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ambivalent optimism: women's and gender studies in Australian universities

  • Mainstream or Muzzled?: Australian Academic Feminism
  • Published:
Feminist Review

Abstract

This article describes the place of Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities as a way of thinking about the place of feminism in the academy. It begins with a story of one such small programme at a time of stress and locates this story in an account of change in Australian universities over the last 20-plus years. The narrative traces a contradictory domain in which women, feminist scholarship and Women's and Gender Studies are enmeshed. The article draws on feminist literature about Australian universities to argue that while neo-liberal university environments are clearly places where masculinist values prevail, the flows of power around individual Women's and Gender Studies programmes cannot be simply predicted. Women's and Gender Studies programmes are thriving in some universities (on a small scale). As well as institutional imperatives Women's and Gender Studies programmes are engaged by specific intellectual challenges and some of these are sketched with reference to the Australian context. Asserting the need for dedicated research and teaching that focuses on gender, the article concludes that Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities are energetic places for this to occur. It proposes an ambivalent optimism to describe its assessment of these programmes and their viability as future places of work for feminist scholars.

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Notes

  1. The Rudd government which was elected in 2007 has signalled its intention to initiate another radical expansion of the sector (Gillard, 2009).

  2. The Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA) (‘Gender’ was added only in 2006) was formed at the inaugural Women's Studies conference held in Adelaide in 1989 and is the peak body for the sector. The AWGSA website lists 18 current programmes. See http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/womens-studies/awgsa.indexphp. For programmes not listed on the AWGSA site, see James Cook University (http://www.jcu.edu.au/sass/swcw/cws/index.htm), the University of Tasmania (http://www.utas.edu.au/philosophy/Gender/index.html) and Murdoch University (http://www.mcc.murdoch.edu.au/curriculum/courses/Honours_in_Gender_Cultural_Studies_(BA(Hons))). The AWGSA website also includes a brief history of AWGSA written by Professor Chilla Bulbeck as well as a comprehensive bibliography of articles about Women's and Gender Studies in Australian settings published over the last 15 years. Some programmes have produced small institutional histories (Rockel, 2000; Sheridan and Daly, 2006). AWGSA arranges conferences every two or three years.

  3. The number of Women's and Gender Studies research centres has declined over the last decade: there are currently three small centres (at Monash University, the University of South Australia and at the University of Queensland) (see Magarey and Sheridan, 2002: 132).

  4. The University of Melbourne is a recent exception to this rule. In 2007, as part of the university's radical re-invention under the ‘Melbourne Model’, a move that will increase its intake of private fee-paying students, the Faculty of Arts was restructured and Gender Studies was downgraded from a major to a minor programme of study and staffing was cut in half.

  5. Women comprised 23 per cent of all university students in 1960, 27 per cent in 1970, 45 per cent in 1980, 50 per cent in 1987, 55 per cent in 2000 (DETYA, 2001: 5).

  6. Female students and staff are represented most strongly in education, nursing, arts, humanities and social sciences. Women predominate among law and medicine students but these are areas where, with the sciences and engineering, female academics are still in a minority (Carrington and Pratt, 2003: 7).

  7. The AVCC has since changed its name to Universities Australia (see http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/).

  8. There are seven feminist academic journals in Australia, two of them based in Women's Studies programmes. For Australian Feminist Studies, see http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/08164649.asp (see editor Mary Spongberg's contribution in this issue). For Hecate, see http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/awsr/Home/home.htm. For Outskirts, see http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirts. For Lilith, a feminist history journal with a particular orientation to postgraduate work, see http://www.history.unimelb.edu.au/lilith/. For the Australian Feminist Law Journal, see http://www.griffith.edu.au/law/australian-feminist-law-journal. For Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, see http://intersections.anu.edu.au/. For Women Against Violence: An Australian Feminist Journal, see http://search.informit.com.au/browseJournalTitle;res=IELHSS;issn=1327-5550.

  9. Professor Gabriele Griffin from the University of Hull in the UK and colleagues from several nations conducted similar research across the European Union in the early twenty-first century (Griffin, 2004, 2005; EWSI, ND). See Employment and Women's Studies: The Impact of Women's Studies Training on Women's Employment in Europe, http://www.hull.ac.uk/ewsi/index.htm, accessed 6 April 2009. See also The Impact of Women's Studies Training on Women's Employment in Europe, http://www.pjb.co.uk/npl/bp52.htm, accessed 6 April 2009.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jeska Rees and Deidre Michell for research assistance in the writing of this article; to Susan Sheridan for conversation; to the participants at the ‘Feminism in Institutions – Mainstream of Muzzled?’ symposium held at Melbourne University in November 2007 for encouragement; to the two anonymous readers of the article; and particularly to Ann Genovese, the editor of this special section.

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  1. Barbara Baird
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Baird, B. ambivalent optimism: women's and gender studies in Australian universities. Fem Rev 95, 111–126 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.58

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