary curriculum, students, unlike their faculty, would have
no grounding in a traditional discipline. In graduate training,
this constitutes a serious anomaly.Faculty would be educating
students to do what they themselves could not do and might
not even want to do, however much they broaden their original
disciplinary training through selected engagements with other
disciplines.
Second, my experience with interdisciplinarity in all its
forms leaves me committed to the notion that it is most suc-
cessful when it emerges out of a firm grasp of the knowledge
bases and methodologies of at least one of the existing disci-
plines. It is one thing to develop a strong home base which one
enriches and challenges with ideas and methods from other
areas; it is another thing entirely to be interdisciplinary from
the get-go, combining a little of this and a little of that into a
form of intellectual bricolage. If the danger of disciplinarity
resides in potential overspecialization,the danger of interdisci-
plinarity rests in potential superficiality. Disciplinarity offers
depth but also insularity; interdisciplinarity offers scope but
also rootlessness. Each counters the excesses of the other. I

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 313

prefer a symbiotic relationship between the two, with each

reining in the limitations of the other. Moreover,the brilliant
breakthroughs that interdisciplinarity potentially achieves
often depend upon this symbiotic relationship. As Marianna
De Marco Torgovnick writes, "Interdisciplinary study works
because people from one discipline are not routinely bound by
the same assumptions as people from another. They do not
necessarily share the same blind spots, focus on the same
things, or think about problems in the same way.... In other
words, interdisciplinaritybrings with it the benefits of defamil-
iarization."'3In these terms, interdisciplinarity results either
from a collaborativeprocess where people from different disci-
plines interact or from a form of individual intellectual travel
away from one's home discipline. The latter involves forays
into other disciplines for theory, methodology,and/or informa-
tion that the researcher brings back for its capacity to chal-
lenge and shed light on disciplinaryknowledge.
Such borrowings and adaptations have characterized wom-
en's studies from the beginning. The problem doctoral pro-
grams in women's studies raise is that their interdiscipli-
nary/multidisciplinarycurricula would leave students without
a disciplinary home from which to travel, exposing them to the
dangers of breadth without depth. The counterargument, of
course, is that women's studies is itself a discipline, a bound-
aried territory of knowledge training and certification on its
own. Although I agree that women's studies already has a
number of disciplinary components, I am not convinced that it
has yet defined a distinct body of knowledge or methodologies,
spanning as it does nearly all the humanities, social sciences,
sciences, and arts. The problemis not that there is not enough
but that there is too much knowledge and too many methodolo-
gies in women's studies to draw clear enough disciplinary
boundaries upon which to design a degree program.
The "too-muchness"of women's studies, produced by the
explosive and still accelerating knowledge revolution accom-
plished by academic feminists in the past thirty years, pro-
duces my third set of reservations about doctoral programs in
women's studies. I do not believe it is feasible for faculty or stu-
dents to become sufficiently proficient in women's studies at
the advanced level across the four broad divisions of knowl-

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
314 Susan StanfordFriedman

edge. When women's studies began to emerge in the late 1960s

and early 1970s, I used to read every book that appeared. By
the early 1980s, because of the sheer mass of good material
getting published, I was unable even to read all the feminist
criticism in literary studies, let alone keep up with feminist
theory produced across the disciplines. And by the 1990s, I
can't even keep up with all the feminist criticism on twentieth-
century literature in English, my special field. Feminist criti-
cism-now composedof numerous subfields-has grown remark-
ably in both the quantity and complexityof its knowledge since
the early publication of books like Mary Ellmann's Thinking
about Womenor Kate Millet'sSexual Politics. Its striking inter-
disciplinarity encompasses not only feminist work in other
areas of women's studies but also serious engagement with
other disciplines and with interdisciplinary fields like cultural
studies, postcolonial studies, and multiculturalism. This explo-
sion of knowledge in feminist literary studies is replicated
across the disciplines to greater and lesser degrees depending
on disciplinary resistance to feminist inquiry. How can a doc-
toral degree program in women's studies foster even minimal
proficiency across the divisions of the humanities, social sci-
ences, natural sciences, and performing arts when each of the
fields within these divisions has proliferatedinto so many sub-
fields? The feminist knowledge revolution is so broad ranging
in scope and so deep in its complexity of debate and discovery
that even an introductoryacquaintance across the divisions is
a major challenge. I fear that the attempt to design a Ph.D.
program that draws on knowledge from all four divisions
would result in insufficiently rigorousteaching and learning.
The extent and complexity of discipline-basedwomen's stud-
ies knowledge goes hand in hand with the growing sophistica-
tion of methodologies used to produce it. In the early 1970s, I
not only read everything published in women's studies, but I
also could understand it. This is no longer the case. Advances
in discipline-based women's studies have depended in part on
feminist scholars becomingever more proficientin the method-
ologies of their home disciplines. This does not mean that femi-
nists have always adopted such methodologieswithout modifi-
cation; often, the feminist questions they bring to their home
discipline fundamentally alter methodological aspects if it.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 315

