Feminist Communication Scholarship and "The Woman Question" in the Academy

Abstract

Feminist scholarly practice poses a challenge to disciplinarity merely by existing. By “disciplinarity,” I refer to the theories, practices, and institutional arrangements that discriminate among forms of knowledge, specify knowledges and knowledge relationships that coalesce around “objects of study,” and demarcate boundaries within which knowledges may take on the appearance of coherence. As one of the most vital institutional sites for the articulation of the feminist movement’s commitment to the struggle against the devaluation of women, women’s studies programs have provided indispensable leadership in the project to transform knowledges and practices that exclude and marginalize persons on the basis of gender, race, and, to a lesser extent, class. Beginning primarily in the 1980s, feminists in the field of communication joined in this effort. Similar to the broader area of feminist scholarship, feminist studies in communication gained much of their strength as modes of inquiry by questioning the boundaries of intellectual investigation and recognizing that interdisciplinary scholarship is central to doing so. The extent of diversity of its interdisciplinary perspectives establish feminist communication studies as a model of and for women’s studies, one that exhibits feminist scholarship’s force as a selfreflexive intellectual endeavor. In the pages that follow, I will also argue that feminist communication studies is a model for the uneasy position of women’s studies in a disciplinary-based academic environment. Feminist communication studies share with other feminist scholarship the risk of becoming coopted and diluted through institutionalization. Perhaps more profoundly, however, we share the risk of nonrecognition within a field and an academic environment that attempt to impose “discipline” on knowledge through institutional mechanisms for specifying the boundaries of scholarly inquiry and practice. Moreover, as I will argue, feminist studies in communication occupy an especially precarious position, as a “special interest” that remains largely unrecognized and unauthorized, not only by the field of communication and the disciplinarybased academy, but also by other feminist scholars, whose interdisciplinary inquiry is often circumscribed within the “traditional” disciplines and thus fails to take

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