Feminism's Attachments

Abstract

Feminism'sAttachments Ann Braithwaite and CatherineM. Orr There is no women's studies without feminism. Feminism is the the oretical and political foundation of women's studies. —Bonnie Zimmerman1 Although bonnie Zimmerman's claim would seem to verge on the obvious for many in women's and gender studies (WGS), consider the following not-so-unusual scenarios: • A colleague who teaches several WGS courses, serves on WGS program committees, and produces knowledge on topics such as Islam, marriage practices, and social movements through the lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, emphatically refuses the label "feminist," preferring instead to position herself as "womanist." • A colleague in WGS, whose current scholarship focuses on legal studies, disability studies, and social welfare policy, and a graduate student in WGS, whose dissertation is on a First Nations community center in a large urban setting, are both regularly challenged by their colleagues to explain what makes their work feminist, and thus WGS. FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 512 Forum:W/G/SStudies 513 • Colleagues at a national meeting of the CWSA/ACEF (the Canadian national association for WGS) openly worry that changing the name of the association to something that doesn't include the words "women," "gender," or "feminist" will mean a loss of visibility and perceived value for the work of the discipline of WGS.2 Taken together, these scenarios point to the need to rethink a number of assumptions that circulate around the questions of both this forum on "whither feminisms?" and in the field of WGS more generally about the assumed relationship between feminism and WGS. We want to argue—perhaps provocatively—for the possibilities opened up in interrogating the multiple attachments that the above scenarios make apparent. Of course, we are not alone in this provocation to rethink attachments to feminism.3 But here, we contend that such attach ments within WGS contexts both enable and delimit, produce and fail to produce, intellectual work that is up to the demands of the worlds we inhabit. Our focus, then, is on exploring some of the possi ble consequences of "letting go." As the above scenarios demonstrate, there are any number of ways in which feminism and WGS are consistently sutured together, including that WGS and its practitioners are/must be feminist; that both WGS and feminism require a focus on "appropriate" subjects; that the appropriate subjects of WGS and feminism are women or gender; and that feminism is the (only?) means to analyze the range of topics included in WGS, even while the term itself is increasingly con tested and now more typically referred to in the plural ("feminisms"). They demonstrate the ease with which WGS assumes that feminism is both necessary for and foundational to the field. And as the prompt for this forum points out, this foundational status is both intellectual and institutional: WGS is feminist, and without feminism, there is no intellectual project unique to WGS, andwithout WGS, there is no insti tutional space that is (unquestionably) feminist. Our concern is that these attachments to feminism are not benign, but rather shape how WGS can (and too often does) respond to the questions of this forum about the consequences of institutional consolidations and changes. But the "whither feminisms?" question also reveals another mean ing to this idea of attachment — that is, as a deeply held affective bond embedded in our individual disciplinary (and professional) identity 514 Forum:WjGjS Studies formations. Why do we—the practitioners of WGS — desire to main tain this connection so centrally in the firstplace? Is it that we wonder who we would be without feminism — even though the complexity, multiplicity, and indeed often contradictory understandings of this term can, and have, led to much disagreement about the sort of profes sional identity WGS should produce? There is no doubt that in inter rogating the primacy of this attachment, we risk confrontation with the various fears, anxieties, and nostalgias—as well as the hopes — that fuel our passions for the intellectual, pedagogical, and institu tional labor we do under the sign "WGS." If our intellectual identi ties and disciplinary claims are tied to the unquestioned centrality of feminism, then challenging that attachment...