Title: His Story/Her Story: A Dialogue About Including Men and Masculinities in the Women's Studies Curriculum
Abstract: In Feminist Phase Theory: An ExperienceDerived Evaluation Model, Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault proposes that Women's Studies programs evolve through five stages: the familiar absence of women at stage one; noting the absence of women at stage two; complementary but equal conceptualization of men's and women's spheres and personal qualities at stage three; reclaiming women at stage four by using women's activities, not men's, as the measure of significance; and the fifth stage, multifocal, relational that provides a gender-balanced perspective [ . . . ] which serves to fuse women's and men's experiences into a holistic view of human experience (372). Given that feminist scholarship is entering its fourth decade and that more Women's Studies programs are including the term in their program names, it is imperative that such programs take a step back and ask: has the field of Women's Studies developed to the point that we should move to stage five and explicitly embrace Men's Studies as an essential part of our programs?1 Such an undertaking is fraught with possible difficulties. Women's Studies programs were started, after all, to correct for the male bias dominant in the academy. Women's Studies provided a forum where scholarship on women was produced and taken seriously, female students and faculty could find their voice, and theoretical investigations necessary to advance the aims of the women's movement could take place.2 If the academy as a whole does not yet sufficiently integrate Women's Studies into the curriculum, integrating Men's Studies into Women's Studies could end up further marginalizing Women's Studies by reducing the number of classroom hours students spend engaging women's lives and feminist scholarship. Such an integration may appear to be another form of male privilege, with men finagling their way into the only branch of scholarship that has consistently focused on women. If there's a sudden influx of male students into our courses, Women's Studies faculty may worry that female students who have experienced the classroom as a safe space for women will lose that space. On a more theoretical level, feminist scholars worry that a move from a Women's Studies program to a Gender Studies program will dilute the political aspect of women's programs. After all, Women's Studies has traditionally been seen as the academic arm of the women's movement, yet there is no gender movement to correspond with Gender Studies (Auslander 19). While the concerns just cited certainly have merit, we three faculty members and two program directors in Women's/Gender/ Men's Studies argue that when undertaken
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 12
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot