WhitherFeminismin Higher Education in the CurrentCrisis? Laura Briggs I want to argue, against all common sense and a great deal of experience, that feminist scholars and administrators can have what they want and that the important question for how we conceptual ize the relationship of queer and sexuality studies to women's stud ies should not be one of resources. I say this having been chair of a department at the University of Arizona that survived an effort to eliminate it,and I take very seriously the neoliberal discourse that has shrunk education budgets across the board—more sharply in K-12, but still quite acutely in higher education, especially public higher education. Even so, I want to argue that women's studies, ethnic stud ies, LGBTQ. studies, and, to the extent it has been institutionalized in the US academy, postcolonial studies, are well equipped and well positioned to survive, and that the provocative and interesting intel lectual questions about where sexuality and queer studies belong in relationship to women's studies, and what this all has to do with the politics of feminism, should be divorced from the resource questions. They don't belong together. Myself, I am agnostic; I have seen sexuality studies productively separated from and nested within women's studies. At the Univer sity of Arizona, where I was for fifteen years, scholarship and activism thrive at the lively Institute for LGBT Studies, which is distinct from both the Gender and Women's Studies teaching unit, with its BA, FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 502 Forum:W/G/SStudies 503 MA/JD, and PhD degrees, and the attached Southwest Institute for Research on Women. For reasons of history and personnel, these are configurations that made sense and captured our hopes and imag ination. Neither name fixed limits on the horizon of our work; the University of Arizona's Women's Studies Department, as it was called until 2007, had as its mission statement "the feminist study of every thing" and LGBT studies hosted the Sex, Race, and Globalization proj ect. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I am now, the recently renamed and departmentalized Women, Gender, Sexual ity Studies has been growing, adding new people and courses in ways made possible by linking the two fields. Neither seems intrinsically better, nor was either move necessary for survival; they simply made sense, given the tools, resources, and opportunities at hand. 1 would argue that the most radical thing we can do is be pragmatic and even a little bored about the name-game; it is a strategy for garnering resources and even growing, nothing more—it doesn't describe our alliances, our politics, or the crucial issues that we will take up (some of which are just around the next corner, not yet visible from where we sit now). We are in universities, but not entirely ofthem — our hopes and aspirations for world-transforming knowledge, work, and activ ism extend well beyond them, and we lose when we think we are or ought to be described or confined by these spaces. These are related to the questions that animate much of what is lively and provocative, still, about the exchange between Wendy Brown in "The Impossibility of Women's Studies" and Robyn Wiegman in her response, "The Possibility of Women's Studies."1 Brown argues, and Wiegman agrees, that much of the source of excitement, renewal, and new knowledge in women's studies is coming from critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and I would concur with that. They arrive at different conclusions from there about the institutionalization of women's studies, with Brown arguing (wrongly, in my view) that we should refrain from further institutionalization and turn the project of feminist scholarship back to the disciplines, while Wiegman argues that this is precisely the kind of interdisciplin ary knowledge production that women's studies exists for. Certainly, women's studies cannot continue productively without sexuality studies, and, certainly, sexuality studies is derived and derives from feminist scholarship. What that means about institutionalization, I 504 Forum:W/G/SStudies think, is essentially a local question, belonging to the particular con figurations...