This essay presents an effort to incorporate feminist teaching and gender studies content within an institutional setting that limits the opportunities for conventional women’s and gender studies classes. Within the parameters of disciplinary teaching assignments, a full-time faculty member in English (Miriam Wallace) and a visiting faculty member in Psychology (Chemba Raghavan) found a way to introduce feminist theory students and psychology students to the pleasures and difficulties of cross-disciplinary study by putting these students in a single collaborative unit (see Appendix A). In the process, we explored our own interdisciplinary commitments and disciplinary blind spots, enabled students to teach each other about areas they might not have encountered otherwise, and developed an alternative to both the dedicated course or the co-taught, semester-length course that might be adapted as yet another tool for feminist integration within the larger curriculum, especially at other small liberal arts colleges.

At the time, we were teaching at a small liberal arts college that lacked any dedicated faculty in women’s and gender studies but offered the equivalent of a minor course of study. New College of Florida, the honours college of the State University System of Florida, is unusually small, with fewer than eight hundred students. Founded in the 1960s by educational reformers, our campus culture values close teacher-student interaction, undergraduate research, individualized instruction, and innovative pedagogies. Students are assessed with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades, and instead of accumulating credit hours for each course, a student must complete seven semester-length ‘contracts’ of coursework co-signed by an academic sponsor to graduate (see New College of Florida website for more on its mission). This mission makes New College a good fit for many core principles of feminist pedagogy: treating students as bearers of knowledge, valuing experiential knowledge and student activism, recognizing education as ‘doing’ rather than simply ‘being done to,’ valuing self-reflexivity and self-critique, and envisaging teachers as also learners in the classroom.

However, although New College of Florida would seem to be a natural site for interdisciplinary work, each faculty member is hired with primary responsibility to a home discipline. Moreover, faculty assignments are administered through three academic divisions (rather than departments): Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. This has the unintended consequence of making work across disciplines located in different divisions particularly challenging, since all budget and evaluative functions are the responsibility of the home division. Consequently there is no institutional way to evaluate, value, or support trans-divisional work, and such work may even be perceived as draining resources from the faculty member’s home division. Ironically, the college’s small size and the self-defined unconventionality of our students contribute to a tendency on the part of many faculty to retreat to the safe space of disciplinary traditions. Collaborative work between tenure-track faculty and visiting faculty further reveals institutional limitations of differential autonomy and status not specific to New College.

Stand-alone women’s and gender studies courses can rarely be offered since they replace more regular disciplinary offerings; disciplinary cross-listed courses are mostly found within the Humanities Division (e.g., Philosophy of Embodiment, Women’s Writing, Women in Art History). There have been no regular courses offered in psychology of gender or sociology of gender, for example, though there are two regularly offered, cross-listed biology courses. Cross listing has been successful, provided that we are inclusive and do not ask too carefully about the ideological lens of the courses or the quantity of feminist and gender content.[1] The resulting tensions between the interdisciplinary nature of serious women’s/gender studies scholarship or teaching and the institutional pressures to serve our disciplines demand more creative pedagogical practices.

Our response to this challenge was to foreground the tension that we both experience in implementing, on the one hand, a commitment to poststructuralist-inflected feminist approaches to culture and art and, on the other, engagement with cross-cultural study of gender roles and the value of quantitative research methods. Fortuitously, we discovered that Miriam was offering a survey course, Feminist Theory, and Chemba was offering Psychology of Gender in the same term (see Appendix C). We decided to create a shared week-long unit in which both classes would read the same material and come face-to-face in a special joint-class meeting. Our hope was to undercut the sense that ‘feminism’ meant abstract ‘theory,’ while ‘psychology’ meant collecting data about the ‘real world’ – a distinction that our students often take for granted. In particular, we wanted to trouble the common ‘straw man’ arguments that we see students on our campus, students who are committed to one side or the other of the social sciences/humanities divide, making about the ‘other’ group. These particular tensions are well documented in feminist scholarship,[2] suggesting that although our institutional setting may be more familiar to others also at liberal arts colleges, some of the larger theoretical issues for interdisciplinary feminist work do carry over.

Feminist Pedagogy and Collaborative Teaching

Scholarship on ‘feminist pedagogy’ is broad and deep, with at least one journal (Feminist Teacher) explicitly dedicated to it, and several others (including Radical Teacher; NWSA Journal; Women’s Studies Quarterly; Pedagogy; College Teacher: College English; and now thirdspace) publishing important work. Much has been written about the function of emotion in the classroom (Boler; Fisher; Wallace) and about teaching as transgressive and transformative (Hernández; hooks; Maher and Tetreault; Scheneidewind and Maher; Thorne),[3] and there continues to be work (feminist and otherwise) on the pleasures and dangers of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching.[4] Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber’s distinction in “Dialoguing about Future Directions in Feminist Theory” between ‘discussion’ (which she takes as monologic argument for one’s own viewpoint) and ‘dialogue’ (which she understands as mutual and respectful listening and speaking) is helpful for highlighting one way to distinguish a more feminist-inflected classroom from more conventional models. As Ellen Carillo suggests, an “impulse to raise questions about and reflect on that which has long been taken for granted is not only important in the classroom, but is one of the defining characteristics of feminist pedagogy” (39). Self-reflective self-questioning about the dynamics of the classroom, as well as how the course content functions as ‘liberatory’ (and for whom), is a common signal of overtly feminist work.[5]

However, as Carillo and others document, we need more consideration of feminist teaching in courses that fall outside of the gender and women’s studies curriculum per se: “Much scholarship on feminist teaching continues to focus on college classes within women’s studies or those devoted to feminist theory [...] How we position ourselves in relation to texts, students, and feminism becomes an especially complicated issue for feminist teachers who do not teach feminism” (Carillo 38). Jane Kenway and Helen Modra agree: “From [academic literature on feminist pedagogy] one gains the impression that feminist pedagogy is something that happens almost exclusively in Women’s Studies classrooms in the tertiary sector of education” (qtd. in Carillo 38). It was here, in creating an intersection between an overtly feminist course and a clearly disciplinary psychology course that we saw our joint-class unit intervening. Simply by creating the context for dialogue between students of feminist theory and students working on empirical psychology projects, we sought to set self-reflection in motion and combat the marginalization of feminist student work.

The Collaborative Course Unit

Team teaching has been a particularly productive model for feminist pedagogy, one that unsettles the dynamics of authority and power in the conventional classroom simply by providing more than one voice with the institutional standing of ‘teacher.’ Unfortunately, team teaching a full-term course was not an option for us. Neither of us was likely to be able to offer these courses again in tandem, and the impermanence of Chemba’s position also limited our options. Co-directing a small group of students in a tutorial or independent study (established instructional modes at New College) was also not an option for us, given our disciplinary teaching loads. However, we realized that it would not be difficult or particularly problematic to bring our two classes together for a single week’s unit with shared readings.

