Disciplining Feminism

Ellen Messer-Davidow is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, as well as on the faculty of the Women’s Studies Department, the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. She is the coeditor of several books, including (En)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe and Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Knowing and Doing Part 1. Confronting the Institutional Disciplinary Order 1. Disciplining Women 2. Constructing Sex Discrimination Part 2. Institutionalizing and Intellectualizing Feminist Studies 3. Articulating Projects 4. Formatting Feminist Studies 5. Proliferating the Discourse Part 3. Crystallizing the Future 6. Remaking Change Agency 7. Playing by the New Rules Notes Works Cited Index

“Disciplining Feminism is the first study to offer a historical account and a theoretically informed explanation of how feminism became eviscerated from its originating political and community roots as it gained legitimacy within the key institutions of academia. It thus untangles three of the most crucial problems facing the academy today. First, it explodes the simpleminded truism that feminism naÏvely got coopted by the awards and perks of academic success. Second, it makes clear how the ‘disciplining’ of feminist inquiry made academic feminism vulnerable to the escalating organized attacks from the conservative Right. And, finally, it offers a compelling set of strategies for making social change.”-Annette Kolodny, author of Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century “Here is a scholar of texts who has been a social activist doing ethnography and combining it all seamlessly. The way in which the material merges into a single argument makes this an outstanding contribution on many fronts.”-Jean O'Barr, Duke University "I found Messer-Davidow’s discussion of the roots of academic feminism far-reaching, clearly articulated, and instructive as to how we arrived at this point. Disciplining Feminism would be particularly useful for an introductory level course in women’s studies, as it provides a nuanced, careful study of how feminism moved from the grassroots movement of the 1960s to a bona fide field of scholarly study, research, and teaching by the end of the century. Messer-Davidow presents a masterful interweaving of multiple sources of data. . . . She paints a vibrant, complex narrative of the transformation of feminism with simultaneous attention to both the micro and macrolevel." - Karla Erickson (Contemporary Sociology) "In her analysis of academic feminism, Ellen Messer-Davidow’s interdisciplinary lens has a wide, illuminating range. It spans the feminist history of not only higher education but also judicial, political, and private sectors; it combines fieldwork with a theoretical account of disciplines and an extensive knowledge of feminism’s early organizations. The book moves deftly from ‘the personal’ out to the academic and political, closing with a call for renewed personal-political engagement today. Disciplining Feminims’s tremendous breadth of critical method is its strong achievement. . . . [E]xcellent. . . ." - Jill Rappoport (Iris)