Nonetheless, the methodological divides across the divisions

are enormous, particularly between quantitative and qualita-
tive approaches. Feminists who do survey research, for exam-
ple, must acquire highly complex statistical tools for data
analysis. Feminists in literary studies must be familiar with a
dazzling array of strategies for reading texts, many of which
are founded in dense, philosophical discourses. Such feminists
may well share a certain core of feminist theory that shapes
some of their research questions, but they hardly share a com-
mon methodologicallanguage and can barely understand each
other's research. Such methodologicalchasms make the design
of an interdisciplinary women's studies Ph.D. very difficult, if
not impossible.
Moreover,common methodologicalpractices within women's
studies itself; combinedwith the effects of the feminist knowl-
edge revolution, intensify the problems of training doctoral
students at a sufficiently advanced level. These practices cen-
ter around different forms of contextualization that exponen-
tially compoundthe scope of what must be learned in order to
produce and teach cutting-edge feminist work. The first such
contextualizing practice entails an interactive critical analysis
with traditional disciplines. From the beginning, women's
studies has brought feminist questions to existing knowledge
and methods as a way of producingnew knowledge. Thus Joan
Kelly famously asked if the European Renaissance was equally
a "renaissance"for women, challenging conventional assump-
tions of historical periodization and social change and laying
out an influential methodology of disciplinary engagement for
feminist historians.'4To have done so successfully, she and the
many feminist historians doing revisionist work had to be
thoroughly conversant with their own subfields within history
and with historiographic methodology in general. Such disci-
plinary contextualization, pervasive in women's studies, re-
quires extensive knowledge in aspects of a person'shome disci-
pline that appear to have little to do with women. In literary
studies for example, feminist critique early on focused on the
absence or trivialization of women writers from literary tradi-
tion. The archaeological recovery and revisionist readings of
women writers have been thoroughly influenced by feminist
theory and by feminist work in other disciplines. But feminist

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
316 Susan StanfordFriedman

critics have also adapted the sophisticated and rapidly expand-

ing strategies of reading texts that are de rigueur in literary
studies. They have also had to contextualize women's writing
in relation to that of men. The very success of the feminist
knowledge revolution has depended to a great extent on cre-
ative engagement between feminist theory (often informed by
interdisciplinarity) and existing disciplinary knowledge and
methodology.This kind of dialogic practice requires the exten-
sive training within an existing discipline that would be impos-
sible to achieve in a broadly defined doctoralprogramin wom-
en's studies.
Supplementing this kind of disciplinary contextualization
has been the expansion of feminist practice well beyond a focus
on women to incorporate both the gender system in general
and systems of alterity based on race, ethnicity, class, sexuali-
ty, religion, geopolitics, age, and so forth. Early recognition of
the androcentricityof knowledge led to the analysis of gender
as a system that constructs male as well as female identity,
thus broadening the scope of women's studies considerably
within disciplines to incorporate the place of gender within
larger cultural formations. Pioneered especially by women of
color,lesbians, and Jewish women, theory and scholarship rec-
ognizing differences among women forcefully insisted on an-
other form of contextualization requiring vast areas for study
within existing disciplines. The need to complicate the cate-
gories of woman and gender by understanding their co-implica-
tion with other systems of alterity compoundsthe problems of
disciplinary coverage and methodology. It is not enough to
know about women within a single discipline; it is also neces-
sary to know how systems of racial, ethnic, class, religious,
national, and sexual stratification and privilege interact with
gender. In short, the knowledge revolution in women's studies
has meant the expansion of women's studies far beyond the
boundaries of gender alone. This multifaceted analysis is diffi-
cult enough for feminists to achieve at the advanced level with-
in a single discipline;to do so in all areas of women's studies is
impossible.
Given all these dimensions of the knowledge revolution both
within women's studies and, as a result of women's studies,
within the academy in general, what might a doctoralprogram
in women's studies look like? What would be the focus, content,

