Offended by Offence

On January 12, 2010, the CBC Radio program, The Current, investigated the topic of “Women’s Studies” in universities today (http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/).  It noted that, with these programs, “women created a new field of study… one centred on their own experiences and perspectives”.  There was also a discussion of the fact that Women’s Studies programs are transforming themselves into “Gender Studies” and “Sexuality Studies” because it is becoming difficult to attract sufficient numbers of students to major in these programs.  To investigate this topic, Catherine Porter (a columnist with the Toronto Star)  and Barbara Kay (a columnist with the National Post) were interviewed. 

Although a number of important criticisms of Women’s Studies were expressed by Barbara Kay, the columnist’s anti-feminist stance inhibited an understanding of the troubles the have been brewing for quite a while in these interdisciplinary programs.  As has been argued in Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge’s Professing Feminism and Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism?, one can be a feminist while still being opposed to the field known as Women’s Studies.  This is because it is currently not a program that focuses on women as a subject (a valid and important topic for academic study) that can be analyzed with a wide range of theoretical perspectives.  Instead, it insists that women must be studied in a particular way, which, as Patai and Koertge have pointed out, results in all sorts of ideological policing. 

The main problem, which was not discussed on The Current, is the insistence of Women’s Studies programs that biology determines knowledge (i.e. “perspectives”).  Women have a special ”way of knowing” that is different from how men understand the world.   Those who do not study women in the right “way” are not welcomed into the postmodern sisterhood.  The result is the isolation of the study of women from mainstream disciplines, and an entire body of research that has not been scrutinized by scientific methods accessible to all.

Studying women is very important to the knowledge of humanity as a whole, and it should not be immune from rigorous scholarly evaluation.  To do so makes the entire field subject to wishful thinking, demagoguery and superstition.  Instead of understanding women’s role in history and the social and economic conditions influencing female-male relations, the field is contributing to sexual segregation.  Taking the arguments of Women’s Studies seriously would mean that women cannot participate equally in scientific research and modern occupations because their “way of knowing” would prevent them from collaborating with men for the benefit of all.   This obstructs, rather than facilitates, the achievement of gender equality.