Trans/Feminist Methodology: Bridges to Interdisciplinary Thinking

Pryse, Marjorie, 1948-

NWSA Journal, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2000, pp. 105-118 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nwsa.2000.0042

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Trans/Feminist Methodology: Bridges to Interdisciplinary Thinking

MARJORIE PRYSE After analyzing the relationship between critical interdisciplinarity and expanding the potential for cross-cultural insight in Womens Studies (NWSA Journal, Spring 1998), I wanted to explore further some questions concerning methodology: how does Womens Studies cross disciplinary borders in order to construct ways of thinking in feminist analytic terms; might Womens Studies develop an interdisciplinary methodology of its own; and from what base in feminist theory might we do so. In the article that follows, I build on the work of Israeli feminist theorist Nira YuvalDavis to construct a model for feminist interdisciplinary thinking based on transversalism. The prex trans in my title derives from Latin and Germanic roots: across or over; beyond or above; from one place to another; to cross over, pass through, overcome. To feminist readers, the prex may become a noun, as in its reference to the community of transgendered persons. It may evoke the trans perspective of Gloria Anzaldas borderlands and mestiza consciousness; it may recall the metaphor of Anzaldas and Cherre Moragas 1981 book This Bridge Called My Back, since a trans is also a bridge, a span across a chasm or otherwise untraversable terrain; it may evoke problems of trans/lation, itself a word that derives from roots meaning carried across, a word often invoked when two persons who speak different languages are trying to communicate. I intend trans to evoke all of these contexts while we consider inter disciplinarity as itself a site of trans, one with afnities for the kind of cross-cultural or bi-cultural locatedness of borderlands; one that often requires translation between and across the languages of other disciplines; a location that even after 30 years of feminist pedagogy, scholarship, and activism still marks Womens Studies as queer in the academic world; yet a place from which we may embark, a site of trans/port and of trans/ formation. Trans perspectives offer new ways to think about interdisciplinarity in Womens Studies. In the essay that follows, I will begin by exploring current understandings of interdisciplinarity in Womens Studies, invoke a paradigm for a transversal feminism and demonstrate its implications for interdisciplinarity, and end by constructing a model for a transdisciplinary methodology.

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Current Understandings of Interdisciplinarity in Womens Studies

For 30 years Womens Studies has lived with casual and unexamined understandings of interdisciplinarity. Generally the term has implied structural descriptions of womens studies programs and departments, in which faculty and students with an array of disciplinary training and what the academy calls majors come together to explore common questions. For most of those 30 years, trying to understand gender and its interconnection with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, region, and nationality from different disciplinary perspectives has seemed sufcient to occupy our eld of study; indeed, understanding in order to end sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia hasmore or less, and differently in different institutional settingsserved to dene the content of Womens Studies. At the same time, when feminist scholars in the traditional disciplines have worked to reform those disciplines in the name of curriculum inclusion or integration efforts, they have invoked gender, race, and class as vectors of analysis, as if merely importing these into existing scholarly practices in other disciplines would transform research outside of Womens Studies. Without clearly acknowledging our current merging of the two, sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia have become the objects of study for Womens Studies, while gender, race, class, and sexuality as vectors of analysis have served as place-holders for some methodology that we have yet to design. And in the process, the ways the traditional disciplines have asserted territorial claims to methodology have remained unchallenged because we have failed to understand that vectors of analysis do not in themselves constitute methodology even though they do dene both our political and intellectual commitments. One of the most interesting recent discussions of interdisciplinarity appears in the summer 1998 issue of Feminist Studies devoted to the growth in feminist graduate education, particularly the increase in the number of free-standing Ph.D. programs. The challenge the move to graduate education raises for Womens Studies concerns precisely the interrelation between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Most graduate programs continue to rely on faculty from traditional disciplines who teach courses that remain more or less grounded in the disciplinary methodologies they know and use in their own research, and womens studies courses, especially those cross-listed with other disciplines, generally become applications of those methodologies to understanding sexism, racism, classism, homophobia. In one of the articles in this collection, Susan Stanford Friedman initially argues against the interdisciplinary Ph.D. but then offers some second thoughts in which she tries to imagine feminist graduate education that would not depend so

