Giving gender studies its due
The symposium on ‘Transnational Bodies’ which was recently held in Amsterdam to commemorate the upcoming anniversary of the European Journal of Women’s Studies was remarkable in many ways, but what left me feeling just a little cranky was a remark made by one of the speakers.
Abstract
Gender studies has been around for a long time now. However, one can hardly avoid noticing that while its scholarly insights have been taken up within the mainstream, its theorizing and research are rarely given due credit. A case in point is the symposium on ‘Transnational Bodies’ which was recently held in Amsterdam to commemorate the upcoming anniversary of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, which has been in existence for nearly two decades. The symposium was remarkable in many ways (more on that in just a moment), but what left me feeling just a little cranky was a remark made by one of the speakers. Casting her eyes over the primarily female audience, she noted that it was no coincidence that a topic like this would draw so many women. After all, she explained, the body has always been a ‘women’s issue’. She then proceeded to provide a sociological take on the body, drawing upon social theories currently popular in sociology, while making no reference to the – by now – massive scholarship on the body within gender studies. While there was nothing wrong with her presentation, which was interesting and provocative, her opening left me with a disturbing sense of déjà vu. After more than three decades in the field of gender studies and two decades on the editorial board of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, I am left wondering why gender studies continues to be defined as ‘something of interest for women’? Why are certain topics (like the body) assumed to be primarily ‘women’s issues’? And, why is an event organized under the auspices of gender studies relegated to the particular and the specific, while sociology implicitly and without further justification, can continue to situate itself as being of ‘general interest’? Well, before I continue in this grumbling mode, let me take a brief look at the symposium and why we chose this particular topic as a way to think about the journal and what has been happening in the field of gender studies during the past two decades. In 1996, the European Journal of Women’s Studies devoted a special issue to the body in an attempt to represent what was happening in critical feminist thinking on the body at that particular point in time. It focused on differences between women, cultural discourses about the body, power and domination, and subversive body practices. When it was later published as a book, as editor, I looked for a cover photograph which would do justice to these themes (Davis, 1997). I am returning to it now to show just how the journal – and, along with it, critical feminist thinking – could move from ‘the body’ (in 1996) to ‘transnational bodies’ (in 2013). The photograph was taken from a photo exhibition from a well-known Dutch feminist photographer, Gon Burman1 and showed two women, a mother and a daughter, dancing a tango in a garden in Amsterdam. I remember choosing this particular image because I saw it as a nice example of gender bending. It looked like a feminist act of subversion of what is supposed to be one of the most traditional and hyper-heterosexual of all dances – 496746 EJW20410.1177/1350506813496746European Journal of Women’s StudiesEditorial 2013