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 317

and methodologies of graduate courses for students with an

undergraduate foundation in women's studies? A Ph.D. pro-
gram ought to reflect a cumulative curriculum and pedagogy,
where more advanced work builds upon and extends what is
learned at the undergraduatelevel. Just as history, psychology,
or sociologygraduate students have learned some of the basics
of their discipline beforethey move on to more specializedwork,
so Ph.D. candidates in women's studies should have had consid-
erable undergraduate preparationin interdisciplinaryand dis-
cipline-basedwomen's studies, so that graduate work would not
repeat the undergraduatemajorbut go well beyondit.'5
The paradox of the knowledge revolution in women's studies
however, is that its "too-muchness"could all too easily produce
"not-enoughness"at the graduate level. Because women's stud-
ies has become such a vast and multidimensional field, gradu-
ate courses (whether discipline-based or interdisciplinary)run
a serious risk of superficialityand repetitiveness because of the
sheer mass of ground that needs to be covered. A graduate
course on motherhood, to invoke my earlier example, might
have space on the syllabus for just a taste of perspectives
across the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and arts. It
would be difficult indeed to make such a course go beyondwhat
students might have learned in an undergraduate course. The
exception to this would be courses in feminist theory, which I
can easily imagine being more advanced than undergraduate
courses-in both depth and breadth. But I do not believe that a
doctoral programin women's studies should be a pure "theory"
degree. Theory removed from praxis, including some relation to
an "empirical"base (whether textual, statistical, historical, bio-
logical, etc.), is not in my mind a viable focus for an entire
degree programin women's studies.
With the publication of their pioneering collection, Theories
of Women'sStudies, in 1983, Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli
Klein had a dream: the development of an "autonomous"disci-
pline of women's studies not bound by traditional disciplinary
boundaries, a new "transdisciplinary" discipline that would
have its own distinct knowledge base and methodology.Sandra
Coyner, one of the contributors to the volume, envisioned a
new disciplinary structure in which "the same person might
teach, for example, 'Womenin American History,''Psychology

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
318 Susan StanfordFriedman

of Women,' 'The Family,' and a Women's Studies survey or

seminar."16 Coyner acknowledged the impossibility of such a
task given the current system of training feminist scholars in
traditional disciplines, but in her call to make women's studies
an autonomous discipline with its own Ph.D. training, she
nonetheless assumed that such breadth of inquiry and meth-
odologyis possible at the advanced level. Yet her list of sample
courses shows that her own utopian vision retains the discipli-
nary boundaries produced by discipline-based feminists. The
list also reveals the sheer impossibility of a single individual's
being able to research and teach-or be trained as a student at
an advanced level-in such an array of fields.'7 As Coyner
shows, the theoretical foundation of a Ph.D. program in wom-
en's studies depends upon the assumption that a single indi-
vidual-whether student or teacher-can become sufficiently
proficient in content areas and methodologies across the hu-
manities, social sciences, sciences, and arts. I think this is an
impossible and not even desirable dream. Echoes from Moby-
Dick haunt me: "Thatway madness lies." Or perhaps more to
the point: That way, superficiality lies. In trying to know so
much, nothing is known well. That way, burnout lies. In trying
to cover so much, the women's studies teacher or student self-
destructs, a superwoman burned to a crisp by impossible
demands.