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directly upon engagement with a traditional discipline (Friedman 1998, 319). She recalls that 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 (319) and reminds us that the frontiers of any discipline are likely to lie at the interstices between itself and other disciplines (320). The crucial issue for Friedman remains the question of methodology in interdisciplinary work, or, rather, the lack of methodology in Womens Studies. Friedman argues that interdisciplinarity is most successful when it emerges out of a rm grasp of the knowledge bases and methodologies of at least one of the existing disciplines (312). She urges caution, writing,
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 interdisciplinarity rests in potential superciality. Disciplinarity offers depth but also insularity; interdisciplinarity offers scope but also rootlessness. (312)

For Friedman, constructing an interdisciplinary methodology remains one of our unnished and most challenging tasks. One way of understanding the challenge of interdisciplinarity involves envisioning a hybrid methodology, a trans methodology, that will create more balance between a free-standing interdisciplinarity and Womens Studiess historical reliance on the methodologies of other disciplines. In a recent essay in NWSA Journal I began to examine the relationship between interdisciplinary methods and cross-cultural analysis in Womens Studies.1 I argue there that interdisciplinarity produces an intellectual exibility that can be conducive to cross-cultural insight and that therefore becomes a way of enhancing receptivity to difference in members of dominant groups. I have noticed that students who learn to read and think across disciplinary lines gain practice in intellectual border-crossing that seems to make it easier for them to learn from locational positions with which they do not identify; in other words, I suggest that thinking across disciplinary boundaries and theorizing, listening, and analyzing across vectors of race, class, gender, and sexuality are each in themselves cognitive and affective activities that promote translation and dialogue and, when we combine them, create necessary and sufcient conditions for a critical feminist interdisciplinarity. The challenges women of color began to raise for Womens Studies in the 1980s constructed feminist theory as interwoven vectors of oppression and analysis; I see those same challenges as central to the development of an enhanced interdisciplinarity now, one that involves transversality.

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Transversal Feminism
Work by the Israeli feminist scholar and activist Nira Yuval-Davis can help us develop this understanding of cross-cultural interdisciplinarity further in light of what she calls a transversal feminism. In her 1997 book Gender & Nation, Yuval-Davis introduces the concept of transversal politics in order to examine the extent to which feminist solidarity is possible given womens social and especially national divisions (117). She describes the far-reaching changes in both the West and the Third World that have been visible on the international feminist scene during the 1980s and 1990s and credits the rise of the black feminist movement in the West with challenging ethnocentrism in such a way that, in YuvalDaviss view, a growing sensitivity to issues of difference and the multipositionality of women has started to develop among white western feminists (118). While many feminists in the 1970s did express concern for race and class differences among women, and while for some white women who had participated in the Civil Rights movement feminism was an outgrowth of activism to end segregation, it has required the contributions to theory of black and Chicana feminists to move Womens Studies into an intellectual position in which racism and ethnocentrism can be effectively challenged. However, for Yuval-Davis, a feminist version of multiculturalism that reects sensitivity to issues of difference has resulted in identity politics, which she sees as reinforcing the positional boundaries between women rather than making these more uid. In a view that to some might seem controversial and to others forward-thinking, Yuval-Davis offers a model of transversality as a move away from identity politics, one which has signicant implications for Womens Studies. Yuval-Davis credits the term transversal politics to a group of Italian feminists who organized a meeting in 1993 in Bologna between Palestinian and Israeli women (125). As a participant in that meeting, she came to understand transversality as an alternative to identity politics. The problem with identity politics for Yuval-Davis is that it serves as a kind of ideological positioning that assumes essentialist homogeneity within each category. It assumes that all persons who fall into a particular category (such as blacks, Jews, women, heterosexuals) share a common perspective. Such an assumption equates individual identity with group identity rather than acknowledging that differences exist that do not fall into the categories constructed under the rubric of identity politics. The challenge for Yuval-Davis involves how women can enter into dialogue concerning their material and political realities without being required to assert their collective identity politics in such a way that they cannot move outside their ideological positioning.