Feminist and gender studies teaching can move beyond the boundaries of the individual single-teacher classroom in ways that other team-taught, semester-long courses cannot. Preparing cross-course units and projects, using students to teach each other, and encouraging cross-class visits between faculty and students punctures the boundaries of the traditional single-teacher classroom in productive ways. While many women’s studies, feminist, and gender studies courses are rightly offered as dedicated interdisciplinary courses or taught as cross-listed courses, collaborative intersections on particular units between distinct courses offer an important alternative to traditional teaching. Students with significant background in psychology and those with significant background in literary textual analysis or ‘high’ theory are able to offer each other a richer experience, one that exceeds that offered by a team-taught, single course. Joint studies in literature and psychology enhance and sharpen students’ and teachers’ understanding of the concept of feminism itself and support its re-conceptualization as ‘feminisms,’ not ‘Feminism.’ Just as faculty trained in different fields and situated differently in the institution can push each other to ask new questions and develop new answers, so too can undergraduate students.

We hoped to document significant moments in which students whose research relies heavily on fieldwork and actual community research pushed those more versed in theoretical questions to rethink abstract commitments. Likewise, we expected to find that students of theory might ask probing questions of their colleagues about how research methods work, or even presuppose particular outcomes, and how the evidence of interviews is codified in language or discourse analysis. The status of various kinds of evidence was also an anticipated source of productive tension and debate, and, importantly, it intersected with our concern to raise epistemological questions about disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledges.

We were particularly interested in addressing a common tension between students with a strong base in the humanities (particularly in literature and philosophy) and those more strongly embedded in social science research methods. Traditionally, Gender Studies minors at New College, because they are likely to have done the most work within the Division of Humanities, have privileged qualitative or experiential approaches and evinced a distinct suspicion towards the more quantitative or empirical methodologies highly valued by most of our Division of Social Sciences faculty colleagues. Students well grounded in the humanities are often powerfully invested in poststructuralist suspicion towards epistemological claims based on empirical evidence. While some are more sensitive to the claims of experiential knowledge derived from gendered, sexed, classed, and/or raced locations, an inability to grasp the potential power of empirical study for equity work has limited some students’ ability to work outside of the humanities and also to convince faculty committed to those methods to see gender studies as a useful intellectual home. Faculty in the natural and social sciences, who are strongly committed to gender equity in their fields as practising scientists and mentors to women students find an easy dismissal of scientific research insulting and misinformed. In contrast, some humanities students overvalue the ‘truth’ produced by scientists and thus resist feminist work that unsettles their faith in scientific objectivity, calling into question methodologies that fail to achieve objectivity or universality.

Located in Literature and in Psychology, we were well situated to address this particular cultural divide among our students. Questioning the grounds of our claims to knowledge is an important and shared goal of feminist scholars and teachers; it is in this kind of collaboration that we can begin to explore the relative value of differently situated knowledges and to help students discover the value of other ways of knowing for themselves.[6] In the process of planning this unit, we worked together to imagine the future of gender studies on our campus. Thinking about our own teaching practices and research questions, we also participated in the reflexive self-examination that we believe is foundational to feminist pedagogy. In our interactions as feminist colleagues, we found that our different perspectives teaching in different fields (English and comparative literatures, psychology, and family studies) and our different educational and life experiences (mother or not; tenured or not; educated in India and California or educated in the United States, on both east and west coasts; experienced teacher in multiple settings or experienced at a single small college) fruitfully highlighted our own situated knowledges. As not only teachers but also as learners in this collaborative venture, we hoped to offer a model that other instructors can borrow for collaborative units across other disciplines.

The Joint Session: Procedures and Description of Requirements

Once we agreed on the rationale for trying to structure a link between our classes, we began to plan the Feminism and Psychology unit at the end of our summer break. We agreed that the collaborative unit would include three to four assigned articles to be read by both classes and an actual joint class meeting focused on face-to-face student discussion. Miriam was using a regular position-paper format in her Feminist Theory course, with several students responsible for papers at each class meeting. We borrowed this format but decided to require short response papers from all students in both classes for this collaborative unit.

We negotiated the articles that we would assign as shared readings, which meant that we had to alert students to some changes for that week in advance: one was a literary-oriented feminist theory article (Jessica Benjamin, “The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination”), one was an overview of the psychology of gender (Abigail J. Stewart and Christa McDermott, “Gender in Psychology”), and the third was an overview of feminism in the psychology of gender (Jeanne Marecek, “Feminism and Psychology: Can This Relationship Be Saved?”). These articles were chosen to reflect methods of analysis more familiar to students versed either in the humanities or in the social sciences, as well as to identify the growing cross-disciplinary, integrated approach to analysis identified as research intersectionality.

Expecting that tensions might arise among students during the discussions and realizing that feminist theory students outnumbered psychology of gender students by about three to one, we designed specific questions to address such tensions and enable serious discussion. (In hindsight, preparing in this way did preset ‘tension’ as an expected experience for the class, but given what we ourselves experienced in this larger institutional setting and have heard from students who worked in both areas, we believe that this would have shown up in any case.)

The joint class met for a full two hours (rather than the usual eighty minutes). We opened with some cross talk among ourselves to introduce the goals of the joint session and then administered the Liberal Feminism Attitude and Ideology Scale (LFAIS, see Appendix B) to collect data on varying attitudes to mainstream liberal feminism among both groups of students, but particularly to get all students thinking about conventional notions of feminism before their discussions (see Morgan 359-90).[7] Immediately after collecting the surveys, we broke students into discussion groups of four to five students (chosen in advance to ensure that there was at least one psychology student in each group). In the interests of time, we asked each group to choose one of the three articles for forty minutes of internal discussion using the questions we developed. Following the group work, we invited students to come back to the class as a whole and to share the highlights of their discussions with each other. We asked each group to report on its discussion and facilitated some cross discussion about the students’ responses to particular essays and their approaches.

Guidelines for position papers were provided to students in both sections, though position papers were required in advance of the joint class meeting for feminist theory students (consistent with our class practice) and assigned to follow the joint-class for psychology of gender students (a special assignment in that class). To ensure comparability of responses, the guidelines for response papers were similar for both theory and psychology students, with an additional question on methods for psychology students (see Appendix A).

