Department of Gender Studies?

Last semester, Tara Raghuveer ‘14 and Jennifer Zhu ‘14 ran for Undergraduate Council President and Vice President on a platform that called on the University, among other things, to consider the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality as a department. Harvard’s upcoming capital campaign, which has received great coverage in The Crimson during the past week, seemsa fitting path to a department of gender studies.

There are many parts of the capital campaign that deserve and in fact require student input. (For example, I’m confused by the notion that funding priorities that don’t excite donors “are tweaked or eliminated during the vetting process”—what about funding parts of this University that may not excite Harvard’s wealthiest donors?) But for this column, I would like to focus on the implications of one possible funding target. What would a WGS department mean for the role of feminist and queer thought in our university?

As an undergraduate WGS concentrator, I would of course love WGS to receive department affiliation. The arguments for a WGS department are compelling. Currently, the Committee on Degrees in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality has none of its own graduate students—and also has no permanent faculty. My professors either hold joint appointments with other departments, meaning that they must split their time and intellectual commitments with other social sciences and humanities, or they are visiting faculty. This gives the concentration little continuity and means that there is little research published from Harvard that focuses solely on gender or sexuality. It also means that WGS is dependent on other departments to decide if they want their faculty to take joint appointments with WGS. Currently, there are no feminist economists or feminist philosophers offering classes regularly in the WGS concentration. Despite the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus’s amazing work to establish the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality and despite the popularity of WGS General Education classes like Robin Bernstein’s “Race, Gender, and Performance” and Caroline Light’s “Sex and the Citizen,” it often feels as if WGS is figuratively as well as literally shunted off into the University’s basement.

Hundreds of students are introduced to feminist theory through WGS classes each year, but few take more than a couple of WGS classes. I, like most of my WGS classmates, am a joint concentrator. The feminist philosophy of science I have read in my tutorials complements and broadens the understanding of the history of science that I study in other classes, but Harvard has not recently offered any class like “Feminism 101.” If WGS were a department, it could hire its own faculty, allowing the concentration to expand the number of departmental classes, including foundational classes.

Women’s studies was originally formulated as a critique of dominant thought in the University. The students who formed the original Committee on Women’s Studies in the 1970s to work toward a women’s studies program at Harvard declared, “Most theories upon which Harvard’s courses are based have been developed by men, who have studied men’s roles in society...Women’s Studies is needed to re-evaluate such theories.” In the years since its founding in 1987, the committee has added “gender” and “sexuality” to its purview, incorporating feminist and queer critique about the intersection of race, gender, class, and power in societies around the world. What, then, would a purely feminist syllabus look like? Most feminist writing is critique—critiques of Marx and Freud, critiques of biology and medicine, critiques of literature and sociology. Requiring all undergraduates to read Freud just so that they can understand canonical feminist critiques of Freud seems to defeat the purpose of WGS in the first place.

Perhaps, then, the purpose of having a WGS department is just so that freshmen need not have to read Freud. Once WGS can hire its own faculty and produce its own research, it can also participate in the production of its own epistemology. Is this not what the students of the 1970s wanted—a world in which courses base their theories on the writings of women, people of color, indigenous people, workers, queers?

On the other hand, perhaps becoming an established part of the academic institution would cripple the great strength of feminist and queer theory: its ability to question established modes of reasoning. What does a discipline so used to being excluded from spaces of power—in fact, a discipline built up on critique of the institutions of power—do when it is offered a seat at the table?

I don’t yet have good answers to these questions. Of course, as of now, this discussion is moot. Harvard may never have a WGS department unless the administration makes a real commitment to raising money for that purpose during the capital campaign, which they likely will not do unless students and student governments continue to make clear that WGS is a priority for us. As a member of the undergraduate Capital Campaign Task Force, I am excited to convey to Harvard the depth of student and community excitement about funding a WGS department.  But, as is true for all fundraising goals, it is important for the students, faculty, researchers, and teachers of WGS to consider and debate what, exactly, a feminist department would mean.

Sandra Y. L. Korn ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House. Follow her on Twitter @sandraylk.