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Citing the importance Patricia Hill-Collins gives to recognizing the different positionings from which different groupings view reality while recognizing at the same time that such situated knowledge is always partial (1990, 129), Yuval-Davis adds the terminology of the Italian transversalist feminists:
The idea is that each participant in the dialogue brings with her the rooting in her own membership and identity, but at the same time tries to shift in order to put herself in a situation of exchange with women who have different membership and identity. They called this form of dialogue transversalism to differentiate from universalism which, by assuming a homogenous point of departure, ends up being exclusive instead of inclusive, and [from] relativism which assumes that, because of the differential points of departure, no common understanding and genuine dialogue are possible at all. (130)

Shifting does not involve losing ones own rooting and set of values and the process of shifting should not homogenize the other (130). While transversal politics does not assume that dialogue across differences is boundary-free, Yuval-Davis writes that the boundaries of a transversal dialogue are determined by the message, rather than the messenger and that the struggle against oppression and discrimination might (and mostly does) have a specic categorical focus but is never conned just to that category (131).

Transversal Politics and Feminist Interdisciplinarity

The work of Yuval-Davis and the Italian transversalists points the direction for the construction of a transversal methodology for Womens Studies. Our attempt here should be to devise a methodology for interdisciplinarity that will, like transversal politics, differentiate both from universalismthe research perspective Donna Haraway termed the god trick (Haraway 1988, 581)and at the same time from a relativism that would prevent feminist scholars and researchers from doing cross-cultural research. A transversal methodology would allow feminists to construct research questions that emerge from thinking from womens lives (Harding 1991) while at the same time getting specic (Phelan 1994) about differences between and among women. Just as those differences within feminism have served to check both universalism and essentialism, getting specic about our research methodology can help us prevent the excesses, gaps, unasked questions, and partial vision of disciplinary methods, characterized as they are by a relatively narrow range of accepted ways of asking questions, gathering data, identifying parameters, and testing hypotheses. Furthermore, while students and faculty, as they currently are within most womens studies programs and departments, may remain rooted

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in a particular disciplinary methodology, a transversal interdisciplinarity requires feminist scholars to learn to shift and pivot as an ongoing aspect of our own methodological practice. It does not require us to become experts in all research methodologies and the creative arts, but rather to focus on the ways in which rooting makes shifting possible; and it is the shifting that is the trans movement in feminist thinking. It is learning to shift and pivot while remaining grounded in a latticework of identities and research methodologies that I am proposing as the design for a transversal, trans/feminist methodology for Womens Studies. In order to be able to shift, students as well as faculty have needed to root themselves in a particular set of methods borrowed from or learned within the traditional disciplines; this is probably the assumption behind the creation of concentration requirements in many undergraduate and graduate programs in Womens Studies. However, most students do not develop disciplinary reectiveness as a result of remaining rooted in a concentration.When I have asked students to describe the assumptions of their majors or minors, they have often been unable to do so, and they are even less able to describe the differences in assumptions and methodologies between one discipline and another. Like students, faculty also have difculty developing disciplinary reectiveness. Friedman writes that feminist scholars across disciplinary divisions may well share a certain core of feminist theory that shapes some of their research questions, but they hardly share a common methodological language and can barely understand each others research (1998, 315). If methodological shifting should prove to be less difcult than challenging ones own racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism, it would still serve as good practice for the kinds of trans movements that are necessary for cross-cultural and cross-identity dialogue to be meaningful. However, feminist scholars may hold even more tenaciously to their disciplinary socializations and methodologies than they do to their cultural attitudes and biases. What Friedman calls methodological chasms (1998, 315) between disciplinary divisions among feminists have the same effect on attempts to create interdisciplinarity as identity politics does on attempts to create productive dialogue across differences. Most of us are far too committed to the superiority of the methodologies we learned in graduate school. And despite attempts within Womens Studies to support diversity among faculty and curricula, we have rarely extended the concept of diversity to include tolerance for and understanding of each others disciplinary methodologies: how we work and how we have learned to think. As a step toward encouraging such tolerance, I will briey discuss ways of thinking differently about disciplinary divisions. We can learn from each other across these divisions. For example:

