Troubling Women's Studies: Pasts, Presents and Possibilities

The four essays in this collection present a multifaceted conversation about what is at stake in ‘passing on’ the institutionalized project of Women's Studies at this historic moment. The authors come to this conversation from a diversity of histories, commitments and investments in Women's Studies. Framed by the argument that Women's Studies is a project fraught with uncertainty, the authors explore what it means to live within this uncertainty and how one might respond to it intellectually, emotionally, politically, institutionally and pedagogically. In exploring their own responses and taking into consideration responses from other feminist intellectuals, the authors subject their practices to the same kind of academic critique to which they subject the discipline, its location, theories, methods and pedagogies. The purpose of these essays is not to enact these responses nor to fix a firm direction for the future of the discipline; but rather, by looking back and attending to the now, inspire us to grapple with what might be possible.