SECOND THOUGHTS
What I have argued so far doesn't sound very ambivalent. It
sounds downright hostile to doctoral degree programs in wom-
en's studies. But I do have second thoughts. Ever since ever,
my habit of mind has been to oppose what is in favor of what
might be, to trust the desire to change, and to distrust the
impulse to stay the same. I don't want to be a nay-sayer, and
(like many feminists of my generation) I am haunted with the
fear that a combination of academic success (personal and
institutional), aging, and sheer burnout might increasingly
erode the rough edges of women's studies' early brilliance and
pioneering radicalism. And so, I can't help resisting my own
arguments against the development of doctoral degree pro-
grams in women's studies.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 319

What troubles me is how much my argument is based on the

way the U.S. academy, with its territorial divisions of knowl-
edge, is currently structured. I worry about being captured in
the discourse of the present in the United States through a
failure of imagination, an inability to think more broadly about
future possibilities. Maybe I cannot break through old habits of
thought enough to imagine how advanced work in women's
studies could be done in a way that does not depend so directly
upon engagement with a traditional discipline. Perhaps it will
be our women's studies students-those whose undergraduate
education has been centered in interdisciplinary and multidis-
ciplinary women's studies-who will have the imagination to
construct women's studies as its own discipline. After all, their
education has been profoundlydifferent from my own-not only
my graduate training in the "old"days but also my continuing
self-education as an academic feminist. Who knows where
these changes might lead, especially given the importance of
the unpredictable,the anarchistic, and the utopian?
Greater emphasis on the diachronic,on the evolution of dis-
ciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in the academy would foster
thinking about the future of women's studies in ways that I
cannot at this point easily imagine. This requires foreground-
ing what I have only mentioned before: that all disciplines,
including traditional ones, are founded upon boundaries and
structures that are products of history, not a priori essences.
Relatively new disciplines like sociology and political science
appeared interdisciplinary in their formational years at the
end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Women's studies today may be like these disciplines in their
early years. Moreover,as Gloria Bowles convincingly reminds
us, traditional disciplines today are anything but unified and
stable entities.18 History,for example, is the umbrella discipline
for economic, social, intellectual, medical, political, diplomatic,
labor, and feminist historians, most of whom are also divided
by what part of the world they work on as well. Social scien-
tists have radically different methodologies for getting at an
empiricalbase-from quantitative to qualitative, from documen-
tary to participant observation and ethnography-all frequently
coexisting within a single discipline such as political science,
sociology,or cultural anthropology.The related methodologies

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
320 Susan StanfordFriedman

of quantitative social science suggests that scholars from differ-

ent disciplines like political science and sociologywho use these
methods might have more in common with each other than
they do with scholars in their own disciplines who use qualita-
tive methods. Increasingly, literary studies adapts methodol-
ogies and knowledge bases from philosophy,history, sociology,
media studies, legal studies, economics,linguistics, psychology,
and interdisciplinary fields like ethnic studies, postcolonial
studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory,
and women's studies. The boundaries between traditional dis-
ciplines are anything but fixed. Indeed, the frontiers of any
discipline are likely to lie at the interstices between itself and
other disciplines.
I was astounded by a recent experience on a search commit-
tee for dean of the UW-MadisonCollege of Letters and Science
to learn how legitimate a seat interdisciplinarity already occu-
pies at the academic banquet of knowledge. As one of only two
committee members from interdisciplinaryunits, I entered my
first meeting believing I would have to defend the need for can-
didates to support interdisciplinary programs. My fears were
grounded in the experience of twenty years ago, when our
arguments for the interdisciplinarity of women's studies often
met with hostility and suspicion. In fields relevant to women's
studies interdisciplinarywork had little legitimacy in the early
1970s, associated as it was with superficiality of content and
method, faddishness, and ephemerality. To my surprise and
delight, the greatest defenders of interdisciplinarycurriculaon
the search committee were the scientists, who insisted that our
new dean must understand that the cutting edge of science has
for many years existed at the interface of scientific boundaries.
Scholarship solidly within the discipline, they argued, is im-
portant and necessary, but it seldom breaks new ground. Their
frontiers of knowledge clearly sat in the liminal space between
traditional disciplines.19
What light, I wonder, does scientific enthusiasm for break-
ing conventional boundaries of knowledge shed on debates
about the future of women's studies? Scientific interdiscipli-
narity often depends upon multidisciplinary collaboration of
people trained in traditional disciplines and is consequently
not so very different from what women's studies teachers and

