Feminist Studies

preface This special issue revisits a question our journal has taken up before: what are the possibilities and risks of the doctoral degree in women’s studies? Twenty years after we staged a conversation about how to structure doctoral degree programs in the classic 1998 special issue titled “Disciplining Feminism? The Future of Women’s Studies,” and fifteen years after a 2003 forum on interdisciplinary graduate training, we pause and reflect on the state of the field. The landscape of graduate education in women’s studies has certainly changed—there has been unprecedented growth in new PhD programs—but some of the dilemmas faced by doctoral degree holders remain troublingly familiar. The many short peer-reviewed essays in this issue about the doctoral degree in Women’s, Gender, Sexuality , and Feminist Studies (WGSFS), received in response to our call for papers, are organized along three thematic lines: 1) The job market for WGSFS doctoral degree holders, including the relationship between graduate certificates and doctoral degrees in women’s studies; 2) Curricular and methodological challenges within doctoral degree programs; and 3) Structural challenges faced by WGSFS departments and universities . Our authors range from veteran to midcareer scholars to recipients of PhDs granted in the past decade. Our content includes data-driven analyses and proposals for best practices, as well as a wide array of personal narratives. In addition to our articles on the doctoral degree, we have an article and a short story about the topic of sexual assault and education, an art essay, creative nonfiction, and poetry. We should clarify that throughout this issue, departments are named in varying ways (as women’s studies, WGSS, GWFS, etc.), reflecting the array of naming Doctoral Degrees in W/G/S/F Studies: Taking Stock 224Preface practices in the field; we deliberately decided against imposing a standard name in view of their freighted meanings. We open the issue with a cluster of essays that take stock of the successes and continuing challenges for doctoral degree holders on the job market. Two essays emerging from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) PhD Interest Group, a collective focused on advocating for WGSFS doctoral degree holders, offer data generated by the group’s information-collection efforts. Stina Soderling, Carly Thomsen, and Melissa Autumn White review what they see as a period of growth in the field, particularly in the number of doctoral programs and job openings in the past decade, but pose a sharp question: why are so few tenure-track and tenured lines in WGSFS PhD-granting programs held by those with a PhD in the field? They track the faculty composition of WGSFS PhD-granting programs, noting that two-thirds of faculty members training doctoral students in WGSFS hold PhDs in traditional disciplines . While this may be understandable among senior ranks of faculty trained in an earlier era, the authors worry that this trend persists among junior faculty. Jennifer Musial and Christina Holmes take up the matter of current hiring trends in WGSFS, asking: how have those holding WGSFS degrees actually fared in tenure-track job searches? They analyze who is being hired in the increasing number of WGSFS positions available and argue that the placement rate of those holding a WGSFS PhD has not kept pace with the increasing numbers of WGSFS faculty lines and jobs where WGSFS is listed as a preference. A joint statement by chairs of US PhD-granting departments offers a different vantage point on the job market and hiring practices. For the most part, there is broad agreement that the health of the WGSFS job market is good (in comparison with other fields) and that several departments report significant success among graduates. The one point of disagreement is about whether it is possible and preferable to specify in job advertisements that only those holding PhDs in WGSFS will be hired. It is clear that department chairs recognize the importance of hiring people “with the same credentials [they] are producing.” Yet the constraints faced by most departments in obtaining administrative approval for faculty lines—including the compromises made with other departments and their own diversity needs— mean that the pool is frequently widened to include those holding...