Outcomes of the Joint Session: Student Position Papers

A dominant concern that emerged from all student position papers was the perception of obstacles to interdisciplinary work. Based on this idea, student solutions to these obstacles revealed five core themes: (1) engaged thoughtfulness without solution; (2) discoveries about the ‘other’ field; (3) defending one field or the other; (4) an effort to move beyond disciplinary parameters; and (5) relating personally. Students from both groups showed all five of these responses, and some showed more than one of the above responses in their papers. Some examples of each follow:

1. Engaged thoughtfulness – No solution seen or offered

A Euro-American male psychology student wrote: “[Psychological] women’s studies tend to be viewed within feminism as too scientific. Women’s studies are viewed within psychology as being a ‘special interest,’ while feminism has come to critique the objectivity and empiricism that psychology holds as its tenets.”

A Euro-American female student taking both classes argued: “Gender is not an empirical concept, and meta-analysis and empirical values will not (cannot) define it.” Here, no solution is seen to the conflict: in this second student’s view, either psychology cannot study gender as an empirical concept and, therefore, cannot study gender at all, or psychology should alter its structure in order to study gender.

2. Discoveries about the ‘other’ field

One Euro-American female theory student with a background in literature reacted with recognition: “I was pleasantly surprised by how many concepts that I am familiar with from feminist theory have found sophisticated articulations within psychology, while not surprised to find that they remain outside the mainstream, in an embattled position vis-à-vis the traditional ‘scientific method’ ideology. These articles caused me to reflect on the uses of and challenges to interdisciplinary work within the academy.” Here, the student has processed the challenge presented to pre-existing notions of psychology with careful attention to similarities and differences. She has discovered a field – psychology – with which she was not familiar in advance, and she now knows not only that psychology interests her but also that she is better prepared to do interdisciplinary work than she had realized. (This student later completed the Gender Studies minor and will probably pursue a PhD in either women’s or lesbian and gay studies.)

Another Euro-American female theory student wrote:

This student retains concerns about tensions between the fields but finds something valuable for her own work in literature from her new understanding of psychological approaches. This is a beginning effort at synthesis, and it could lead to more serious engagement with both fields. Moreover, she shows a meta-level awareness of institutional issues surrounding interdisciplinarity.

3. Defending psychology or defending theory

In defence of psychology

A Euro-American female psychology student wrote: “Where theory can stand on a few specific cases and reflection on those cases, psychology is a science that has to have solid evidence behind its conjectures. At times I felt that the authors of this article and the feminist theory students did not take these scientific constraints into account, but in the last few paragraphs, Stewart and McDermott reconcile this problem.” The student believes that psychology has the answers to some of the questions posed by her peers in the humanities: “If feminists pick up a trend based on anecdotes, case studies, or contemplation, psychologists can start with this hypothesis and study the relevant intersectionalities to see if such a theory can be backed by science. Thus, proponents of differing perspectives can corroborate their data in order to fill in each others’ gaps and illuminate truths of society.”

Another Euro-American female psychology student echoes this argument and contends that psychology is

This student rejects the work of Chodorow and Benjamin as not ‘real’ psychology and ascribes to the value of scientific method by demanding data such as surveys of multiple readers’ perceptions rather than interpreting the significance of a cultural object such as The Story of O.

Some theory students also felt more attuned to the ‘psychology’ approaches and were suspicious of the more speculative approach found in Benjamin: “Despite the logical development of Jessica Benjamin’s essay […] there are a number of problems intrinsic to its construction that prevent it from making a sound argument concerning the origins of sadomasochistic behavior. [Benjamin’s] orientation in psychoanalysis defines the essay’s progression from a premise that is based in the theoretical, not the factual,” wrote one Euro-American woman. Another theory student, a female South American, stated: “As persuasive as Beauvoir’s argument is [in The Second Sex], her constant speculation evokes suspicion in me. Stewart and McDermott’s assuring statistics and quotes make me feel more at ease – I can take their work more comfortably than Beauvoir’s.” The appeal of empirical and quantitative data is strong, even for students with solid backgrounds in the humanities. (This last student eventually became a literature major, writing her senior thesis on ‘bad’ women in Gothic fictions).

There is an interesting question here about how to value the study of culture and cultural work and the kinds of work and knowledge that can be gauged empirically; it seemed more common to find student humanists who were willing to defer to empirical truth claims than student empiricists who were willing to see deep value in the more interpretive and affective knowledges associated with the study of cultural artifacts and activities. Our question is whether an encounter like this was more valuable than simple distribution requirements because it asked students to confront rather than compartmentalize these different ways of knowing and making meaning.

In defence of theory or theoretical approaches

Theory students were often impressed by the psychology overview given by Stewart and McDermott, noting particularly how convincing they found the empirical examples these authors include. Others found Marecek’s critiques of the ways that feminist approaches have tended to be marginalized in mainstream psychology familiar or expected. Some tried to defend principles they associated strongly with theory. Jessica Benjamin’s article on ‘rational domination’ was the most apparently theoretical essay assigned this week and directly followed from both classes’ exposure to Nancy Chodorow’s work. Thus, self-identified theory supporters were likely to choose this essay to defend. One of the theory students expressed dismay at hearing from a psychology student in her group that the only way in which Benjamin’s work on rational domination could be accepted as ‘valid’ was if a number of other readers were to read The Story of O and respond with precisely the same interpretive reading. The productiveness of a concept of cultural fantasy reproduced in early childhood seemed to her to be reduced here to merely reading the same text in the same way – which is anathema to current approaches to literary study. However, if some theory students were troubled by the truth claims of positivist study and empirically based research, others sought to align themselves with this more measurable approach as a relief from the uncertainties of theory.

This group was apparently less united in defence of their ‘field’ than the psychology students, probably in part because theory is not a unified or easily defined ‘discipline.’ One Euro-American female theory student, attending to the concerns expressed about the empirical basis for Benjamin’s work, wrote that

This student attends to the differences between an empirically based study of clinical evidence and the kind of speculative theorizing about cultural fantasy that Benjamin’s work represents. She does not need to diminish the value of psychology here; she recognizes that Benjamin’s work participates in a different and potentially valuable tradition of critical analysis. Nor does she assert the greater value of theory to make her limited claim about the value for her work of Benjamin’s approach.

An African female theory student wrote in her mid-term paper:

Here, the student’s commitment to a conception of subjectivity or ‘self’ as fluid, socially constructed, and reiterated in performative acts stands in tension with the possibility of identifying an adequate list of quantifiable attributes to represent the identities of subjects of study. This is not precisely a ‘defence’ of theory against the incursions of psychology, but it does represent a resistance to what is perceived as a reductive conception of subjective self through psychological studies, questioning even the ‘solution’ of intersectionality.

4. Multidisciplinary perspectives and synthesis

One paper by a Euro-American male psychology student (Psychology major, Gender Studies minor) was a good example of the position that “psychology should be informed by feminist theory.” He wrote:

He continues: “I have found the lack of communication between disciplines startling at times, even between psychology and sociology, where for instance Gilligan’s theories have only recently been explicitly applied to the group (Wolfinger 1999),[8] and not too thoughtfully even then. That makes it particularly refreshing to have insights from feminist theory brought succinctly and practically to bear on psychological research.” Clearly this student found the unit particularly helpful for thinking about how psychology as a field uses or operationalizes the variable of gender.

On the other side, one Euro-American female theory student found Stewart and McDermott’s article particularly suggestive for feminist theory, seeing psychology in the role of ‘practice’:

An African American female theory student responded to Marecek’s citation of studies that show little verified difference between male and female participants and wrote the following:

After asking about the implications of finding minimal verified gender differences in psychological studies, the student raises pointed questions about the limited ethnic/racial and age range of participants in these studies, showing a willingness to take psychological work seriously, but also attending to perceived omissions in a focus solely on gender that fits well with concerns addressed by intersectionality. This student seems to find something congenial in the psychological approach, and she is moving beyond gender alone in her thinking about how disciplinary fields themselves function. (She later wrote a sociological thesis studying student-mothers and their coping mechanisms.) Another Euro-American female theory student emphasized Marecek’s concern with restoring agency to women by questioning assumptions found in ‘difference’ feminisms, and she also stressed the need for more inclusive and representative participants and subjects of study n psychological studies:

One Euro-American male psychology major responded particularly thoughtfully, pushing beyond the critique of psychology he found in Marecek’s essay:

Here, this student, who has a background in queer theory and was pursuing a minor in Gender Studies, draws on an understanding of the ways in which the field of psychology requires the self-reflective position of attending to its own underlying suppositions and the ways in which the field is made through “doing psychology” and the investments that implies. He synthesizes a theory approach with an insider’s knowledge of psychology to produce a critique of psychology that does not simply see theory as an alternative or an answer but as a way of revealing investments and assumptions that are invisible within disciplinary boundaries.

5. Relating personally

Many students sought to draw the course material into their own experiences and lives, sometimes with frustration, sometimes with new excitement. In the words of one Euro-American male psychology student:

Another Euro-American male student of psychology concluded with a stronger sense of his own agency: “My hope, anchored by a realistic analysis of the present state of my discipline, is to produce work that is aware of itself and acknowledges my position as a queer, feminist researcher”; but he ended by worrying that “maybe this leaves me, by Marecek’s standards, impaled by psychology’s ‘greasy pole.’” Interestingly, students who identified as sexual minorities were often those who felt most drawn to make personal observations about their inclusion or exclusion from psychological studies and psychoanalytic models.

Finally, a Euro-American female theory student wrote the following of Benjamin’s article:

Here is a strong sense that, despite the apparent datedness of this, the oldest article assigned for this class, the concerns still seem pertinent to her own life and studies.

Instructors’ Perspectives

Overall, this collaborative effort was fruitful for both faculty and students. It was successful in that it invited students to consider alternative theoretical perspectives and to question their positions prior to the joint class meeting. We both felt (and several students confirmed) that they benefited greatly from interacting with their peers and trying to explain their reactions to each other. Even though some students represented their exchange with the other group as tense and heated, we take this discomfort as signifying a learning experience still in process. Perhaps more importantly, students were actually able to see mutual respect modelled effectively by their instructors. Specifically, our interaction in the classroom (and in preparation for the class) highlighted the similarities and differences in our own approaches to the study of gender. Our discussions with each other – preceding, during, and since the class – have served as valuable learning sessions for both of us. Of course, such an endeavour can be successful when the hosts are at ease with each other and know that their differing perspectives are respected as suggestive, helpful, and valid. Thus, efforts to replicate this unit should be chosen, not mandated.

For us, a particularly enlightening moment came while talking over student reactions and recognizing that, cross-culturally, different strategies might be effective. For instance, Chemba noted that the so-called math phobia associated with US girls is lacking in South and East Asian girls and that she herself began as a strong quantitative-oriented scholar. What appears at New College as a disciplinary divide – between those who value and those who fear or distrust quantitative methodologies – may be in large part exacerbated by our institution’s cultural location.

Women faculty and students who have found a measure of power in associating themselves with quantitative ‘hard’ methods and sciences have an investment in resisting attacks and criticisms; feminism can benefit by ensuring that quantitative data on gender are rigorous and precise, not based upon poor samples or biased assumptions. Other faculty and students who have found fulfillment in the view from above or the patterning of structure and system that theory elicits also have an investment in the value of their approach while at the same time learning to question it.[9] Many students are attracted to theory on our campus because it is ‘sexy’ – obscure, powerful, and intellectually challenging – but one purpose of teaching feminist theory is to challenge what counts as theory by opening the value of embodied experience, situated knowledges, and revealing the ideological stakes in particular variants of theory. In some ways, the languages of theories can enable students to move across disciplines and reveal and even resist the disciplinary limits that academic disciplines would impose – this was one benefit of inviting psychology students to read theory and of inviting theory students to consider the ‘view’ provided by psychology.

We enjoyed reading beyond our normative fields and found the perspective offered by the ‘other’ expert valuable for increasing our ease in discussing this material and framing questions for the students and ourselves. We both feel better equipped to teach similar units on our own. Working together was an effective way to avoid a tendency to represent the other field in a reductive, simplistic way – whether as a diminished straw man or as an idealized and unproblematic authority. Questions about the limitations of empirical study and the scientific method for understanding our world are better engaged when classrooms include rather than exclude thoughtful and self-critical practitioners of these methods. Likewise, it is best to approach concerns about theory and psychoanalysis by examining seriously the work of scholars who use such methods but are both critical of them and knowledgeable about their histories and implications.

For us also, a sense of (feminist) collegial interaction – the kind of intellectual exchange most of us sought in choosing graduate study and that, once hired, is often limited to those in one’s own department – was an invaluable gain. In some ways, because we are not involved in each other’s departmental politics or hiring practices, we were more free to engage with each other as colleagues and socially committed intellectuals. We both found that the emotional and intellectual camaraderie we gained was significant, despite the efforts we sometimes had to make to translate our concerns and scholarship for each other. As Judith Worrell documents,

We can both attest to the validation that we gained for our scholarship and for our teaching through this endeavour. Teaching can be a lonely business; even considering students as fellow-learners has its limitations when scripting a syllabus to attend to the process of learning. Students cannot know in advance how the semester’s knowledge-building agenda is imagined, and, of course, faculty cannot know in advance how students’ engagement will actually develop over the term. Having a colleague-observer-participant to talk with was valuable and worth the risk of looking less ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘expert.’

Above all, it was important for the students to see that, as professors, we had respect for the validity of each other’s discipline and its approaches, that we listened carefully to one another, and, particularly, that we were excited by new ways of thinking about a shared concern with gendered experience and equity. Because students themselves may be only just becoming aware of epistemological tensions with their peers or may see such tensions as simply insurmountable, it was particularly valuable for our students to witness a cooperative effort between faculty whose approaches diverged widely and see that respectful discussion can take place.

Even beyond the parameters of this class, a certain respect for the intellectual work of other academics and students would be helpful in combating a tendency to mistake attacking other’s work for scholarly critique. Too often the first response of smart students is to search for a weak spot in the work of other academics, rather than trying to understand the writer’s argument, the methodology by which the writer is guided, and the possible benefits of the work, even if it is flawed. Our position paper assignment invites critique but begins by asking students to explain what the article argues in an effort to forestall the immediate tendency to ‘trash’ a work in order to show one’s own intellectual prowess. We believe this impulse signifies an academic model that militates against careful and thoughtful reading and an exploration of the possibilities as well as the potential limitations of various approaches; it is debilitating to mutual respect across the disciplines. In fact, this impulse represents an effort to discipline the disciplines themselves, and it is hostile to the goals of feminist work, as we understand it. An academic model that values proving the power of one’s ideas by demolishing those of others, rather than acknowledging their merits or potential usefulness even as models to work against, fractures knowledge and rewards only one kind of argument.

Finally, writing this essay together allowed us to balance the isolated work of writing with the more social work of discussing and debating our perceptions about the class. Our writing styles, our differing educational experiences and expectations about what counts as ‘analysis,’ and even how to note citations, all reveal ways in which we are both experts and learners. Our writing has been further complicated by Chemba’s departure from New College; although electronic files fly across seas and mountains, in revising this essay from some distance we miss our easy collaboration and lunch meetings.

Conclusion and Future Plans

Many students in the Psychology of Gender class chose to write their final paper based on their experience with this particular unit or subsequent discussions derived from it. Many of the Feminist Theory class’s mid-term papers developed from this unit and several show the desire to resolve some of the tensions that were revealed in the joint class discussion. While we certainly cannot attribute all student interest in feminism and psychology after this point to our joint session or to the interdisciplinary nature of these two classes, it seems reasonable to assume that we achieved two results: (1) basic exposure to another disciplinary perspective, where often little or none existed before; and (2) a keen awareness of outsider perspectives on their home discipline and an understanding that there may be legitimate questions about fundamental assumptions or methods of that discipline (psychology or literary theory in particular). Though we did not explicitly ask for a written evaluation of the joint session itself (because we wanted to let the dust settle a bit and believed that real teaching and learning occur over time, through reflection, and are not necessarily apparent immediately), several conversations with students and an overview of the position papers and mid-term essays reflect active renegotiations of conceptual understandings in both populations.

As our citations show, students appeared to have processed the information in diverse ways: however, their engagement and critical thinking (albeit sometimes laced with anger, frustration, and dismay, and, at other times, with the joy of exciting discoveries) are clearly evident in much of their writing and attest to the need for such cross-disciplinary endeavours, even in the absence of extensive resources.

As time passed since we wrote our original draft of this essay, all of the students who participated in this joint class session have graduated, Chemba has been teaching in Thailand and consulting for UNESCO and UNICEF, and Miriam is once again preparing to teach Feminist Theory in the fall of 2008. Of the students from these two courses, many eventually graduated with a minor in Gender Studies, including at least one Psychology major, and one student who created a special major in Gender and Ethnicity Studies. At least one student has published part of his senior thesis in a prominent psychology journal, and another may well publish some of her senior thesis work on the disciplining of ‘intimate domains’ in South Africa under apartheid. Several students arranged either internships or volunteer work for local women’s and social justice groups. One student went on to graduate with two children, one born while she was a student, and noted specifically at her senior baccalaureate examination how important her introduction to feminist theory and social science approaches was for her decision to use feminist methodologies in her senior thesis on student-mothers. Even without systematic offerings in women’s and gender studies or any further course offerings on feminist approaches to psychology since we did this unit in 2005, students seemed to derive ongoing value from the term’s work.

Within institutional frameworks that limit the possibility for regular interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary courses, that expect faculty to consider first the needs of a home discipline, or where students are less likely to venture beyond their field of comfort, collaborative intersections between discrete courses such as the one we have described here offer some significant benefits; they may provide another response to the need for cross-disciplinary exposure and interdisciplinary study. We imagine that future directions might include online collaboration with other institutions (locally and globally), a series of pod- or webcasts, in the form of discussions and interviews between academics, activists, and students, and future collaborative publications. We challenge our peers and colleagues across academia, across the United States, and across international boundaries to take up this project and make it their own.

Appendix A

Joint Class Unit: Feminist Theories of Psychology and Psychology of Gender

I. Reading Assignments

Jessica Benjamin, “The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination,” Feminist Studies 6/1 (Spring 1980): 144-74.
Jeanne Marecek, “Feminism and Psychology: Can This Relationship Be Saved?” In Feminisms in the Academy. ed. Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 101-32.
Abigail J. Stewart and Christa McDermott, “Gender in Psychology,” Annual Review of Psychology 55/1 (2004): 519-44.

*Three-page position papers due at class meeting for ALL STUDENTS

II. Questions for Class Discussion (passed out in class after students were broken into groups)

General questions for discussion:
1) How do each of these essays conceive of the role of psychology and/or psychic development in gender difference?
2) What methods and authorities does each use to support its argument/analysis?
3) What do you find compelling and what do you find unconvincing or confusing about each article?

Specific questions for each article:
1) Stewart and McDermott
How does this article make the argument that psychologists usually use gender/sex in their work?
How is “intersectionality” likely to change this, and what are its strengths as a new and more “feminist” method?
2) Marecek
How does Marecek suggest that feminist theory can inform feminist psychology? How does or should psychology inform feminist theory?
3) Benjamin
Does it matter that Benjamin uses a literary text as her case study? Why or why not?

III. Response Paper Guidelines

You will write 4 position papers of 2-3 double-spaced pages, to be presented to your discussion group and handed to me. They are due as noted on the syllabus & according to our schedule. You will owe me a total of 4 position papers over the term, including one due at our special meeting to discuss psychology/object relations. A hard copy of your paper is due to me on Thursday in class. You should also post your paper by Thursday morning at 11a.m. on my web board for your colleagues. They may not have read it before class, so you should open your discussion group by presenting your position from your paper to them.

Audience

Your audience is your discussion group, other class members, and, ultimately, me. A personal “I” voice is fine here (even preferred with some topics), but I do want more than just a pro or con response to the essay you choose to write on. I want to know how you position yourself in regard to this essay – are you sympathetic, critical, hostile, grudgingly impressed, a fellow traveller, or a vehement opponent. Has this reading made you rethink or change a position you thought you were committed to, or has it confirmed your previous positions?

Please use the following format for writing your position papers:

1) Summation: First give a condensed version of what you understand as the central point of the essay or essays you chose to take a position on. What question did it address, and what did it argue? Don’t worry about being critical here, just try to understand what was being said and figure out how to rephrase it for yourself. This is the first response to anything you hear or read. Criticism comes later. This should be no more than about a page.
2) Critical Response and Analysis: Then tell me what interested you about the essay(s) (about a page here). Did you agree/disagree with the writer’s argument or with aspects of it? How did you find it compelling, frustrating, exciting, or irritating? (Remember, ‘criticism’ does not mean simply to criticize, but to analyze critically. You need to do more than simply say, “I don’t like this, it’s hard to read,” although pointing out how and why some of this stuff is difficult to read may be a useful critique to make.)
3) Position and Persuasion: What position do you take in response to this essay’s position? Try to show your audience how you get to your position, and try to persuade your audience that your position is a reasonable or legitimate one that they may want to consider themselves.
What kinds of assumptions or givens is the writer working with? Is it fair to make these assumptions? Is the essay successful in persuading you to buy the writer’s argument? Does it excite you as a reader to new ideas, even if they are in opposition to the writer’s points, or does it seem to lack any useful ability to engage an object of criticism?
4) Synthesis: Can you make any remarks yet about how this reading responded to or contrasted with other critics we’ve read so far? Are the ideas connected, wholly different, or in some kind of dialogue? How are the writer’s ideas likely to be useful for you and your current project(s)? Keep this section brief – perhaps a paragraph at most – this could become a term paper project.

Appendix B

LFAIS Scale: from Betsy Levonian Morgan, “Putting the Feminism into Feminism Scales: Introduction of a Liberal Feminist Attitude and Ideology Scale,” Sex Roles 34.5/6 (1996): 359-90.

“The objective of the present study was to develop a scale that could be used to assess the extent to which respondents embrace feminist ideology and attitudes. The total 60-item LFAIS and each of its domains was shown to be highly reliable […] each of the aforementioned areas [flexible notions of gender roles, stringent ideas about gender equality, woman-oriented policy decisions, acknowledgement of discrimination, greater need for collaborative action in response to discrimination] is more strongly supported by self-identified feminists than by women less likely to identify as feminists.” (Morgan 381)

Appendix C

Course Descriptions and Details

Course in Anglo-American Feminist Theory

Description

Anglo-American Feminist Theory: Conceiving Women was a mixed-level course offered every three years. Students had to be beyond the first year in their studies to take the class, ensuring some background in college-level work in a variety of disciplines, but they were not required to be declared majors in gender studies or any other field at the time they took the course. Because the course is offered only every third year, students have only one chance to take it, thus prerequisites would significantly limit access for students who are interested in the material. The instructor’s field of hire is literature (English), with the expectation of offering regular literary theory courses. Although her background includes extensive interdisciplinary graduate work in feminist theory, this course cannot be offered more frequently because it is outside her area of primary responsibility in the college’s curriculum.

Student level and background in foundational areas (women’s or feminism’s history, psychology of gender, sociology of gender, poststructuralist theory, gay/lesbian and queer studies or theory) was quite varied. Some senior students who were writing theses in related areas were members of the class; several students had taken a previously offered course in critical literary theory; some students had little or no previous college-level work in women’s or gender studies areas; some students had activist or internship experience with groups such as Planned Parenthood, NOW (National Organization for Women), or local non-profits such as victim advocacy, or they had provided legal services to poor parents with dependent children. This is a large class with no cap; in order to open it to interested students, this year’s enrolment was initially thirty-eight students, but it dropped to thirty as students found the workload demanding. (At New College and other small liberal arts colleges, this represents a large course; our average course size is about fifteen students and our student to faculty ratio is eleven to one. A seminar discussion style ceases to be possible above twenty-five students, in my judgment.)

Majors represented among feminist theory students this year included history, anthropology, literature, public policy, philosophy, and psychology. Students were expected to read quite a lot of difficult material, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and 1970s foundational statements and ending with eco-feminist and feminist science work (Fox-Keller, Haraway, Rosser, Shiva, Spanier, Sturgeon). Students read some object relations and psychoanalytic material in preparation for the collaborative unit, including most of Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering. The class met twice weekly on Monday and Thursday: Mondays were mostly lecture with discussions; on Thursdays, students met in small regular discussion groups of four to five members led by a hand-picked ‘discussion group leader.’ Groups were formulated to mix students across level and field expertise in natural/social sciences or humanities.

Students signed up at the beginning of the term to write three short two-to-three-page position papers on specific dates/topics and to present their arguments to their discussion group. Other writing assignments included a regular response journal, in which students were expected to note initial responses to reading assignments in a more informal and personal manner (simply checked off so that these were moderately safe spaces for personal reactions), and two longer term papers, to be developed from reading journal entries and/or position papers and due in the seventh and fifteenth week of the term. Regular attendance and participation, especially in the group discussions, was required.

Students in this class should develop a sense of the richness and complexity of feminist approaches, particularly the continuing tensions surrounding the concept of ‘gender’ and ‘women,’ the continuum between ‘social construction and so-called essentialist arguments, and some understanding of the variety of feminist work that engages race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class identity, along with ongoing critiques of identity politics. For many students, some of this material should be unsettling, some should be challenging or even uncomfortable, and other material should excite and encourage them. Frequently, students go through a period of asking whether or not they consider themselves ‘feminist’ or ‘women,’ and frequently they find themselves less comfortable with previous notions of a shared ‘femininity’ or ‘womanhood.’

Syllabus

Week 1: The Woman Question: “The Mind Has No Sex”
Monday: Lecture
Feminism and Theoretical Underpinnings: Querelle des femmes; Women as rational; Nature/nurture debates
Thursday: Lecture/Discussion – Feminism in the 20th Century; Naming the Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), introduction, chap. 1-3, 8
Opt: essays by Bair and Kaufmann from Yale French Studies

Week 2: Feminism in the 20th Century, continued
Monday: Discussion
Beauvoir, chap. 11, 25, and conclusion
Opt: Genevieve Lloyd, chap. on Beauvoir from The Man of Reason
Thursday: Discussion – 1970s Feminism and “Women’s Lib”
Handouts: Definitions and Foundations
Marilyn Frye, “Sexism” from The Politics of Reality
Betty Friedan “The Feminine Mystique” (from Feminism in Our Time)
“An SDS Statement” and Beverley Jones, “Manifesto” (from Feminism in Our Time)
Redstockings Manifesto (from Feminism in Our Time)
Kathy McAfree and Myrna Wood, excerpt from Bread and Roses (from Feminism in Our Time)
Anne Snitow, “A Gender Diary,” in Conflicts in Feminism (1990)
Combahee River Collective Statement, Feminist Theory Reader, p. 164
bell hooks, “Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression,” in FTR, p. 50

Week 3: Feminism and Literature in the US
Monday: Lecture
Thursday: Lecture/Discussion
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (excerpts): part 1, chap. 1, 2, pp. 3-84
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (from Future of Difference)
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34 (1972): 18-30
Rivkin and Ryan, “Introduction: Feminist Paradigms in Literature,” in Literary Theory
Catherine Stimpson, “Feminist Studies,” from Redrawing the Boundaries

***Reading journals due in class Friday

Weeks 4-6: The French Feminist Challenge and American Responses

Week 4: All Readings from New French Feminisms, except where indicated
Monday: Lecture
Introductions 1 and 3, Cixous p. 90, Irigaray p. 99, 107, Kristeva p. 137, Beauvoir p. 142, Gauthier p. 161, Kristeva p. 165, Rochefort p. 183
Manifesto of the 343 p. 190, C.D. p. 197, Gauthier, 199
Variations on Common Themes p. 212, Cixous p. 245, d’Eaubonne p. 236
Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman,” in FTR, p. 249
Thursday: Discussion
All readings from The Future of Difference:
Carolyn Burke and Jane Gallop, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France”
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans”
Domna Stanton, “Language and Revolution: The Franco-American Disconnect”

Week 5
Monday: Discussion
Joan Scott, “Deconstructing Equality vs. Difference,” in FTR, p. 378
Recommended: Dena Goodman's review of Joan Scott’s, “Only Paradoxes to Offer: Equality versus Difference”
Thursday: Discussion/Lecture
Nancy Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering: You may read the whole book, but at least read the following:
Chap. 3 pp. 40-57, chap. 5-8 pp. 77-140

Week 6: Rewriting Freud – Object Relations and Psychoanalysis
Monday: Lecture
Nancy Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering: chap. 11, 12 pp. 173-210
Jean Maracek, “Feminism and Psychology: Can This Relationship Be Saved?,” from Feminisms in the Academy
Special Evening Meeting
Read: Jessica Benjamin, “The Bonds of Love” from Future of Difference
Carol Gilligan, excerpt from Meeting at the Crossroads (handout)

NB: This class will be meeting with Professor Chemba Raghavan’s social psychology class. Be prepared for an unusual week.
***3-page position papers due at class meeting for ALL STUDENTS
***Reading journals due in class Friday

Week 7: (Re)Considering Sex and Race
Monday: Lecture
Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies:
Cherrie Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas”
Chandra Tadpale Mohanty and Biddy Martin, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?”
Teresa de Lauretis, “Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts”
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
Thursday: Discussion
Gloria Anzaldua, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Mestiza Consciousness,” in FTR, p. 179
Patricia Hill Collins, “Politics of Black Feminism,” in FTR, p. 318
Kaplan and Rogers, “Race and Gender Fallacies,” in The Gender and Science Reader
Opt: Ann Feguson, Jacquelyn Zita, and Kathryn Pyne Addleson, “On ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality…’: Defining the Issues” (in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology)

***Papers due Thursday in class

Break Week

Week 8: Anti-Foundationalist Feminisms – The Birth of Queer Theory
Monday: Lecture
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: chap. 1, 3, and at least part 4 to end
Thursday: Discussion
Butler: conclusion
Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory,” in FTR, p. 334
Sally O’Driscoll, “Outlaw Readings,” from Signs

NB: Students from the queer theory tutorial may visit one day; be prepared for a different dynamic.

Week 9: The Recurring Problem/Power of Essentialism
Monday: Lecture
Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, ed., The Essential Difference:
Naomi Schor, “Introduction”
de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle”
Diana Fuss, “Essentially Speaking”
Thursday: Discussion
Birke, “In Pursuit of Difference,” in The Gender and Science Reader
Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” in The Essential Difference
Opt: Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism,” in Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism

***Reading journals due in class Friday

Week 10-12: WOC and Third World Feminism(s) – Experience and/as Theory

Week 10
Monday: No Class Meeting
Thursday: Lecture /Discussion
Gloria Anzaldua and Analouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home:
Anzaldua, “(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces,” p. 1
Analouise Keating, “Charting Pathways, Marking Thresholds ... A Warning, An Introduction,” p. 6
Chela Sandoval, “AfterBridge: Technologies of Crossing,” p. 21
Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in FTR, p. 404

Week 11
Monday: Discussion
Your group should choose 3 to 5 selections from This Bridge We Call Home that you’d like to read and read them together. Come prepared to present one to your colleagues in other groups.
Thursday: Lecture/Discussion
Amrita Batsu, “Globalization of the Local/Localization of the Global: Mapping Transnational Womens’ Movements,” in FTR, p. 68
Baca Zinn and Dill, “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism,” in FTR, p. 353
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,” in FTR, p. 460
Uma Narayan, “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist,” FTR, p. 308
Gwendolyn Mikell, “African Feminism: Toward a New Politics of Representation,” in FTR, p. 103
JeeYeun Lee, “Beyond Bean Counting,” in FTR, p. 472

Week 12
Monday: Discussion
T. Minh-ha Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, selection
Uma Narayan, “Contesting Cultures,” in Second Wave, ed. Nicholson
Susan Stanford Friedman, “Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse,” Signs 21/1 (Autumn 1995): 1-49.
Thursday: Lecture “Beyond Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism – Eco-Feminism(s) and Cyborgs”
Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”
Ecofeminism, ed. Karen Warren:
Karen Warren, chap 1: “Taking Empirical Data Seriously: An Ecofeminist Philosophical” Perspective, p. 3
Deane Curtin, chap. 4: “Women’s Knowledge as Expert Knowledge: Indian Women and Ecodevelopment,” p. 82
Carol Merchant, “Domnion Over Nature,” in Gender and Science Reader, p. 67

***Reading journals due in class Friday

Week 13: Beyond Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism: Eco-Feminism(s) and Cyborgs
Monday: Discussion
Noel Sturgeon, chap. 15: “The Nature of Race,” Ecofeminism, p. 260
Val Plumwood, chap. 20: “Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism,” Ecofeminism, p. 327
Noël Sturgeon, “Ecofeminist Appropriations and Transnational Environmentalisms,” in FTR, p. 113
Vandana Shiva, “”Democratizing Biology: Reinventing Biology from a feminist, Ecological, and Third World Perspective,” in The Gender and Science Reader, p. 447
Thursday: Thanksgiving holiday

Week 14: Women Doing/Interrogating Science and Technology
Monday: Lecture
In Gender and Science Reader:
Anna Fausto-Sterling, “Life in the XY Corral”
Evelyn Fox Keller, “From Working Scientist to Feminist Critic”
Londa Scheibinger, “Creating Sustainable Science”
Bonnie Spanier, “From Molecules to Brains, Normal Science Supports Sexist Beliefs About Difference”
E. Anne Kerr, “Toward a Feminist Natural Science”
Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race and Nation: Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe 1815-1817”
Thursday: Discussion
In Gender and Science Reader:
Sue V. Rosser, “Are There Feminist Methodologies Appropriate for the Natural Sciences and Do They Make a Difference?”
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”
From Ecofeminism, chap. 24: “Women-Animals-Machines”
Carol Cohn, “Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12/4 (1987): 687-718.

***Reading journals due Tuesday of exam week

Expectations and Assignments

1) Attendance and participation are key for this class. Satisfactory work means that you are engaged with the course, willing to challenge yourself, and open to at least considering some new ideas. Some readings will be abstract and difficult while some may seem deceptively simple or even quite familiar or dated. You are expected to complete all the reading and be prepared at least to ask questions, if not offer some initial ideas about it beyond, “I liked it” or “I hated it.” Some materials may make you uncomfortable, some may make you angry, some may surprise you: I ask that you use the class discussions, your reading journals, your position papers, and your formal papers to translate these experiences through reflection and analysis. There is room for a personal voice, but the authority/authenticity of personal voice is also something we’ll want to discuss. Theory books like these are expensive and there’s no single adequate text: I hope that you’ll be able to borrow, buy, and share enough to make this course manageable. There is a good resale value on most of these, if you decide not to keep them.

2) Keep a Reading Journal, to be turned in and checked off every three weeks. The entries may be informal, but there should be either a one-page response to two readings, or a longer two-page response to a single piece for each week’s reading. These may be shared with your discussion group, so be sure they’re not so private that they can’t be used in class.

3) Each week one student from each discussion group is responsible for distributing a Position Paper Response to one of the readings on the Tuesday meeting to help start our discussion on Friday. You may distribute hard copy or email copy to me, your group-leader, and the other members of your group if they all agree: you may also post a copy as a file on my webboard under “Feminist Theory Fall 2005.” Something based on your journal writing is fine, but it must be legible and coherent enough for others to follow, and more detailed. It should take a position of some kind. (We will work out a calendar for position papers in the first week after we create discussion groups.) Position papers MUST be distributed in advance to all members in time for them to read them: this means you may need to do your reading earlier in weeks where you are handing in a position paper.

4) Two 7-10 page Formal Essays, due by Thursday’s class before mid-term break for Mod 1, and by Wednesday of exam week for Mod 2. Your essay should use readings from the class to explore an issue or text that interests you (not necessarily something from the class per se). Bring notes and rough drafts to the Friday discussion before they are due, and we will discuss them together there.

Jointly written papers, literary analysis, combined material from another class, and other experimental formats are acceptable, but must be cleared with me at least two weeks in advance.

5) Students are expected to complete the readings, to keep up to date with written and participatory assignments, to attend class regularly, and to show serious effort to engage with the material to earn a satisfactory evaluation in this course.

The Course in Psychology of Gender

This course serves as an in-depth introduction to the psychology of gender and how it relates to practical life and to applied situations. The course also initiates students into current theories, trends, and methods in the study of gender from a psychological perspective. Taught over a fifteen-week semester, Part 1 of the course involves intensive reading of theories and methods in the field, and Part 2 involves a hands-on practicum component that usually culminates in an empirical research project on the topic of gender. Empirical training is seen as vital to the course, and to that end, students are required to have a basic knowledge of research methods in psychology.

An overview lecture focused on popular methods in the psychology of gender and it included introductions to experimentation, observational methods, survey research, interviews, and ethnographies. Students were required to pick a method or a combination of methods for their empirical study.

Course requirements included:

1. Satisfactory completion of two papers:

    (a) At the end of the first 7-weeks/mid-term, an 8-12 page proposal on a topic related to the readings and discussions
    (b) At the end of the semester, a final report on the empirical study. Many class periods in the second half of the semester were devoted to discussions of empirical gender research issues so that students had the opportunity to discuss their specific concerns.

2. A satisfactory ‘empirical research’ presentation. One goal of these short presentations was to provide students with the opportunity to integrate findings from students’ hands-on research project with current published psychology research. The content of these presentations encompassed the following:

• a brief description of the theoretical background
• research questions and/or hypotheses
• research method/s of choice and rationale
• principal findings
• integrated discussion of results

As an upper-level course with many requirements, only twelve students enrolled or were qualified. Students were expected not only to show an in-depth theoretical knowledge of their topic but also to develop the skills required to collect empirical data on this topic, analyze and interpret it, and report it in standard established formats. Although this empirical emphasis could be seen as narrowing the focus and restricting attention away from many interesting topics in gendered study, the value for this choice lay in training students to understand the process of substantiating statements with actual research data.

Upon completion of the course, students were expected to have acquired a well-grounded perspective in the theoretical bases of the psychology of gender, in addition to sophisticated knowledge of empirical research methods. Theories in psychology such as the psychoanalytic, behaviourist, social learning, cognitive, and the more-recent contextual perspectives were analyzed with particular relevance to feminist approaches across cultures. Students were thus gaining a foundational understanding for the joint session with their peers from the humanities. This exposure to theory aided students to think about multiple feminisms across the globe and how these can be identified. Rigorous methodological training complemented understanding the ‘how’ of this process: students designed, carried-out, and analyzed data from an empirical study in the second quarter of their semester.

At the time of writing of this article, students in the course were leading engaged discussions on how the divide between essentialism and constructionism may not be apparent from their empirical data, what it means to be a feminist, how we can construct new measures for studying issues such as gender expression and relational aggression in homosexuality, and how gender biases can be empirically observed in children’s texts (e.g., Disney ‘princess’ fables), for example.