I would like to add a response to the discussion initiated by my dear friend, colleague, and (occasional) co-author, Marina Shevtsova. I'm not here to write in “opposition” to Marina, as I enjoyed reading her bitter-sweet take on what it means to be a member of our department. Rather, I would like to extend the conversation by providing a different kind of analysis—one that I think will further clarify the way in which Gender Studies is (perhaps necessarily) seen as an outsider within the specific taxonomy of academic disciplines at CEU.
First and foremost, I am not writing to over determine what was already expressed by Marina: the mythologized narratives and personality traits ascribed to Gender Studies students who mingle with other departments (usually at Bambus or Instant, let's be honest). I am well aware of the degree to which Gender Studies is dubbed an ugly duckling, but isn't that expected? Most departments at CEU devote little time to gender as a site of analysis (although this differs across departments, many of which doinclude at least some sessions, readings, or entire courses specifically about gender).
Despite this welcomed recognition, gender is still often discarded in many fields as a relevant topic, yet remains one of the principle ways in which we socially organize ourselves, identify as people, and read information about each other. So is it not a bit unsurprising that a department that not only centralizes gender nominally, but includes it symbolically in chorus with all other major ways of socially organizing culture and politics (i.e. race, class, sexuality, etc), is going to be “different?”
I would like to remind the student body that there are important, productive reasons for Gender Studies' differences, and as a result, what Gender Studies does is not limited to our department nor an academic setting. But it has its significant differences, and they are remarkably useful.
The scope of Gender Studies is wide, inter-disciplinary, and hotly contested (sit in on one of our classes and you will see the range of ideological, social, cultural, political, and intellectual stances at play). Nevertheless Gender Studies students tend to share a few common lenses, namely the notion that the world is a complex, shifting, discursive web of power and social relations that creates meaningful objects and subjects of knowledge: identity categories, forms of discrimination, an enteric nervous system in the stomach (trust me, the “inter” in inter-disciplinary is taken seriously).
Regardless of how we choose to pursue feminist and queer scholarship, Gender Studies often represents a constant threat to normalized, standardized, or taken-for-granted frameworks within which institutions of academia are typically situated. I'm not here to glorify or romanticize it. Gender Studies adheres to normative institutional practices as well, and like I mentioned earlier, any student and department is capable of producing similar knowledge (and in fact, many do).
But at the end of the day, if someone tells me what Gender Studies does is a bit strange, I will affirm so, happily! It isstrange and different to use an institutional position to constantly muddle and in some cases, try and dismantle, parts of that very same institution. The methodological and intellectual contributions of a field that constantly challenges the (always in-the-making) meanings of bodies, institutions, discourses, and historical moments is, or at least can be, an uncomfortable “strangeness.”
And I am saying that this is something to embrace given its political, creative, and social utility. We have thesis topics that are working to, albeit always incompletely, disentangle and disrupt a number of widely held assumptions: including what it means to join the EU, to masturbate, to be a mother, to have gay friends, to migrate to another country, to be a man, to wear a uniform, to give consent, and to read fan fiction about Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy making' sweet wizardly love. Indeed, we are doing some strange things, and it's pretty friggen exciting.
Chris
Gender Studies Department
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