Mea Culpa

Ampersand calls me out for having too glibly disparaged _________ studies programs, and I think he's right (you can read his criticisms here or in my comments here).

The gist of what he says is this: I'm dead wrong to suggest that WGSS et al. are cloistered disciplines. To support that point he describes his own experiences as a modified Women's Studies major as a cultivation of a broad array of interests and views, and I have no reason to think this untrue.

So let me restate my point. And to do so, I'll use Judaic Studies as an example (can't get in trouble with that one, right?). Ampersand attests to the fact that business majors, not to mention natural or applied science majors, are more often than not monomaniacs about their own fields, to the point of willful social exclusion. But I wasn't even thinking about them. What the Judaic Studies major has in common with history, literature, and philosophy majors, and what the engineering major does not, is a commitment to humanistic study. There is something tragic, it seems to me, about making such a commitment while immediately dividing out a portion of humanity on the basis of, in this case, ethnicity or religion (which one is Judaism? I guess part of the idea is to figure that out), upon which to focus one's intelligence.

Is it true that there's a cloistering present in every discipline? Yes, but. But literature and history are chosen perspectives, not selected demographies. The education they provide cannot possibly be exhaustive, but neither is it so apparently, self-consciously inexhaustive. Now if Ampersand's anecdotal evidence is valuable, then so is mine. And can promise that I've had seemingly bitter, rancorous, nasty arguments with WGSS students, which turned out not to be arguments at all. They weren't arguments because we could not actually have substantive disagreements, and that was because my interlocutors simply would not desist from speaking entirely in gender-theoretic terms. To paraphrase Leon Wieseltier (I think it was him), if the argument is from reason, then appeal to my reason; and if it is from tradition, well my tradition is different. The phenomenon is something like this: The Judaic Studies major (returning to my example) doesn't refuse to engage with material beyond the narrowest confines of his own studies, but does so in a way that is less inquisitive than militant. This is what I've noticed in my interaction with WGSS majors; a latent implicature that the existence of other fields in the humanities is an affront, an oppressive superstructure that needs to be not so much understood as torn down. I don't suggest that this is intrinsic to the field itself, but it is a noticeable feature of it, at least as it's practiced here. One expression of this phenomenon was the subject matter of my original post, namely the YDN column which treats the legitimation of LGBTQ Studies as a more important indicator of waning homophobia than a decline in the bullying of gay kids. That is cloistered thinking.