Co-option or Transformation? Women’s and Gender Studies Worldwide

Abstract

The establishment of women’s or gender studies¹ as a worldwide phenomenon in higher education — worldwide phenomenon here meaning that many countries around the world have women’s or gender studies programs in higher education² — took shape from the 1970s onwards. Often thought of as western,³ it is worth noting that whilst the Department of Feminist Studies at Odense University in Denmark was established in 1981, for example, and women’s studies at the Australian National University began in 1976, the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World in Lebanon was actually founded in 1973.⁴ The point is that the institutionalization of women’s studies in higher education has occurred over a period of some thirty years, but its geochronology is not as straightforward as we might think. The politics of location was and remains critical here. In general, it is the case that women’s studies was established as an institutionalized subject in higher education in western countries, in particular during the 1980s, and that the institutionalization of women’s studies in Eastern European countries and in Africa, for example, was more a phenomenon of the late 1980s and the 1990s, associated respectively with the end of communism, on the one hand, and the rise of self-determination and nationalism in the so-called post-colonial countries, on the other. Thus, the Ahfad University for Women’s Studies Unit in the Sudan was established in 1989; the Moscow Center for Gender Studies was founded in 1990; the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University in Uganda in 1991; the Center for Gender and Development Studies in the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1993; the Gender and Women’s Studies graduate program of the Middle East Technical University in Turkey was set up in 1994; the Kharkov Center for Gender Studies in the Ukraine in 1994; and the first graduate program in Women’s Studies in Japan at Josai International University in 1996. Women’s studies in higher education has, thus, proliferated from being found predominantly in western countries to becoming institutionalized in Eastern European, African, and Asian countries. And certainly during the early to mid-1990s, the subject enjoyed a hitherto unprecedented growth worldwide.