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(1) With the theory revolution, humanities research has increasingly focused on strategies for reading textstexts that are no longer always dened as either literary or written. But qualitative and ethnographic research in the social sciences, like creative writing, also produces textual narrative. Interpretations and conclusions based on open-ended questionnaires, interviews, or focus groups might be productively complicated by applying reading strategies from the humanities to these other narratives. The humanities can complicate and strengthen research results in the social sciences. (2) As feminist standpoint theorists have argued, social science research tends to ignore or minimize the way research questions are generated, or what is called the context of discovery (Harding 1991, 14344). Because it is only after the researcher has posed a question that the rules of scientic method can be invoked, the political and social inuences that govern the selection of research topics are viewed as preliminary and outside the purview of scientic method. Thus they remain invisible within conventional understandings of objectivity. Sandra Harding proposes a strong objectivity that would allow individuals and cultures to detect the assumptions and agendas that govern and shape both the questions researchers are allowed to ask and those that often remain suppressed or discouraged (1991, 149). However, as feminists develop ways to detect these political and social inuences, they will also in effect be suggesting ways feminist social science studies can complicate reading strategies in the humanities. (3) Work in the pedagogy of science studies implies ways scientic methods can help researchers and creative artists in other elds. Sue Rossers 1990 book Female-Friendly Science offers observations and procedures for practice in science that can guide the development of interdisciplinary methodology. Rosser approaches the teaching of science from the perspective that the desire of many women students for relationship can be converted into methods that will connect women to science. For example, Rosser advises science instructors and students to increase the numbers of observations and remain longer in the observational stage of the scientic method (Rosser 1990, 59). Remaining longer in the observational stage, she suggests, makes for better science; it also enhances the relationship between the researcher and the object of research. According to Evelyn Fox Keller, geneticist Barbara McClintock listened to the corn plants she was studying in order to develop a feeling for the organism (Keller 1983). Remaining longer in the observational stage makes such listening possible, and for more than scientists; it can also increase the subtlety of interpretive practice in the humanities, of creative technique in the arts, and of the ability of social scientists to interpret the results of their research.

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Designing a Transversal Feminist Methodology

The lattice-work produced by the intersection of vectors of oppression with interdisciplinary epistemologiesa transversal methodologycreates a conceptual structure strong enough to be suspended across the gaps between us rather than built on anyones back.2 Moving beyond Friedmans methodological chasms and learning tolerance for each otherss ways of thinking requires a transversal shifting. How might we design a transversal feminist methodology that would both encourage and emerge from such rooting and shifting? In large part the lack of a common methodological language across the disciplines results from the traditional separation between theory and practice, with practice relegated to internship opportunities designed to consolidate disciplinary commitment among student interns rather than to bring back into the discipline research questions that emerge from communities and constituencies outside the university. What has differentiated Womens Studies from other disciplines since its beginning in the 1970s has been an interconnection between academics and activism, an ideal that the National Womens Studies Association has reected in both its organizational structure and its conference programming but which, in a larger sense, denes differences in general between the content and methodology of Womens Studies and that of other disciplines. However, the traditional disciplines in their very structures do not possess a social justice orientation.3 Indeed, the logic of the disciplines that has carried over from the historical origins of the modern university in the late nineteenth-century required denition by exclusion, specically the exclusion of persons of particular gender, race, or class origins from scholarship as well as the identication of questions concerning the lives of such persons as outside the realm of disciplinary inquiry. The epistemological gaps that exist between disciplines may be viewed as moats, the postulates and assumptions governing rules of disciplinary logic as drawbridges (not the spans of trans) against permeability beyond disciplinary borders and specically against any interface with social and political life. Furthermore, as others have discussed, disciplinary logic and disciplinary structures also represent attempts to construct strong institutional boundaries in order to prevent poaching and encroachment from other disciplines (Klein 1990). Indeed, at the level of college and university governance, where departmental structures based on disciplinary identities serve to protect access to resources, interdisciplinary programs in general and Womens Studies in particular pose a challenge to such exclusionary logic. When Womens Studies proposes a new course, for example, in History of Feminism, typically the womens studies program or department must secure the signature of the chair of the history depart-

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ment that, in effect, acknowledges minimal overlap of course offerings, a practice that protects disciplinary boundaries. As Womens Studies becomes more institutionalized and as other disciplines remain more or less committed to their traditional missions,4 Womens Studies can become more creative in the kinds of course offerings we propose. That is to say, Womens Studies can begin to offer courses that cross disciplinary methodologies (requiring, say, more than one) in the way we have already incorporated cross-cultural differences among women (offering courses that include more than one vector of oppression or analysis). Within my department, for example, we offer our own courses in which disciplinary content and methodology seem already embedded, courses such as History of Women and Social Change, Black Women in U.S. History, Literature of Feminism, Women, Biology, and Health, Women and the Law, and Feminist Thought and Public Policy, among others. The boldness in such course offerings results, in effect, from acknowledgment by the disciplines (as a result of their signing off on our course proposals) that, no, they do not cover or include more than marginal course content on women, on feminist analysis, or on the way foregrounding gender-and-race or gender-and-class analysis might change their modes of inquiry. In the above list of courses, the emphasis on women and feminism has seemed to produce the terms that mark the difference between Womens Studies and the disciplines, and this difference has secured Womens Studies its expanding core curriculum. In order to avoid, or in failing to recognize the importance of including, courses that will mark women and feminism, departments like history, literature, and biology have been willing to yield the very terms that in any other context, they would assert as their disciplinary property. In other words, in the process of protecting their own borders from the transgressive challenges of feminist thinking, disciplines have had to acknowledge that their very identities (history, literature, biology) are not the impermeable boundaries some might argue represent natural divisions of knowledge (divisions that interdisciplinary students and scholars know to be man-made and therefore subject to dismantling and alternative reconstruction) but are rather methodologies they cannot actually own. In this way, the process of expanding curricula in Womens Studies has revealed methodologies characterized by terms like history, literature, and biology to be portable and boundaries between disciplines to be even more arbitrary than we had already understood. And such methodologies may not be owned by any single discipline because they merely name the broad range of strategies for thinking, for design, for sorting into categories, and for identifying and solving problems.5 Methodology, then, when examined closely, already becomes a transgressive term, a branch of logic dealing with the general principles of the formation of knowledge; even though the term may also be appropriated