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
SusanStanfordFriedman 321

scholars have been doing since the 1970s. I am not certain how
many scientists would advocate doctoral training that aban-
doned a disciplinary base; I am quite certain that interdiscipli-
nary science degrees would not attempt to cover all four major
divisions of knowledge in the academy.Nonetheless, I wonder
if all new disciplines don't begin in multidisciplinary combina-
tions. I wonder, even more heretically, if science hasn't moved
ahead of women's studies in fostering the development of new
knowledge that emerges rapidly and creatively out of the co-
mingling of two or more traditional disciplines. I worry that
women's studies, with its need to establish legitimacy in an
environment that has often been overtly or covertly suspicious,
if not hostile, might be exacting a higher standard of discipli-
nary rigor than the traditional disciplines. We must guard
against being harder on ourselves than the traditional struc-
tures we both oppose and work within.
Such historically informed thoughts about the evolution of
(inter)disciplinarity in the academy help unravel some of my
earlier objectionsto doctoralprograms in women's studies. For
one, the anomaly of different training of faculty and students
can be answered by seeing the 1990s as a transitional moment.
It would not take many years before new women's studies
faculty could be trained in the newly emergent discipline of
women's studies. The seemingly insurmountableproblemof the
knowledge revolution in women's studies might be addressed
through the formationof new subfields within women's studies.
Currently, women's studies subfields are usually defined in
terms of existing disciplinary specializations (as reflected in
Coyner's formulation). No discipline requires its members to
know all the subfields and methodologies within its bound-
aries; perhaps the new discipline of women's studies will
devise specializations that follow intellectually manageable
requirements, allowing students to form in-depth programs in
such clusters as cultural studies; the arts; qualitative social
sciences; quantitative social sciences; or biological sciences.
And just as women's studies majors often have either double
majors or a supplementary area of specialization in existing
fields, so too might doctoral programs build into their require-
ments engagement with traditional disciplines and methodolo-
gies. Awareness of the need to balance breadth with depth in

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
322 Susan StanfordFriedman

the design of doctoralprograms could forestall the worst of my

fears about bricolage, smorgasbord, and insufficiently
advanced curricula. To echo another field of dreams, "buildit,
and they will come."20

CONCLUSION
My ambivalence about doctoral degree programs in women's
studies shakes down to an opposition at this point in time
countered by the realization that such opposition may be too
short-sighted, and by a genuine curiosity about what efforts
other universities have and might produce. I remain deeply
concerned about the ethical issues involved in training stu-
dents for jobs that for the most part do not exist in the acade-
my as it is now constituted. I am all too aware of the financial
constraints that hinder bold new experiments and expansions.
In the culture wars of today, I am strongly committed to the
vital necessity of undergraduate programs in women's studies,
and I'm not willing to undermine these programs for the bene-
fit of doctoral programs. The vast knowledge base of women's
studies, combined with the markedly different methodologies
necessary for advanced work, lead me to question the intellec-
tual viability of broad-based doctoral programs. Although
women's studies may well be an emergent discipline, I think
that now and in the near future it is still an interdisciplinary
field, producing its exciting transformations of knowledge
through dialogic engagement and transgression of disciplinary
boundaries which, to be crossed, must still exist. Nonetheless,
the rapidly changing landscape of the academy may well foster
creative reconstitution of knowledge boundaries in such a way
that feminists can balance the competing needs of breadth and
depth in women's studies for the purposes of doctoral pro-
grams. I still feel caught between a tenacious desire for the
survival of an intellectually rigorous women's studies within
an economically strapped academy and an equally insistent
dream that we keep reimagining the formations of knowledge
and the structures of the academy.I refuse to give up either.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan StanfordFriedman 323

