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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | April 26, 2007

“If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things,” Confucius said. Since the 1990s, college courses cross-listed under the program title “women’s studies” have been trying to establish a new name which will accurately reflect the content taught in classes and the issues that arise in field research. Currently, Program Coordinator Sunka Simon, a professor in the department of modern languages and literature, has been working with other professors to survey students in the program. With this change, the program hopes to join a number of other colleges that have already updated the names of their programs to better demonstrate contemporary cross-cultural, cross-racial and cross-sexual issues in the curriculum.

“Women’s studies, as a name, is a study about women,” Simon said. “When you look at the content of our current courses, it’s really no longer about women specifically. It is about the categories of gender, class, race and sexuality and how they’re all connected. There’s a little verb called engendered … that describes how they’re systematically connected and how they construct each other,” she said.

The survey conducted by the women’s studies program is an attempt to evaluate the propriety of the current name of the program and has been passed out to students of courses cross-listed with women’s studies. The survey presents other name options for the program, including gender and sexuality studies, gender studies, feminist and queer studies and critical feminist studies. The survey also invites students to write in their own suggestions.

“There’s nothing on the books yet as far as the name change goes. The student surveys are being done again this semester. We hope to evaluate these surveys over the summer to get a better grasp of where the student body is,” Simon said.

Simon said that the next stage in the process of changing the name will be a formal presentation to the faculty, which will most likely take place next year.

The college’s women’s studies program is not the first to propose a change in name. According to Simon, it is in fact trailing behind other colleges who have already made the decision to update their programs. “The umbrella for women’s studies was not working for us anymore,” Simon said, adding that the college is at “the tail end” of a national movement within the discipline to steer it away from “essentialist or biological notions of what women are supposed to be.”

“It seems like we’re proposing something so radical. However, in other places, it’s already been put into practice,” Simon said. Whereas Swarthmore’s program has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, “at other schools, these programs have been around since the 1970s,” she said.

Students of women’s studies have made it a point of discussion in various classes. Rory Sykes ‘08, who has taken classes in the women’s studies program, said that changing the name of the program will enable a more accurate and contemporary reflection of the learning material. “I do favor it being changed to ‘gender and sexuality studies’ as opposed to ’women’s studies.’ Given the courses cross-listed under the program, I think ‘gender and sexuality studies’ is more reflective of what is being taught and the topics that students are engaging in,” Sykes said.

Allison Hartry ‘07, another student in the women’s studies program, noted the dangers of identifying one gender, sexuality or race as an isolated entity without taken into account its complex dichotomies.

Hartry said that over the course of a seminar discussion, “we decided … that the best name would be gender and sexuality studies … We thought it more accurately reflected what we’ve studied in the courses that we’ve taken and the direction that we want this program to go in the future.”

“You don’t get very far just by studying women. The program currently teaches us to look past the category of women, and the name of the program should reflect that,” Hartry said.

Most of the discussion behind changing the name of the women’s studies program deals with the evolution of gender and sexuality over the years across cultures and lifestyles. In contrast to the recent past, issues of queer and transgender identity are now more openly discussed and socially pressing.

“At this point, much of the student body and also our own research and our own curricular and research interests have mutated away from the traditional women’s studies to gender and sexuality studies, feminist and queer studies,” Simon said, emphasizing the need for greater diversity in the discipline. “Even in the 1990s, this ’women’s studies’ thing was very much a white subject. And it has changed, everywhere, except here,” she said.

“One of the complaints about ’women’s studies’ as a label is that it can seem like you’re talking only about white, middle-class women, and that’s just boring,” Hartry said. “The name of ‘gender and sexuality studies’ opens the field to talk more about the intersections of race, class and nationality,” she said.

Ultimately, those involved in the women’s studies program are looking for a name that can best consolidate all these issues. Simon made the point that even a topic like masculinity is important in discussion of gender and sexuality. “We’ve had more and more men taking our classes and that’s wonderful,” Simon said, adding that the program should take steps to reduce gender segregation in enrollment.

In addition to distributing the surveys, Simon said her door is always open to students with opinions on this matter. “Students should feel free to give questions and comments, so that they know that this is not a closed matter. We just have to make sure there is a solution for everyone,” she said.

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