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as the system of principles, practices, and procedures applied to any specic branch of knowledge,6 it does not serve to dene the specic branches themselves. Rather, in the Greek origins of the word, method signals a going after, a pursuit that derives from met(a)-, after, and hodos, journey. Rather than prescribing arbitrary and pre-established boundaries between branches of knowledge or disciplines, the term methodology invokes a journey of critical inquiry, a going across, over, beyond, and through, a planful construction of epistemological spans that will allow the trans-ient to become a journeyer, a journeyman, a person who has served an apprenticeship and become competent in principles, practices, and procedures. Because no single discipline can own such a going after, such a journey to discover or construct epistemological spans, trans, and bridges of multiple kinds, methodology can be reclaimed by a critical interdisciplinarity that insists both on deriving these strategies from the lives of women and of persons in other nondominant groups and on making them accessible to those persons for what Harding terms their own emancipatory projects (1991, 285). Indeed, in designing a transversal feminist methodology, the relevant trans becomes that of transgression, trans as a stepping across limits, as trespass (a crossing over), as transcription (a writing over), as transduction (a leading across), as transference (a shifting or making over).7 At the very least, a trans/feminist interdisciplinarity constructs an intellectual space in which scholars and students with different disciplinary orientations (or none at all) learn each otherss language, language such as: textual analysis; qualitative research; ethnography; quantitative methods; concepts of framing, blurring, and foregrounding; storytelling and reading strategies; replicability and scientic method; multivariate analysis; historiography; focus groups; practitioner research; and intersecting vectors of analysis, among others. If such a space were a course, then one of the goals for students learning the language of different methodologies would include becoming translators across disciplinary intolerance. A trans/feminist methodology adds a third dimension to the lattice-work that already interweaves cross-cultural perspectives (on gender, race, class, sexuality) with our claims for interdisciplinarity. Learning to read, speak, and work across methodologies that we have previously allowed to remain unchallenged prerogatives of the disciplines reveals the arbitrariness of the modes of travel, the meta-hodos that becomes the next bridge Womens Studies needs to build. Furthermore, a trans/feminist methodology can exist beyond or above creative and scholarly work that requires students to invoke a home disciplinary base. For example, methodology in Womens Studies begins with a focus on all the issues that involve the context of discovery of research questions and artistic design rather than on the applica-

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tion of specic research methods or creative practices as the disciplines currently understand them. Since, as Donna Haraway writes, feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges (Haraway 1988, 581), a trans/feminist methodology also helps students learn to situate the assumptions, limitations, and political and social inuences of any particular research or creative project. In order to do so, students need to explore gaps in the research questions and representational techniques the traditional disciplines have adopted; to learn alternative cultural reading and viewing strategies; and to incorporate into the center of feminist analysis questions concerning epistemology as these have emerged from feminist critiques of science. A trans/feminist methodology allows us to explore Hardings strong objectivity as a way of reading womens stories and of understanding feminist art as forms of local knowledge, as autobiographical, ctional, and visual representations that may be necessary if not sufcient generators of feminist research (Harding 1991, 13863). Finally, a trans/feminist interdisciplinarity gives students practice in rooting and shifting between interdisciplinarity and feminist research in other disciplines. In the sense that the trans of transversalism also invokes transition, there remains a place for current understandings of interdisciplinarity in Womens Studies as complementing rather than supplanting the work of feminist disciplinary research. Indeed, the strong presence of feminist scholars in the traditional disciplines doing their own research in some ways makes it possible for Womens Studies to address other issues, such as: from where and from whom do we develop our research questions and how do we construct feminist research designs; how do we translate across and between different research and creative methodologies; how do we ensure that the researcher develop an ability to listen to the material8 and that the research project makes space for research subjects to become active participants in the shaping of research questions; how do researchers learn to reect on their own biases and assumptions, especially when research subjects are cultural others for the researcher; how do we develop feminist reading strategies that help us dismantle those conventional assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality that cloud our claims to objectivity; and how do we understand situated knowledge and subjectivity beyond the connes of identity politics. Toni Morrisons paradigm of Playing in the Dark, from her study of the unrecognized presence of Africanism in American literary texts, contributes to the design for a trans/feminist interdisciplinary methodology. Demonstrating what she calls the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase Africanism from cultural view (Morrison 1992, 9), Morrison suggests that these strategies lead to startling displays of scholarly lapses in objectivity (8) and a willful critical blindness (18). For Mor-