NOTES
1. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison,only departments (not programs) can
serve as tenure homes for purposes of hiring and promotion.By design, our program
does not have departmental status, but we have recently elected to serve as a
tenure home on an ad hoc basis. Program faculty are strongly committed to this
structure and to active involvement in their tenure-home departments. As a found-
ing member of the program,I have held a fifty/fiftyjoint appointment with English
since 1975.
2. Six additional "courses" are numbers for directed study and independent
research.
3. In focusing on interdisciplinary doctoral degree programs, I exclude from consid-
eration the individually designed ad hoc interdisciplinary degree (sometimes called
the "committeePh.D.");Ph.D.'s in a particular disciplinary area of women's studies,
such as the Ph.D. in women's history offered at UW-Madisonand State University
of New York-Binghamton;concentrations in women's studies in the doctoral pro-
grams of various departments; and interdisciplinary women's studies degrees out-
side the United States, because of the different institutional structures of higher
education in other countries. For discussion of different models for Ph.D. degrees in
women's studies (particularlythe free-standing Ph.D. degrees in women's studies at
Emory University, Clark University, and York University), see Ann B. Shteir, "The
Women's Studies Ph.D.: A Report from the Field," Women'sStudies Quarterly 25
(spring/summer1997): 388-403.
4. The Women'sStudies Quarterlypublishes an invaluable list of women's studies
programs in the United States, along with what degrees, if any, they offer (reprint-
ed annually in the September issue of PMLA),but this list does not indicate institu-
tional structure and status of faculty. The oldest women's studies department, at
San Diego State University, has been joined by such large departments as the ones
at Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota. The Women's Studies
Department and Program at the University of Maryland serves as the 100 percent
tenure home for most of its core faculty, although it has some joint appointments as
well as affiliate faculty. Indiana University is moving from programto departmen-
tal status and intends to design an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. For discussion
of the institutional structures of women's studies programs and departments, see
Marilyn J. Boxer, "The Theory and Practice of Women's Studies in the United
States," Signs 7 (spring 1982): 661-95; and Women'sStudies Quarterly 25 (spring/
summer 1997).
5. This is an ethical obligation that many traditional disciplines have not met since
at least the early 1970s. The contingencies of volatile job markets, departmental
ambitions for graduate education, campus needs for inexpensive and temporary
staff, and the strong desire of many to make their lives in the academy-all continue
to undermine the ethical responsibility of graduate programstoward their students.
Still, the situation for women's studies is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, dif-
ferent.
6. For the Women's Studies Program, I teach three interdisciplinary courses: the
introductoryhumanities course, a course on women and the arts, and the capstone
seminar for majors. For both women's studies and English, my teaching and
research regularly draw on many disciplines, and I have been engaged in substan-
tial interdisciplinary programming as a Senior Fellow at the UW Institute for
Research in the Humanities.
7. By "locational,"I mean an epistemology assuming that any cultural formations
are historically and geographically inflected by the specific conditions of their
embodiment. For my definitions of locational feminism, see "BeyondGynocriticism

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
324 Susan Stanford Friedman

