Discusses paradoxical challenges to the future of academic feminism, noting the growing conservatism of the surrounding political climate and the academy's increasing dependence on technological and managerial forces. Highlights two paradoxes: the growth of transdisciplinary feminist scholarship has generated greater disciplinary specialization,…

Recommends transdisciplinarity to help address the threatened loss of critical potential that accompanies the increasing institutionalization of women's and gender studies. Transdisciplinarity means constituting disciplines less around a single core than around multiple knots in a netlike structure. Women's studies must trace the paths of these…

The health of black women's studies parallels that of larger academic fields. Reviews the circulation of ideas, scholarship, and theoretical paradigms in today's black women's studies, concluding that scholarly space is shrinking, and conversation in the field is limited. Notes the shrinking space among African Americanists and feminists sharply…

Assesses American and French feminist theory. Considers several novels that reflect in varying ways their authors' ambivalence about appropriating the dominant (male) discourse and about what alternatives to this discourse may exist. (CMG)

Discusses directions in which literary, cultural, ethnic, and women's studies have moved in recent years, noting what has been lost by following certain discursive directions proposed by feminism and rejecting others. Examines the steady move toward separation of political from poetic and recommends a return to the literary imagination and…

Reflects on positive and worrisome shifts in women's studies over 25 years. Positive shifts include establishment of women's studies programs in over 700 colleges and establishment of sections on gender in most major disciplinary organizations. Causes for concern include ways the academy may have changed feminists and women's studies programs.…

Origins and details of various women's caucuses in chemistry, mathematical sciences, biological sciences, physics, engineering, and geosciences are provided. In addition, their collective aims and activities are appendixed. (Author/KR)

Discusses H.D.'s influence on Adrienne Rich in the context of Rich's vision of female literary tradition as a "family" model of influence in which mothers and daughters, represented by past and present authors, seek to transcend the divisive attitudes of patriarchy (in contrast to Bloom's theory of literary, oedipal rivalry). (ML)

Asserts that feminist thinkers must self-consciously and critically confront various traditions of political discourse, feminist and nonfeminist. Reviews a number of these traditions and examines several modes that seem promising for the creation of a feminist discourse that rejects domination. (Author/GC)

Presents a theory of the connections between disabilities and gender, arguing that because bodies are so central to gender, people with disabilities are vulnerable to being denied gender recognition. Though both sexes experience devaluation and discrimination when disabled, being disabled further diminishes women's already devalued status. For…

Discusses how to encourage drama students to recognize and confront their privilege without reifying differences between white and other. Suggests using drama to illustrate institutionalized and invisible whiteness produced in the rhetoric of liberal humanism. Reconfigures identity as too situational and relational to be approached via race,…

Discusses possible intersections between feminist studies and American Indian women's studies, noting the complexity of identity politics when most contemporary Indians have mixed blood. No single authoritative Native women's position or feminist theory of Native women exists. These labels are often umbrella terms that inadequately represent those…

Recent technological developments in interfaces, programing philosophy, and artificial intelligence may invite the participation of women programers, who find a concrete, intuitive, and informal style of programing more congenial than the hierarchical, rule-driven style heretofore pervasive in computer culture. (DM)

Using a Marxist framework modified by recent feminist theory, analyzes the work of three seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers. Illustrates how women's historical participation in production for consumption rather than exchange gave rise to the polyvocal critical perspective essential to the novel's identity. (CJS)

Concepts that these four feminists had about science as a body of knowledge are quite different due to the time span involved. The modern idea that the human species has outgrown nature separates Firestone from the earlier authors of the classics of feminist thought. (Author/KR)