Critical Interdisciplinarity, Women's Studies, and Cross-Cultural Insight

Author(s): Marjorie Pryse

Reviewed work(s):
Source: NWSA Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 1-22
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Critical Interdisciplinarity, Women's Studies,
and Cross-Cultural Insight
MARJORIE
PRYSE
University at Albany, State University of New York
Abstract
In this essay I examine the relationship between interdisciplinary meth-
ods and cross-cultural analysis in Women's Studies. I argue that interdis-
ciplinary methods produce an intellectual
flexibility
that can be
conducive to cross-cultural insight, and that therefore become a way of
enhancing receptivity to difference in members of dominant groups, but
that it is only analysis that works at the same time across lines of race,
class, gender, and sexuality that creates a critical interdisciplinarity.
Analysis by Gloria Anzalduta, Maria Lugones, and Uma Narayan suggest
that mestizaje can enhance feminist understandings of interdisciplin-
arity; Sandra Harding's work on standpoint theory helps articulate knowl-
edge claims for a cross-cultural critical and interdisciplinary Women's
Studies. Maria Mies offers a specific example of research that moves
cross-cultural interdisciplinarity into feminist practice, with implica-
tions for pedagogy in Women's Studies as well.
Feminists often use the word "interdisciplinary" to distinguish Women's
Studies from other academic fields, to describe the structure of women's
studies programs and curricula, to identify a research methodology, to
claim "outsider" status in the academy, and to imply a site of dialogic
knowledge production. At the same time, as second-wave feminist theory
has embraced "difference" and a plurality of feminisms, responding to
critiques from women of color and, in the 1 990s, moving towards a global
or international perspective on women's lives, the word "cross-cultural"
has taken on its own value as both a description of objectives in Women's
Studies and a site of conflicts within feminism.' Thus, to describe Women's
Studies as either interdisciplinary or cross-cultural has become some-
thing of a cliche. However, we have not yet moved in the direction of
setting these two terms in collocation with each other or of theorizing
their intersection. Indeed, the two terms do not readily modify each other.
In some ways, focusing on concerns of interdisciplinarity in Women's
Studies, thereby appearing to locate feminism strictly within an academic
sphere, may appear to work against a cross-cultural construction of femi-
nism that takes into account the lives and struggles of non-academic
women. Similarly, because the cross-cultural dimensions of Women's
2
MARJORIE PRYSE
Studies often inscribe "differences within" feminism, even occupying a
separate or partially separate ideological space,2 cross-cultural approaches
to feminism might appear to resist the way interdisciplinarity assumes an
apparently arbitrary right to cross epistemological borders.
When I was studying for my M.S.W. degree, my peers traded variations
on a joke meant to generate serious reflection: How many social workers
does it take to change a client? The answer: Only one, but the client has
got to want to change. The joke reminded us that although we considered
ourselves, and found ourselves referred to in social work textbooks, as
"change agents," our powers were limited. The strongest "formula" for
creating a climate for change, according to social work practice theory,
was to increase the level of discomfort in a client so that the client would
want to change in order to reduce the discomfort. In its feminist varia-
tions, the question has remained unanswered and no longer sounds like a
joke: How much Women's Studies does it take to produce feminist con-
sciousness in a student? How many women's studies majors does it take
to change an institution's budgetary priorities? How much feminist schol-
arship does it take to move closer to Adrienne Rich's "woman-centered
university" ?
In exploring the theoretical relationship between interdisciplinary and
cross-cultural, I have been trying to discover whether, as feminist teach-
ers and scholars, there is any particular methodology that might increase
our effectiveness as change agents. In other words, is there any way we can
proceed that can answer the question, "How many feminists does it take
to change the world" in some other way than that "the people who own
the world, govern it, and dominate it have got to want to change." Starting
with the modest goal of wanting to produce feminist thinking in the
students who enroll in women's studies courses and in the colleagues and
other readers who are willing to explore feminist scholarship and theory,
can we determine sufficient theoretical grounding for a feminist method-
ology that might increase our chances of achieving this goal? Or, to put
the question another way, can we locate theoretical grounds for inter-
disciplinarity in addition to its practical ability to bring into program
or departmental federation feminist colleagues trained in diverse disci-
plines? Does interdisciplinarity have the potential to produce cross-cul-
tural insight, an actively anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-homophobic, and
anti-imperialist form of feminist thinking? To what extent does the cross-
cultural component of Women's Studies raise interdisciplinarity to a
critical edge?
It seemed to me when I started thinking about these questions that
interdisciplinarity is a much more theoretically significant feature of
Women's Studies than we have recognized, and that the kind of analytical
flexibility interdisciplinarity offers might help students from apparently
privileged groups (white and middle-class; heterosexual, able-bodied, and
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 3
male) develop at least a cognitive understanding of what a writer like
Gloria Anzaldua means by "mestiza consciousness." Furthermore, it
seemed that Anzalduia's construction of theory out of her experience of
this mestiza consciousness has implications for interdisciplinarity; in
fact, when Anzalduia
(1993)
writes that "the coming together of two self-
consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un
choque, a cultural collision" (p. 428),
she seems to be suggesting that
students who claim a certain knowledge of oppression-what standpoint
theorists refer to as "epistemic privilege"-by virtue of their association
with particular identity groups while also participating actively in a
mainstream culture in which they may feel a sense of cultural erasure
(what W. E. B. Du Bois called "double
consciousness") may choose, "on
[their]
way to a new consciousness" (p. 428), a more flexible way of seeing.
Anzaldua writes, "La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual
formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to
use rationality to move towards a single goal (a
Western mode), to diver-
gent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and
goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than
excludes" (p. 429). Working out from this mestiza consciousness, Anzal-
duia is also describing interdisciplinary methodology at its best. Might we
be able to make the theoretical connections between the interdisciplinary
and cross-cultural that would strengthen Women's Studies' claims to
knowledge in a way that would also produce new insight for social change?
Might we be able to build on the kind of academic flexibility women's
studies students gain when they are majoring in one discipline and must
read from others widely disparate from their own as a strategy to increase
students' ability to make the other kinds of crossings that can produce
cross-cultural insight? These are the questions I started with and have
tried to answer by bringing together the concepts of the interdisciplinary
and cross-cultural.
In the essay that follows, I will begin by exploring the theoretical
implications of interdisciplinarity for Women's Studies and will suggest
that a critical interdisciplinarity may be understood as a postcolonial
strategy that is conducive to cross-cultural border-crossing. I will then
explore the assumptions of cross-cultural feminism from the perspective
of standpoint theory and suggest that whether we view it in postcolonial
or transnational terms or as coalition politics within the United States,
cross-cultural feminism is already necessarily interdisciplinary. I am ulti-
mately interested in considering a hybrid or mestiza methodology of
cross-cultural interdisciplinarity as a theorized reflection on what we do
in women's studies teaching and scholarship. While both cross-cultural
and interdisciplinary might in themselves seem necessary theoretical
grounding for women's studies practice, the mestiza concept, cross-cul-
tural interdisciplinarity, offers a methodology that is both necessary and
4
MARJORIE PRYSE
sufficient to produce transformative knowledge. In other
words,
I will
suggest that the theoretical power of bringing these concepts together
both strengthens feminist knowledge claims and creates a foundation for
a more effective women's studies pedagogy. I will end by illustrating, with
an example from Maria Mies's work, how cross-cultural interdisciplin-
arity works to enhance the power of feminist research as well as how it
might affect the way we structure the presentation of content in women's
studies courses.
Interdisciplinarity and Women's Studies
Several characteristics of interdisciplinarity make it of significant in-
terest to many women's studies teachers and scholars. First, interdis-
ciplinarity conceptualizes a "space" between the disciplines which femi-
nist scholars have figured as a gap between the perspectives of women and
nondominant men and the assumptions, models, theories, canons, and
questions that the traditional disciplines have developed and taught.3
Feminist scholarship has more than adequately demonstrated the exist-
ence of this gap during the past 25 years of research and teaching in
Women's Studies, and certain disciplines, notably anthropology, history,
English, and psychology have expanded their borders to include previ-
ously excluded research questions,4 while others, such as sociology, have
challenged research methodology to make room for the presence of
researchers whom Patricia Hill Collins (1986) describes as "outsiders
within" for the legitimacy of qualitative research, and for the recognition
of gender as a research variable, if not a category of analysis.
Interdisciplinarity also combines the insights of two or more fields of
study to produce new fields and may also produce new knowledge, or, in
the case of much feminist scholarship, bring to visibility previously
suppressed knowledge. Indeed, such knowledge may be unassimilable by
the disciplines; both in content and in form, and by virtue of its very
production, such knowledge stands as an implicit critique of disciplinary
organization. The increasing volume of scholarship exploring questions
of feminist epistemology and feminist methodology provides particularly
salient examples of such unassimilable knowledge by the disciplines.5
Further, while interdisciplinarity incorporates disciplinary approaches
to knowledge when they are useful, while it "borrows" and "incorpo-
rates," it does not feel constrained by disciplinary methods and rules
for the uses of such approaches. Therefore, from the perspective of
disciplines, interdisciplinary research can appear unfounded, illegitimate,
transgressive, disturbing, and fundamentally challenging. Ruth Salvaggio
(1992) has described Women's Studies as "crossing (out) the disciplines."
This phrase characterizes the formal critique that is inherent in inter-
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 5
disciplinarity, namely, that in crossing, it will cross out the disciplines.
Additionally, there is a fundamental epistemic challenge that, in produc-
ing new knowledge that does not "fit" the disciplinary structure, feminist
interdisciplinarity will somehow undermine the very legitimacy of the
disciplines themselves.
If we examine the historical origins of the disciplines in the 19th
century, we find a connection worth exploring between the organization
of the modern political world and the organization of Western knowledge
into academic units. In her book-length study of interdisciplinarity, Julie
Thompson Klein
(1990) explains that "the modern concept of disciplin-
arity is a product of the nineteenth century and is linked with several
forces: the evolution of the modern natural sciences, the general 'scien-
tification' of knowledge, the industrial revolution, technological advance-
ments, and agrarian agitation" that combined to influence the design of
the modern university (p. 21; see also Flexner, 1979, pp. 105-106). Further-
more, to the extent that it provided a means for capitalist expansion, the
organization of knowledge into disciplines historically coincided with
and may be viewed as implicated in colonialism. Wolfram Swoboda
(1 9 79)
traces the growth of disciplinarity in the second half of the 19th century
to German and Continental challenges to British economic prominence
and a resulting deliberate specialization of knowledge that "was not
intended to serve the purposes of some abstract 'truth' or the demands of
'pure' knowledge," but rather "was expressed in terms of the applicability
(however remote) of this knowledge" (p. 73). Andrew D. White, the first
President of Cornell, "harbored no illusion but that the duty of his insti-
tution was to train the 'captains in the army of industry"' (Swoboda, 1979,
pp. 73-74; Rudolph, 1962, p. 266). Indeed, as Andrew Abbott
(1988) notes,
"corporate capitalism bankrolled (especially) the private, prestigious uni-
versities, and the great magnates originally saw them as private preserves.
Ezra Cornell wandered around 'his campus,' and the Stanfords refused to
allow 'their university' to be tainted by money from other donors"
(pp.
210-211).
The rapid development of academic and scientific societies in the
United States in the 1880S6 and the proliferation of journals and university
presses in the first decade of the 20th century that served to legitimize and
professionalize disciplinary knowledge both paralleled "the division of
labor that characterized more and more of the productive process" in
industry and served "to maintain old or establish new hierarchies within
disciplinary structures and organizations" (Swoboda, 1979, pp. 78-79).
However inadvertently, and despite their success in generating new re-
search, the disciplines nevertheless represented an administration of
knowledge in which control over academic borders contributed to weak-
ening concepts of interconnectedness and interdependence between or
across those borders. The disciplinary model thus reflects an academic
6 MARJORIE PRYSE
variation on the division of the geographical world into nations with their
establishment of bureaucratic administrative units. As Carolyn Porter
(1994) describes them now, "academic departments are much like mod-
ern nation-states, imagined communities from which both imagination
and community are long gone"
(p. 521).
If the disciplines have indeed compartmentalized, administered, and in
effect "colonized" knowledge, then to the extent that Women's Studies
constitutes a challenge to such a disciplinary model, we may consider
such a challenge a postcolonial strategy. In order, however, to approach
the respect for autonomy and self-determination that emerges from cross-
cultural feminist theory, such a strategy needs to be much more fully
articulated as a methodology for crossing epistemological borders that
will not be appropriative, exploitative, or imperialist. A critical inter-
disciplinarity-an interdisciplinarity guided by analysis of the intersec-
tions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the structures and policies of
nation-states in women's lives-can undermine the disciplinary bound-
aries established by an administrative organization.7 In Klein's
(1990)
view, interdisciplinarity has already reflected attempts to produce a broad-
ening effect on disciplinarity and to reorganize knowledge along new lines
(p.
21). The question becomes not whether knowledge will be restructured
but according to what principles, and whether Women's Studies can
articulate a theoretical justification for restructuring-whether episte-
mologically or administratively-that will preserve the possibility of
feminist vision.
To the extent that a critical interdisciplinarity attempts to dismantle
the organization of knowledge in the modern university that emerged at
the end of the 19th century, it positions Women's Studies on the borders
of disciplines in such a way as to challenge their partitioning effects.
However, Women's Studies is also deeply implicated in the structure of
disciplines-a structure Andrew Abbott (1988) calls the equivalent of a
"system of professions" in the academic world. While the departmental
and curricular structures within most women's studies programs that
combine core courses and faculty with cross-listed courses (and faculty)
from the disciplines seem to promise an opportunity for developing
interdisciplinarity, in actuality it often produces a tension between core
and cross-listed, in which feminist knowledge remains dialogically con-
nected to traditional disciplines even though the perspective students
bring back into the disciplines from their core courses involves critique of
those disciplines. Critique becomes a de facto methodology for the core
curriculum, which produces a necessary but not sufficient approach to the
development of feminist epistemology. Women's Studies thus appears to
occupy the space of critique-by virtue of its organizational position
"outside" the traditional disciplines-as the primary form and content of
its knowledge production. The problem for a women's studies scholarship
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 7
caught between core and cross-listed involves trying to locate where an
interdisciplinary feminist knowledge could "situate itself," both theo-
retically and institutionally. Theoretically, as Sneja Gunew
(1990)
ob-
serves, "it is clear that the feminist as sceptical reader or receiver of
traditional knowledge is the basis for a feminist critique, but where the
authority or basis for this scepticism comes from is not always clear. From
what position of institutional knowledge and theory not permeated by
patriarchy can feminists construct a new body of both knowledge and
theory? " (pp. 23-24). Theorizing interdisciplinarity involves taking
Gunew's question seriously: from what "position" do feminists construct
"a new body of both knowledge and theory"?
Critical Interdisciplinarity and
Cross-Cultural Approaches to Women's Lives
The cross-cultural component of Women's Studies identifies the posi-
tion-or standpoint-from which we construct our new interdisciplinary
epistemology. For critical interdisciplinarity provides a necessary but not
sufficient condition for grounding feminist knowledge; what makes it a
sufficient condition as well is the extent to which feminist scholarship
also works across cultural lines, as feminists of color have repeatedly
demonstrated. The concept of "interlocking" (or what Maria Lugones
[1994]
calls "interwoven" or "intermeshed"
oppressions [p. 159, n.1])
has
become foundational to Women's Studies in the 1990s. Lugones's word
for a foundational intermeshing is "curdling" or "mestizaje." She writes
of mestizaje:
And I think of something in the middle of either/or, something impure,
something or someone mestizo, as both separated, curdled, and resisting in its
curdled state. Mestizaje defies control through simultaneously asserting the
impure, curdled multiple state and rejecting fragmention into pure parts. In
this play of assertion and rejection, the mestiza is unclassifiable, unmanage-
able. She has no pure parts to be "had," controlled. (p. 160)
In a pursuit recalling Anzaldu'a's new conciencia, Lugones invokes cur-
dling for the production of a cross-cultural feminism, a feminism that
interweaves not only an understanding of oppressions but also the numer-
ous theoretical perspectives we know as standpoint epistemologies into
very mixed, very mestiza theory. If by cross-cultural we mean to invoke
an anti-racist and anti-imperialist methodology for feminist scholarship
and pedagogy-or at least to establish anti-racism and anti-imperialism as
attributes without which such a methodology does not become femi-
nist-then the very concept of cross-cultural establishes the epistemo-
logical ground for a feminist interdisciplinarity. In effect, a cross-cultural
8 MARJORIE PRYSE
interdisciplinarity becomes both necessary and sufficient for feminist
critical methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy; the knowledge claims
that Women's Studies makes to generating knowledge at the sites of the
intersection of gender, race, class, sexuality, region, age, ability, and
nationality make interdisciplinarity feminist by establishing its episte-
mology as a political rather than merely administrative and academic
location. Cross-cultural critical interdisciplinarity thus provides one an-
swer to Gunew's question. A feminist body of knowledge and theory "not
permeated by patriarchy" emerges from a mestiza interdisciplinarity, an
interdisciplinarity that views standpoints on oppression as also interwo-
ven and incapable of being "separated," what Lugones calls curdled.
Sandra Harding's
(1995)
work on standpoint theory and on what she
calls "an epistemology from/for Rainbow Coalition politics" (p. 125)
can
help us articulate knowledge claims for a cross-cultural critical and inter-
disciplinary Women's Studies that respects borders while crossing them,
that works to prevent appropriation and exploitation. For Harding, seem-
ingly diverse liberatory movements have generated epistemology projects
that their proponents can learn to view as similarly constructed, even
though the subjects/agents of subjugated knowledge often experience
multiple and frequently contradictory standpoints and may be "commit-
ted to two agendas that are themselves at least partially in conflict-the
liberal feminist, socialist feminist, Nicaraguan feminist, Jewish femi-
nist" (p.125). Yet Harding writes:
[l]t
is thinking from a contradictory social position that generates feminist
knowledge. So the logic of the directive to 'start thought from women's lives'
requires that we start our thought from multiple lives that in many ways
conflict with each other and have multiple and contradictory commitments.
(p.
125)
Thus, she argues, "in an important if controversial sense, the subject
of feminist knowledge must know what every other liberatory project
knows" because not only are gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and
nationality intertwined in the social construction of identity but also
because the subjects/agents "of every other liberatory movement must
also learn how gender, race, class, and sexuality are used to construct each
other in order to accomplish their goals" (p. 126). Since for Harding and
other standpoint theorists, liberatory knowledge is not essential, tran-
scendental, or transhistorical but rather achieved through combined po-
litical and conceptual struggle-as Harding (1995) writes, "all women
have women's experiences but only at certain historical moments does
anyone ever produce feminist knowledge" (p. 130)-the even greater struggle
to understand liberatory knowledges across the different standpoints that
have generated these knowledges requires a particular kind of interdisci-
plinary approach. Such a border-crossing requires the subjects/agents of
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 9
one particular standpoint epistemology to learn, through what Harding
calls a "competency-based" anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-imperial-
ism, to see their lives from the standpoint of "others," not in order to
speak "as or for" these "others," but to be able to contribute distinctive
forms of liberatory knowledge from their own perspective, informed by
other liberatory epistemologies (1991, p. 293; 1995, pp. 123-124, 126).
Viewing a feminist cross-cultural critical interdisciplinarity as a "stand-
point methodology" for Women's Studies thus raises the caution that
border-crossing not be used to legitimate the exploitative and imperialist
behaviors of the new global social order.
Such a methodology for Women's Studies is grounded in critical mate-
rialist analysis, but unlike Rosemary Hennessy's critique of standpoint
theory, which would push interdisciplinarity only in the direction of
"historical materialist" analysis, the kind of standpoint interdisciplin-
arity I am theorizing in this essay does not produce epistemological
hegemony. In her critique of Harding, Hennessy (1 993) argues that neither
standpoint theory nor identity politics can be effective as the basis for a
"global social analytic." Viewing standpoint theory as a "local" or "re-
gional" reading of culture, as "a logic which to varying degrees disclaims
that social arrangements are systematically interrelated" (p. 73), Hen-
nessy argues that a theory based on a coalition of identity politics works
against the possibility of a "collective global standpoint" (p. 136). Hen-
nessy claims that the very concept of collective global standpoint "is not
the same as writing a historical master narrative" (p. 138):
[Oince we understand the narratives circulating in culture as ideologies, .
all texts of culture can be read as having a claim on history, and 'historical'
narratives can be unhinged from the disciplinary boundaries set around
them. 'History proper' can then be seen as a particular mode of reading and
writing which supports a specific regime of truth and disciplining of knowl-
edge. (p.
118)
Becoming "unhinged" from "disciplinary boundaries" is invoked here as
a transformative effect, a kind of "historical materialist" interdisciplin-
arity.5
Although Hennessy's argument for a "global social analytic" reminds
feminist scholars of the importance of contextualizing their understand-
ing of categories of analysis as much as possible within a materialist
frame, what Maria Mies (1986) identifies as "patriarchy and accumulation
on a world scale," "unhinging" historical-materialist narratives from
their "disciplinary boundaries" does not offer an alternative methodology
for a viable feminist interdisciplinarity but rather suggests an attempt to
rediscipline feminist thinking into a "counterhegemonic coherence" (p.
137). Such an argument arrives at what Jane Roland Martin (1994) de-
scribes as the "pitfall of compulsory historicism," by which ironically
10 MARJORIE PRYSE
feminist theorists "have fallen into the very ahistorical trap they have
been telling us to avoid"
(p. 641).
As Martin observes, to insist that there
can be no understanding without historical research-whether we under-
stand "history" as Hennessy uses it or not-is "to embrace another form
of essentialism," where "at the very moment in history when feminist
theorists are reminding feminist scholars to broaden the scope of their
research so as to include people unlike themselves, these same feminist
theorists are becoming exclusionary in regard to methodology"
(p. 643).
To suggest that an "unhinged" historicity, a quasi-historical-materialist
interdisciplinarity, is the only route to "the counterhegemonic coher-
ence" that determines the radical effectiveness of any feminist project-
or even that counterhegemonic coherence is a desirable goal-buys into
the kind of methodological essentialism Martin suggests is itself hege-
monic and counterproductive to the collaborative enterprise of feminist
scholarship. Thus a cross-cultural critical interdisciplinarity must also
"honor diversity in the methodological realm as we already honor it in
other areas" (p. 649),
must construct an epistemological coalition, not a
methodological monolith.
Uma Narayan (1989), writing as a self-proclaimed "nonwestern femi-
nist" and a native of Bombay, describes epistemological "border-cross-
ing" in a way that can help us envision such a cross-cultural epistemologi-
cal coalition. She is specifically interested in "questions of understanding
and cooperation between western and nonwestern feminists" (p. 263) and
argues that even though a commitment to the contextual nature of knowl-
edge "does permit us to argue that it is easier and more likely for the
oppressed to have critical insights into the conditions of their own oppres-
sion than it is for those who live outside these structures," such an
argument does not require us "to claim that those who do not inhabit"
particular social and cultural contexts "can never have any knowledge of
them" (p. 264).
There must be, in Narayan's words, "the possibility of
understanding and political cooperation between oppressed groups and
sympathetic members of a dominant group-say, between white people
and people of color over issues of race or between men and women over
issues of gender" (p. 263). Indeed, for Narayan, the possibility of cross-
cultural critical insight on the part of members of dominant groups
"allows us the space to criticize dominant groups for their blindness to the
facts of oppression" while retaining the need for dominated groups "to
control the means of discourse about their own situations" (p. 265). As
Narayan reminds us, "colonized people had to learn the language and
culture of their colonizers" but "the colonizers seldom found it necessary
to have more than a sketchy acquaintance with the language and culture
of the 'natives"' (p. 265). Creating the conditions within which it becomes
"necessary"
for potential colonizers to learn "their blindness to the facts
of oppression" becomes a challenge for any anti-imperialist work, espe-
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 11
cially such work attempted in Women's Studies
(Narayan p. 265).
A femi-
nist critical interdisciplinarity must be based on Narayan's argument for
"the possibility of understanding and political cooperation between op-
pressed groups and sympathetic members of a dominant group." Creating
the conditions within which it becomes necessary for potential colonizers
to learn their blindness to the facts of oppression is one of the objectives
of women's studies education and suggests a use for interdisciplinary
methodology. What Narayan reminds us about the attitude of colonizers
towards colonized peoples may be argued analogously about the historical
relation between the disciplines and interdisciplinarity as well: interdis-
ciplinary researchers have had to learn the language and culture of the
disciplines, but disciplinary researchers have seldom found it necessary to
have more than a sketchy acquaintance with the language and culture of
interdisciplinary work. Although it would be pointless and politically
suspect to equate academic feminists working as core interdisciplinary
teachers and scholars with colonized persons in terms either of their
actual oppression or their ability to generate critical insights into the
specific material structures of their diversity of oppression, nevertheless
the analogy has some relevance within an academic context in which
Women's Studies, struggling for two decades for legitimacy, faculty lines,
and in some institutions, departmental status, now in the 1990s finds
even modest gains threatened by new institutional economic priorities.
But whether we view interdisciplinarity as a bridge to cross-cultural
understanding for members of privileged and potentially imperialist
groups, understand the knowledge of cross-cultural experience and theory
as correctives to the transgressive and appropriative moves of inter-
disciplinarity itself, or view the "epistemic privilege" of oppressed stand-
points as inherently interdisciplinary, both cross-cultural and interdisci-
plinary methods work together to promote women's survival in a new
global order which has learned to exploit women's labor in the name of
their "housewifization" (Mies, 1986). As Mary Wilkins Freeman, writing
her short story "A Church Mouse" in New England in 1889, expressed
very early and very well in a statement about what standpoint theorists
would call her homeless, unemployed, unmarried, and old character Hetty
Fifield's epistemic privilege, "When one is hard pressed, one, however
simple, gets wisdom as to vantage-points" (p. 329). To the extent that
feminist scholarship reflects the necessity for women to learn the ways of
patriarchal societies embedded in a global economy in order to survive in
them materially and transform their structure, it has emerged from a
position of epistemic privilege, of structural and material "vantage-points,"
and has struggled mightily for the small niche Women's Studies currently
occupies in the United States and increasingly in the rest of the world.9 To
the extent that interdisciplinary work crosses over into the disciplines,
but many disciplines still do not feel constrained to move beyond their
12 MARJORIE PRYSE
own definitions of what can be known, feminist scholarship has learned
the omissions, gaps, weaknesses, and contradictions in the traditional
disciplines in order to construct a more "critical" knowledge or what
Sandra Harding
(1991)
terms a knowledge that emerges from "strong
objectivity."
However, Narayan (1989) explores the limitations of "double vision"
that accompany epistemic privilege, and she offers her analysis of what
she calls the "dark side" of epistemic privilege in order to warn against
"idealizing or romanticizing oppression"or blindness to "its real material
and psychic deprivations" (p. 268).
As she observes, the "double vision"
that accompanies epistemic privilege does not necessarily produce a criti-
cal perspective-whether that "double vision" emerges from cultural
oppression or, I would add, from the attempt to write, teach, and do
research out of the gaps between disciplines. She notes that "mere access
to two different and incompatible contexts is not a guarantee that a
critical stance on the part of an individual will result." Such an individual,
she writes, "may be tempted to dichotomize her life and reserve the
framework of a different context for each part," and she cites a range of
examples for strategies women can use to achieve such dichotomy: middle
class persons in nonwestern countries who may choose to be "western-
ized" in public life but "traditional" in the realm of the family, or con-
versely, who may "reject the practices of [their] own context and try to be
as much as possible like members of the dominant group"; Western
intellectuals in nonwestern contexts who appear to "lose knowledge of
their own cultures and practices"; and women in various cultures who
choose male-identification as a way to "expunge stereotypically female
characteristics" or who alternatively "reject entirely the framework of
the dominant group" and "seek a certain sort of security in traditionally
defined roles" (p. 266). Not all nonwestern persons adopt a critical ap-
proach to Westernization; not all women acquire a feminist perspective;
and indeed, not all attempts at interdisciplinary work produce critical and
anti-imperialist research.
Border-crossing among vectors of oppression-"epistemology from/for
Rainbow Coalition politics"-combines with feminist efforts to "curdle"
the disciplines to produce a critical cross-cultural interdisciplinarity that,
unlike other interdisciplinary and cultural studies fields, continues to
insist on "thinking from women's lives" (Harding, 1991). However, as
Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne (1996) have recently noted, the very
analytical centrality of gender in feminist theory "has been decentered
within feminism" (p. 2), leading them to view as "too optimistic" their
1985 "assessment of the revolutionary potential of feminism taken by
itself," because "some strands of feminist thought have begun to dis-
solve" into a "theory revolution,
"
a nexus of postcolonial discourse, queer
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 13
theory, critical race theory, cultural studies, critical legal studies, and
poststructuralist theory (p. 2).
Here also Harding's idea of an "epistemology from/for coalition poli-
tics" can serve as a useful reminder. To be viable in the long term,
conflicts and competition for professional status and institutional re-
sources among various groups identified with the theory revolution must
be viewed as conflicts in, and within, feminism. If feminism dissolves,
then other politically-based epistemologies will lose their grounding in a
women's social movement with increasingly global articulation that com-
bines identity politics with materialist analysis. Further, since to the
extent that women are "always already" subjugated within any group's
formulation of dominance, whether by race, class, sexuality, or national-
ity, and therefore Women's Studies always already represents the neces-
sity of a critical interdisciplinarity that includes a gender analysis, the
"new" disciplines emerging from the theory revolution risk replicating
patriarchal models by eliding or decentering gender. In such models,
feminist scholars, theorists, and issues occupy the same fractional repre-
sentation in the new knowledges that we/they have done in the old.'0
Subjugated knowledges to be effectively liberatory must not replicate the
exclusions that have characterized the fields of study that for the last
century have fallen into the category of the "disciplines." Women's Stud-
ies needs to critique the lack of coalition work that emerges from these
groups, to protest the attempts to dilute, dissolve, and decenter feminist
thinking, and to reclaim a feminist social theory that has removed itself
from its radical base in feminist activism and social movement. The most
productive feminist, postcolonial, queer, materialist, and African-Ameri-
can or Latina/o scholarship must work across several categories of analy-
sis at once, thereby establishing the methodological practice of border-
crossing that is a salient feature both of the "critical" aspect of much of
feminist scholarship and of its interdisciplinarity.
Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinarity and Feminist Practice
Because it does produce a "curdled" or mestiza methodology, cross-
cultural interdisciplinarity is difficult to achieve in practice. Maria Mies,
however, is one scholar whose work provides a particularly salient ex-
ample of a cross-cultural project that she identifies as inextricably inter-
disciplinary, and that also takes into account those other borders women's
studies scholars and teachers must work across, namely the borders ar-
ticulated as conflicts within feminism between academic and activist
work. Mies's project in particular articulates the possibility of "partial
identification" across cultural lines of identity and the extent to which
14 MARJORIE PRYSE
interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge both emerge from and enhance
such identification. I will use the following discussion of her research as
an example of the way cross-cultural and interdisciplinary become both
necessary and sufficient parameters for producing transformative knowl-
edge.
Mies (1991) developed a fieldwork course for nonwestern women who
came to Holland to study women and development at the Institute of
Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague. The purpose of this course was to
"confront the women from the Third World with the problems of women
in so-called developed countries, to make the theoretical knowledge
which they had gained from their studies refer to 'real life,' for them to
enter into reciprocal learning and research processes with Dutch women's
groups, for all of them to reflect as a group on these new experiences, and,
if possible, to conceptualize brief, communal plans of action"
(p. 74). For
two years she supervised the students from the ISS as they worked with
numerous Dutch women's groups. Mies designed this course because she
believes that feminist research must be linked to emancipatory and
liberatory goals for women, and therefore she finds laboratory-empiricist
methods too narrow and too biased for her use. Mies thereby reminds
women's studies scholars and academics that activism, or action-oriented
research, is also a necessary component of feminist work and a significant
form of interdisciplinarity.
Among the numerous conclusions Mies draws from the "Fieldwork"
course as well as from interdisciplinary action-oriented field research in
India, two are particularly relevant to this discussion. First, she character-
izes cross-cultural research as implicitly interdisciplinary:
[I]n
contrast to the dominant scientific paradigm, various forms of knowledge
were suited to the "Fieldwork" and not just one form (so-called scientific).
These included practical, everyday knowledge, political knowledge and politi-
cal "skills," self-recognition (insight into one's own strengths and weak-
nesses), critical knowledge (the ability to critique ideologies, to demystify),
theoretical knowledge (the ability to relate empirical findings to theoretical
statements), social knowledge (the ability to relate to others, to recognize
social conditions and develop social relationships with "others"; to recognize
that individuals live in certain relationships with each other and with their
material, social, and historical environment). (p. 77)
In short, the emancipatory and liberatory goals of Mies's research produce
numerous forms of knowledge, "not just one which, once set, then claims
primacy over all the others as the 'scientific' knowledge. In 'Fieldwork'
the artificially constructed barriers which usually exist among the differ-
ent forms of knowledge (usually erected along the lines delimiting the
academic disciplines) were broken through and there arose something
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 15
akin to a total view of reality" (p. 77). This "total view of reality" ap-
proaches critical interdisciplinarity in the service of cross-cultural in-
sight.
Second, she implies that feminist interdisciplinarity must involve an
"intersubjectivity" based in part on "double consciousness" and in part
on "partial identification." "Partial identification" involves a dialectical
process "which consists of one being able to observe oneself from out-
side," where the "outside" is not "some imaginary reality, but rather the
real, living other woman who is looking at me, trying to understand me,
posing unusual questions. The outside, therefore, consists of another
'ensemble of social relations' and that also means that a total identifica-
tion, even if it were to be attempted, is not possible. For despite all the
empathy, all the understanding, the others remain 'others"'; partial iden-
tification "makes possible the necessary closeness to the others as well as
the necessary distance from myself" (pp. 79-80). I read Mies as suggesting
here that interdisciplinarity broadly and critically defined also requires
"partial identification," a border-crossing in which it becomes possible to
work conceptually "outside" the disciplines in order to ask questions
"starting from women's lives." At the same time we recognize both that
the "real, living other woman" from whose life we theoretically wish to
start our research and the "ensemble of social relations" that constitute
structures of academic knowledge and economic power are each con-
structs enabled by, but also limited by, the very terms cross-cultural and
interdisciplinary.
We can invoke Sandra Harding's concept of strong objectivity to rein-
force Mies's concept of partial identification in the context of a feminist
cross-cultural interdisciplinarity. Harding (1991) writes that "to enact or
operationalize the directive of strong objectivity is to value the Other's
perspective and to pass over in thought into the social condition that
creates it-not in order to stay there, to 'go native' or merge the self with
the Other, but in order to look back at the self in all its cultural particu-
larity from a more distant, critical, objectifying location" (p. 151). And
Harding adds that strong objectivity leads to a concept of "strong reflex-
ivity" as well-a concept that "would require that the objects of inquiry"
in any research project "be conceptualized as gazing back in all their
cultural particularity and that the researcher, through theory and meth-
ods, stand behind them, gazing back at his [or her] own socially situated
research project in all its cultural particularity and its relationships to
other projects of his culture" (p. 163). The practice of a cross-cultural
interdisciplinarity thus requires the feminist researcher to develop com-
petency in partial identification that recognizes objects of inquiry as
subjects with their own critical perspective. Feminist researchers cannot,
as many scientists do, construct a laboratory which "controls" for contex-
16 MARJORIE PRYSE
tual variables. As Harding argues, we must work towards a "strong"
objectivity that includes the perspective on research from the standpoint
of the research subject.
Such an objectivity necessarily becomes interdisciplinary and critical.
And until feminist education achieves a wider influence, an insistence
on "strong" objectivity probably means continued difficulty identifying
funding sources for Women's Studies, because bringing to bear on re-
search the multiple gaze of cross-cultural interdisciplinarity pulls the
university of the 21 st century away from its early 20th century reliance on
corporate capitalism in an era in which universities are increasingly
valuing grantsmanship among faculty over the production of knowledge
and research unencumbered by the constraints of funding sources. The
pedagogical burdens on Women's Studies therefore become global in
scope and of ongoing urgency. A model in which border-crossing becomes
methodology in the service of a transformed world requires learning (and
teaching students) how to bring together concepts, approaches, and ques-
tions that cross disciplinary borders in order to construct critical knowl-
edge from women's lives. While feminists in previous decades may have
argued with some justification that it is the responsibility of the oppres-
sors to educate themselves, the urgency of changing institutional priori-
ties that threaten Women's Studies requires a new strategy. The central
objective of Women's Studies becomes one of constructing both knowl-
edge and pedagogy that will make it possible for the colonizers to recog-
nize and own "their blindness to the facts of oppression," so that feminist
education will neither replicate the colonialism of the past nor become
complicit in the new imperialism of the global economy.
If cross-cultural interdisciplinarity becomes both necessary and suffi-
cient to generate knowledge out of the epistemic "gaps" produced by
traditional disciplinary organizations of knowledge, then cross-cultural
interdisciplinarity belongs in the women's studies curriculum core as
methodology, not in order to displace either the consciousness-raising
and issues-orientation of many introductory courses or the critique stu-
dents learn in theory but rather additionally to help them develop "com-
petency" (in Harding's terms) in anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic,
and anti-imperialist perspectives, and to be able to explain how they
achieved such competency. Helping students locate what feminists have
usefully "borrowed" from various disciplines at the same time as they
learn to trace the constituent standpoints that have generated feminist
perspectives creates a model for an interdisciplinarity towards which, and
by means of which, Women's Studies asks them to work. In practical
terms, students need to learn to recognize both the extent to which any
specific course, research project, or discipline creates only a partial per-
spective on women's lives and also how they can bring together methods
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY, WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 17
both from the disciplines and from the work of mestiza consciousness. As
Anzalduia
(1993) writes, "because the future depends on the breaking
down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures"
(p.
429).
Feminist scholars and teachers can contribute to such a future-in
which the mestiza intellectual works, in Adrienne Rich's 1975 vision,
"toward a woman-centered university," by consciously including/"incor-
porating" in our own thinking and teaching the work of feminist scholars
that has emerged from other disciplines. This means challenging any
hierarchy of disciplinary methods that may describe the structure of a
particular women's studies program. It means including narrative and
poetry as integral to feminist theory (as Anzalduia does in Borderlands/La
Frontera); turning to feminist social scientists in order to understand the
relationship between methodology and research questions; asking non-
Spanish-speaking students to struggle with the language borders Anzal-
du'a, Lugones, and Maria Luisa "Papusa" Molina cross in their work;
helping students who have avoided science since high school to under-
stand what Sandra Harding (1991) means when she explains "Why 'Phys-
ics' Is a Bad Model for Physics" (pp. 77-104) and to be able to read Bonnie
Spanier's
(1995) critique of ideological foundations of molecular biology;
choosing textbooks and anthologies that highlight interdisciplinarity;"
and in particular challenging students to read writers whose work crosses
cultural as well as disciplinary difference, such as Patricia Williams
(1991)12 and Peggy Sanday (1996).13
The doubled "curdling" of a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary meth-
odology gives students and researchers as well as feminist professionals in
the community an approach to formulate questions, diagnose problems,
conduct qualitative interviews, draw social inferences, analyze public
policy, propose interventions, write essays, fiction, and poetry, and create
and perform art. It also characterizes the parameters within which we
generate feminist questions and thereby becomes the knowledge claim
for our place in the coalition of standpoint epistemologies that comprises
the theory revolution as well as in the system of disciplines feminist
scholars and teachers have been trying to transform for a quarter of a
century. Thus for the moment, even while recognizing the ultimately
undisciplined mission of feminist education, we may even need to argue
for a particular kind of status for Women's Studies, not a field of study
parallel to the disciplines of the modern university but a mestiza disci-
pline, one with a cross-cultural and critical interdisciplinarity as its par-
ticular methodology.
Correspondence should be sent to Marjorie Pryse, Dept. of English, Uni-
versity at Albany-S UNY, Albany, NY 12222, mpryse@cnsvax.albany.edu.
18 MARJORIE PRYSE
Notes
1. Early examples of critiques of academic feminism by women of color include
Moraga and Anzalduia (1983)
and hooks
(1984).
For a broader sense of differ-
ence and feminism, see Hirsch and Keller (1 990).
For an excellent introduction
to global feminism, see Basu
(1995).
2. I am thinking here about the debates concerning the construction of "Black
feminist thought" and Patricia Hill Collins's
(1990) questions concerning
who can produce such thought (pp. 19-40).
3. Klein (1990) refers to Donald Campbell's (1969) visual models of interdis-
ciplinarity, with disciplines typically conceived as clusters of specialties
leaving interdisciplinary gaps but ideally constructed according to a "fish-
scale model of omniscience" with more overlap between disciplines (pp. 82-
83; Campbell, pp. 329-331).
4. Stacey and Thorne (1985) have noted, however, that "the efforts of feminist
historians and literary critics to influence mainstream work in their disci-
plines have met with considerable indifference and hostility" (p. 304).
5. See for example Alcoff and Potter (1993); Fonow and Cook (1991); Harding
(1987 and 1991); Herrmann and Stewart (1994); Lennon and Whitford
(1994);
and Stanley and Wise (1993), among others.
6. The Modern Language Association was founded in 1883, the American His-
torical Association in 1884, the American Economic Society in 1885, and both
the American Mathematical Society and the Geological Society of America in
1888 (Swoboda, 1979, p. 72; Rudolph, 1962, p. 406).
7. However, merely bureaucratic proposals from administrators interested in
creating fewer units to manage in periods of academic "downsizing" are not
necessarily beneficial to Women's Studies; such proposals may emerge from
arbitrary groupings of faculty and curricula that may be termed "interdiscipli-
nary" but bear no relation to the critical interdisciplinarity I am considering
here.
8. According to Hennessy (1 993), New Historicist readings "cordon off an area of
inquiry" (p. 122); Nancy Armstrong's argument in Desire in Domestic Fiction
(1987) "so divorces culture from economic change as to dismiss it altogether"
(p. 123); and Joan Scott's feminist history "is ultimately a regional analytic"
(p. 123).
9. Discussions among international feminists from Barbados, Brazil, Bulgaria,
Russia, and South Africa at the recent NWSA conference held at Skidmore,
NY, in June 1996, as well as the recent UN/NGO Fourth World Conference in
Beijing, have revealed that Women's Studies as a disciplinary field is emerging
CRITICAL INTERDISCIPLINARITY,
WOMEN'S STUDIES, AND CROSS-CULTURAL INSIGHT 19
from around the world, not just from within Western countries. See also Basu
(1995).
10. To cite just one recent, influential, and troubling example, see Simon During,
ed. (1993), The Cultural Studies Reader. The volume, which claims to collect
"representative essays in cultural studies as an introduction to this increas-
ingly popular field of study" (p.
1) , includes 28 articles by contributors. Fewer
than a third of these articles are written by feminists. Furthermore, while the
opening section on theory includes two feminists, Teresa de Lauretis and
Michele Wallace, the contributions by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Roland Barthes, James Clifford, Stuart Hall, and Renato Rosaldo are all cited,
within the editor's first sentence introducing their work, as "classic," "impor-
tant," "brilliant," "influential," and "lucid," while the contribution by de
Lauretis "contributes" and that by Wallace "is addressed to non-Eurocentric
readers." The collection's editor appears entirely unselfconscious and un-
apologetic about the sexism inherent in the volume; indeed, the contributions
by de Lauretis and Wallace appear in the familiar pattern of the "add women
and stir" approach to curriculum transformation, the institutional movement
that has tried, since the 1980s, to alter the traditional disciplines from within.
11. Most standard textbooks for women's studies courses present the field as a
series of issues (domestic violence, abortion rights), a series of theoretical
frameworks (liberal, radical, psychoanalytic, Marxist), or a collection of auto-
biographical, personal, and fictional/poetic statements. The only text I have
found that begins to attempt the doubled crossing of cultural perspectives
and the disciplines is Maggie Humm's Modern Feminisms (1992). Although
Humm unfortunately includes brief excerpts rather than complete essays in
order to present a broader view of the field, her text begins with a chronology
that includes significant dates in feminist politics and feminist writing from
numerous countries (Britain, Russia, Mexico, Germany, Japan, Italy, India,
Egypt, the United States, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Northern
Ireland, Chile, Canada, Australia, Turkey, and Palestine), thereby suggesting
from the beginning that feminism and Women's Studies are not just of con-
cern in the United States (although her historical essay focuses on the "His-
tory of Feminism in Britain and America"). She then includes significant early
feminist theorists (Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and
others), thereby suggesting that feminism emerged first from women and only
later becomes complicated by the influence of male social theorists. The body
of the collection includes both a survey of theoretical and political perspec-
tives on feminism (including a clear explanation of the differences between
first and second wave issues and extensive representation of what she calls
"Asian, Black, and Women of Colour Lesbianisms/Feminisms"(1) and a sur-
vey of perspectives from a variety of disciplines (psychology, philosophy of
science, history, cultural studies, language and writing, and education).
Other collections of interest include Anne C. Herrmann and Abigail J.
Stewart's Theorizing Feminism (1994) and Sneja Gunew's A Reader in Femi-
nist Knowledge (1990). Herrmann and Stewart subtitle their collection of
20 MARJORIE PRYSE
essays "Parallel Trends in the Humanities and Social Sciences," and they
begin with a preface that encourages readers to "collaborate across disci-
plines." The collection raises the question of the relationship among the
disciplines in Women's Studies by including two essays that discuss "the
mutual influence of the humanities and social sciences," includes explica-
tions of feminist theory by the Combahee River Collective and Cherrie
Moraga (thereby suggesting that a women of color feminism is foundational to
theory),
and presents perspectives on various feminist topics from art, psy-
chology, economics, law, anthropology, feminist theory, and cultural studies,
although the individual essays in the collection do not themselves cross
differences. Gunew's collection includes several essays on Women's Studies,
women's history, philosophy, biology, and religion, along with representa-
tions from some theoretical perspectives on feminism
(psychoanalytic, radi-
cal, and
socialist),
and begins with a critique of white mainstream feminism
from the perspective of Aboriginal women in Australia.
12. Although Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991) does not include
other disciplines besides law, in its mix of personal narrative and legal analy-
sis it provides a model for how to make a traditionally-inaccessible discipline
available to readers not trained in law.
13. Sanday's most recent book, A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial
(1996), is also her most interdisciplinary. In previous work, such as Fraternity
Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, Sanday has used her
training as an anthropologist to focus on a single case study within the context
of some larger psychoanalytic and cultural analysis of fraternity culture. In A
Woman Scorned, she begins with the St. John's rape case, a case which already
involves issues of race because the accused perpetrators are white and the
victim is African-Carribbean, and then turns to an amalgam of history, includ-
ing legal history from the colonial period; literary and cultural analysis of
sexuality and rape in early New England, at the "birth of the nation," and in
the 19th century; sexology; feminism and the anti-rape movement; media
studies; and contemporary activism. Throughout she interweaves perspec-
tives from anthropology and sociology, along with narratives from other
victims of acquaintance rape, and the subtitle of her book suggests to the
reader that a feminist analysis emerging from a demonstrated cross-cultural
interdisciplinarity brings together the evidence to put cultural attitudes about
acquaintance rape "on trial"-and to convict them convincingly for her read-
ers. Sanday writes A Woman Scorned not only as an anthropologist but as a
feminist critical cross-cultural interdisciplinarian.
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