and Gynesis: The Geographics of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism,"
Tulsa Studies in Women'sLiterature 15 (spring 1996): 13-41, esp. 28-32.
8. To be more specific, examples of a focus of inquiry include the past, change over
time, for history; power, government, and politics, for political science. Few, if any,
disciplines have a single methodology.Political scientists, for example, may engage
in statistical analysis, survey research methods, qualitative historical and/or theo-
retical analysis; textual analysis and periodization, and so forth. Literary studies
incorporatestextual exegesis, periodization,historical contextualization,biography,
generic analysis, theory, and so forth. Nonetheless, each discipline has a (changing)
set of recognized methodologies that constitute a required part of graduate student
training. Institutional bases within higher education typically take the form of
departments. Outside the academy,they run the gamut of publishing organizations,
foundations, and public and private funding agencies.
9. Many thanks to my students in the seminar for women's studies majors and to
the gender studies faculty at LawrenceUniversity for challenging me to refine these
ideas. I am particularlyindebted to artist Helen Klebesadel for arguing that the cre-
ative and performing arts should not be subsumed into the humanities but should
be recognizedas a distinct category at the same level of generalization.
10. For attempts to define these terms, see, for example, Gloria Bowles and Renate
Duelli Klein, eds., Theories of Women's Studies (New York: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1983), esp. 40, 52-54, 56-57, 90, 99. The terms "cross-disciplinary" and "trans-
disciplinary"also appear with some frequency and even less consensual meaning.
Cross-disciplinary usually functions as a synonym for multidisciplinarity while
transdisciplinary often suggests a utopian gesture at knowledge which transcends
all disciplinary lines or a fundamental resistance to any such boundariesin the first
place. For extensive debate about the nature and desirability of interdisciplinarity,
see the Forum on Interdisciplinarity with forty-two participants on the topic in
PMLA 111 (March 1996): 271-311. For an overview of debates about cultural
hybridity, see "BeyondDifference:MigratoryFeminism in the Borderlands,"in my
Mappings:Feminism and the Cultural Geographiesof Encounter,forthcomingfrom
Princeton University Press in 1998.
11. However desirable, collaborative multidisciplinarity and individual interdisci-
plinarity in teaching and research are often discouraged because of work-load
issues, time pressures, and promotionrequirements.
12. This contradictionexists as well for undergraduatedegree programsin women's
studies, with students having an interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary major
that is fundamentally different from the graduate training and disciplinary alle-
giances of their faculty. This difference poses problems at the undergraduate
level-enough so that at UW-Madison,we strongly encouragestudents to do a double
major;students majoringonly in women's studies must complete a cluster of cours-
es in another field (the equivalent of a minor).
13. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Forum on Interdisciplinarity, PMLA 111
(March 1996): 282. See also contributionsby Lillian Robinson, Sara van den Berg,
Jacqueline Henkel, Timothy Murray,and Derek Attridge to the same issue (276-80,
284-85).
14. See Joan Kelly-Godol,"TheSocial Relation of the Sexes: MethodologicalImpli-
cations of Women'sHistory,"Signs 1 (summer 1976):809-23, and "DidWomenHave
a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate
Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz(Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 137-64.
15. Of course, some graduate students in traditional disciplines have not majored
in their Ph.D. field. In such cases, universities often require that work missed in the
undergraduatemajorhas to be made up either before applicationto graduate school
or if after admission to a graduate program, without credit toward an advanced
degree.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Susan Stanford Friedman 325

16. Sandra Coyner, "WomenStudies as an Academic Discipline: Why and How to

Do It,"in Theoriesof Women'sStudies, 60.
17. An updated version of such vast requirements appeared in an e-mail job
announcement for an assistant professor in women's studies at a university whose
women's studies program is moving from program to departmental status, with
plans to institute a doctoralprogram.In addition to knowledge of "theoryand meth-
ods related to race, ethnicity, international and cross-culturaldiversity,"candidates
should have "researchand teaching expertise related to gender from the range of
natural and human sciences, especially those related to: medicine, health, sexuality;
gendered technologies (computers, communication, electronic media and informa-
tion systems); environmental, ecological, regional, or geographic development;and
other cognate areas pertinent to contemporarygender studies." (My emphasis.) The
"and"instead of an "or"may be an oversight, but even so the range of required
knowledge and attendant methodologiesis staggering.
18. Gloria Bowles, "Is Women's Studies an Academic Discipline?" in Theories of
Women'sStudies, 32-46.
19. Confirmationof commitment to interdisciplinarity in the scientific community
comes from many sources. J. Rogers Hollingsworth is engaged in a multivolume
study of the relation between interdisciplinarity and discoveryin the biomedical sci-
ences. New interdisciplinary fields and new disciplines in the making in the sci-
ences include neurosciences, biophysics, mathematical biology, artificial intelli-
gence, cognitive sciences, dynamical systems, and medical physics. Phillip Certain,
a chemist and the new UW-Madison dean of Letters and Science, has called for
interdisciplinarity across the divisions in his widely distributed document, "Creat-
ing a New College,"March 1996 (http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/Isadmin/letsci.html).
Recognizingthe spread of scientific interdisciplinarity,Judith Allen advocatedwom-
en's studies interdisciplinarity in terms of the scientific model at the "Conferenceon
Feminism beside Itself,"held at Indiana University, Bloomington,March 1995.
20. I allude to the magic-realist The Field of Dreams, a film about the magnetic
power of vision to make impossible things happen.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.157 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:09:53 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions