Abstract

What happens when traditionally-trained academics begin to reconsider their disciplines in light of recent feminist scholarship? This book was written by academics outside Women's Studies programs who have changed their minds about the foundations of their disciplines. The authors share a commitment to explore the cultural construction of gender and the gendered construction of culture. Each chapter simultaneously examines and exemplifies the transformation of knowledge that resulted from their intensive study of feminist scholarship. Taken together, they not only demonstrate some of the range, variety, and intellectual vigor possible in discipline-specific reformulations, but also participate in the kind of trans-disciplinary thinking characteristic of the philosophy of Women's Studies from its inception. In the concluding chapter, the editors consider how efforts to transform traditional ways of knowing are inflected--and infected--by the politics of gender within academics.