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rison, both creative writers and critics share the same weak objectivity that Harding nds in the sciences and social sciences. Morrison describes her own project in Playing in the Dark as an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served (90). A trans/feminist methodology for research and creative practice must attend above all to what the described and imagined have to say to the describers and the imaginers. In conclusion, if we begin to practice a rooting and shifting model of cross-disciplinary dialogue, we may be surprised to discover that methodological socializations and prejudices remain even more intransigent than those of race, class, sexuality, ability, region, and nationality. My hope is that we can verse our students in the ways we have learned to think but that we can also trans/verse them across and beyond those prejudices. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the transverse in a nautical context expresses the zigzag route of a vessel forced by contrary winds to sail on different courses. In a way, weve been on a transverse from the beginning of Womens Studies, forced by contrary winds to sail on different courses, often guided by the pragmatic concerns of limited resources and a hostile environment. But let us now create versatile students: students capable of making future turns; capable of moving freely in all directions; capable of rooting and shifting in both political and academic spheres. Transversality is more than a political issue; it becomes an alternative intellectual structure for Womens Studies. We can expect that students who engage in the struggle with interdisciplinary methodologies will also become versed in the ability to engage in dialogue across differences; transversal politics and transversal methodologies are interconnected. In this interconnection lies the particular bridge for Womens Studies to move forward toward new constructions of interdisciplinary thinking. This article is a revised version of the talk I presented as part of the plenary on interdisciplinarity at the NWSA Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 1999. Marjorie Pryse holds a joint appointment as professor in the Departments of Womens Studies and English at SUNY-Albany. Research interests include curriculum development in Womens Studies. She is completing a co-authored book on nineteenth-century United States regionalism and feminist subjectivity with Judith Fetterley.

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Notes
1. In that essay I also discuss the historical construction of the modern university and the disciplines as we know them in the late nineteenth-century, and note the structural and political coincidence of the carving up of knowledge into the disciplines and the colonization of the continent of Africa. 2. I am alluding here to Donna Kate Rushins The Bridge Poem, in Moraga and Anzalda (1981), in which she writes, Ive had enough / Im sick of seeing and touching / Both sides of things / Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody (xxixxii). 3. Linda Nicholson reinforced this point in recent conversation with the author. 4. We should note here that even though there may be dramatic changes in the research orientations and content of any particular discipline, such changes still do not reect either an integration of feminist critique or a commitment to research that would emerge from questions communities outside the discipline might ask or problems (such as racism, classism, sexism, and so forth) they would like to solve. 5. When we begin to consider ownership of research questions and methodologies, we come up against the ways in which research dollars connected to specic projects, and questions of interest to the grantors rather than independent and unencumbered research, have come to constitute power and knowledge in the new corporate university models that appear to be replacing humanist academic structures. Thus, economic resources construct the research questions that can be asked, and grantors come to have a vested interest in disciplinary socialization that can police the parameters of research that can be conducted within the discipline receiving the grant, often resulting in muting critical questions that might be asked about the research. Furthermore, such disciplinary socialization then guarantees that grant money will continue to be channeled into the same disciplines. 6. Both denitions are from American Heritage Dictionary. 7. The denitions in parentheses identify the etymological meanings of the words, according to the American Heritage Dictionary. 8. Keller citing Barbara McClintock (Keller 1985, 162).

References
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Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1998. (Inter)Disciplinarity and the Question of the Womens Studies Ph.D. Feminist Studies 24(2):30125. Gunew, Sneja. 1990. Feminist Knowledge: Critique & Construct. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3):57599. Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Womens Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1983. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: Freeman. . 1985. Reections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Klein, Julie Thompson. 1990. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Moraga, Cherre, and Gloria Anzalda, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phelan, Shane. 1994. Getting Specic: Postmodern Lesbian Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pryse, Marjorie. 1998. Critical Interdisciplinarity, Womens Studies, and CrossCultural Insight. NWSA Journal 10(1):122. Rosser, Sue. 1990. Female-Friendly Science. New York: Pergamon Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Women, Ethnicity and Empowerment: Towards Transversal Politics. In her Gender & Nation, 11633. London: Sage.