Feminist Studies

Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc.  Stina Soderling, Carly thomSen, and meliSSa autumn White Critical Mass, Precarious Value?: Reflections on the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies PhD in Austere Times How . . . can discipline-based faculty train students in truly interdisciplinary research? And if they succeed, will there be a sufficient number of jobs for scholars trained outside existing disciplinary conventions? Ultimately, do we want to create women’s studies as an “interdisciplinary” discipline, with theories, methods, and professional regimes of its own, or do we want to retain our current approach, making strategic forays that disrupt and reconfigure existing disciplines? —Nancy Hewitt and Susan Lanser1 It is . . . from within a field that one is most instructed on how to best abide by its rules, as no practitioner becomes legitimate to herself or to others without acquiring fluency in the skills a field offers, including how to recognize and read the objects of study prioritized by it. —Robyn Wiegman2 The authors are listed alphabetically intentionally as they are equal contributors to this article. 1. Nancy Hewitt and Susan S. Lanser, “Preface,” Feminist Studies 24, no. 2, special issue, “Disciplining Feminism? The Future of Women’s Studies” (Summer 1998): 236. 2. Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 15. 230 Stina Soderling, Carly Thomsen, and Melissa Autumn White nearly three DecaDes have passeD since Emory, Clark, and York universities launched the first PhD programs in women’s studies; today, there are more than two-dozen PhD-granting programs in gender, women’s, and feminist studies (GWFS) in Canada and the United States alone.3 The growth in the number of GWFS PhD programs is but one indicator of the robustness of the field. In a 2009 collaborative project between the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and Ms. Magazine, thenNWSA president Beverly Guy-Sheftall wrote that there were “more than 900 programs in the United States, boasting well over 10,000 courses and an enrollment larger than that of any other interdisciplinary field.”4 Students can earn majors, minors, master’s degrees, graduate certificates, and PhDs in GWFS. There are several journals specifically dedicated to the field, and more than 1800 people attend the NWSA conference annually .5 While the growth of the field could be (and often is) framed as an academic “success” story, we—the authors of this piece and cofounders of the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies PhD Interest Group, a constituency group of NWSA—take another, more critical, position. Our central questions here echo those posed in the epigraph to this article , first articulated by Nancy Hewitt and Susan Lanser twenty years ago in the 1998 Feminist Studies special issue on the women’s studies PhD.6 We ask: If the PhD represents the consolidation of GWFS as a specific interdisciplinary discipline, then why are so few of the tenure-track lines in PhD-granting programs held by those with a PhD in GWFS? Further , what are the consequences for GWFS PhD holders as well as for the 3. The names of PhD-granting programs in Canada and the United States vary by institution. After much discussion, we decided on gender, women’s, and feminist studies as an umbrella term for PhD candidates and holders in the field at this time. Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, launched the first women’s studies PhD in 1990; Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and York University in Toronto, Ontario, began offering women’s studies PhDs in 1992, although Clark University’s PhD program closed in 2008. All our data include all programs in the United States and Canada. 4. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Forty Years of Women’s Studies,” Ms. Magazine (Spring 2009), http://msmagazine.com/womensstudies/FourtyYears.asp. 5. National Women’s Studies Association, “2018 Annual Conference Overview,” nWsA website. 6. Published in 1998, this special issue of Feminist Studies reflected on the “early stage in the formation of doctoral training in women’s studies” (emphasis added). Hewitt and Lanser, “Disciplining Feminism,” 236. Stina Soderling, Carly Thomsen, and Melissa Autumn White 231 development of the field more broadly? As the number of PhD programs grow, these questions are increasingly urgent. In this...