Feminist speaks to Pitt department

Amanda Sammons Staff Writer

“Whenever I have given this paper, people have gotten pissed… Amanda Sammons Staff Writer

“Whenever I have given this paper, people have gotten pissed off,” announced Robyn Wiegman, Duke University’s director of women’s studies.

In the opening event of Pitt’s own women’s studies department, Wiegman discussed her recent paper, “Academic Feminism Against Itself,” using terms like “apocalyptic” and “overt despair” to describe what she calls “academic feminism’s critical deliberation on itself.”

“Like all academics, we really just write about ourselves,” Wiegman said as she presented the paper to an audience of Pitt faculty and students.

Her career in women’s studies developed in step with the growth of the field itself: When she graduated, there were no graduate programs in women’s studies. Wiegman moved from a full-time position as an English professor to a joint position in English and women’s studies, to a full-time position as a women’s studies professor at the University of California-Irvine.

“Women’s studies as a field was just beginning to hold tenure,” Wiegman said, and “Being the first person to get tenure in women’s studies is just never fun.”

She described taking an interdisciplinary approach to women’s studies as a joint professor, and then shifting to an approach treating women’s studies as a separate subject.

Much of the anxiety over the future of women’s studies is a problem of autonomy, Wiegman argued in her paper. She said academic feminism has tried to establish itself as separate from the humanities and social science fields it grew out of, while academic feminists attempt to work out the role of political and social action in an academic setting.

In addition, the various generations of feminism experience a conflict, Wiegman said, because of the current rejection of the utopianism that characterized feminist scholarship in the sixties and seventies.

“As a queer feminist activist said to me, ‘In the sixties, we really did believe the world would change in our lifetime,” Wiegman read. By her generation, she went on, “I never thought the world would change,” and the focus of feminist study has become inseparable from political action.

“‘If you can’t answer the question, ‘How are we going to do it?’ you’re not allowed to finish the thought,” Wiegman said, quoting a colleague.

“I don’t think if you have health care you can consider yourself an activist.”

Wiegman also talked about the trend of Ph.D. programs to offer two tracks, so that they produce activists as well as academics.

“Do you have to have a Ph.D. to be an activist?” she asked.

Wiegman also talked briefly about the changes she would like to see in academic feminism. She talked about the tendency to blame the emergence of critical theory in English departments for the current pedagogical problems in women’s studies.

This criticism overlooks the fact that humanities departments have been able to introduce new approaches and ideas that have grown into fields such as queer studies and women’s studies, mostly, Wiegman said, because of a lack of regulation and funding.

“Sadly, [it’s] because nobody give a shit,” she said, but added that it’s the lack of structure that has allowed women’s studies and cultural studies to emerge from the humanities.

“Is feminism only what we know of it?” Wiegman said. “We think we own it … we can’t, and therefore, we can’t know what the future is going to be.