Critical Interdisciplinarity, Women's Studies, and Cross-Cultural Insight

Abstract

In this essay I examine the relationship between methods and analysis in Women's Studies. I argue that methods produce an intellectual flexibility that can be conducive to insight, and that therefore become a way of enhancing receptivity to in members of dominant groups, but that it is only analysis that works at the same time across lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality that creates a critical interdisciplinarity. Analysis by Gloria Anzalduta, Maria Lugones, and Uma Narayan suggest that mestizaje can enhance feminist understandings of interdisciplinarity; Sandra Harding's work on standpoint theory helps articulate knowledge claims for a critical and Women's Studies. Maria Mies offers a specific example of research that moves interdisciplinarity into feminist practice, with implications for pedagogy in Women's Studies as well. Feminists often use the word interdisciplinary to distinguish Women's Studies from other academic fields, to describe the structure of women's studies programs and curricula, to identify a research methodology, to claim outsider status in the academy, and to imply a site of dialogic knowledge production. At the same time, as second-wave feminist theory has embraced difference and a plurality of feminisms, responding to critiques from women of color and, in the 1 990s, moving towards a global or international perspective on women's lives, the word cross-cultural has taken on its own value as both a description of objectives in Women's Studies and a site of conflicts within feminism.' Thus, to describe Women's Studies as either or has become something of a cliche. However, we have not yet moved in the direction of setting these two terms in collocation with each other or of theorizing their intersection. Indeed, the two terms do not readily modify each other. In some ways, focusing on concerns of interdisciplinarity in Women's Studies, thereby appearing to locate feminism strictly within an academic sphere, may appear to work against a construction of feminism that takes into account the lives and struggles of non-academic women. Similarly, because the dimensions of Women's This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Tue, 15 Nov 2016 04:01:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms