Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities
Finally, the feminist discussion comes into the research class!!!! In their collaborative essay, “Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities”, Anne Donadey and Francoise Lionnet offer an overview of the changes that have occurred within the field of feminist studies during the past twenty years. What I found so interesting about Donadey and Lionnet’s treatment of feminism in the humanities lies with the fact that they offered such an unexpected approach to the larger feminist discussion. Instead of segregating feminist concerns, as is usually the case with all things “feminine”, they tried to incorporate them into a more comprehensive discussion of identity rather than just gender. Whereas feminism is usually this foreign concept that carries with it all kinds of connotations that are unique and separated from the rest of the academic disciplines, Donadey and Lionnet make feminist studies relevant to academic scholarship as a whole by blurring the boundaries that are often placed around it. At one point they contend, “The boundaries among “feminisms, gender, sexualities,” “race and ethnicity,” “migrations, diasporas, and borders,” and “cultural studies” have become more and more porous, and the corresponding essays in this book are most productively read in dialogue with one another. Feminism as we conceptualize it is as much about race and colonialism as it is about gender and sexuality” (225). Essentially, this essay draws a clear connection between the other material we have read this quarter and brings the discussion full circle. Donadey and Lionnet expand the definition of feminism in a way that I had never considered. I honestly had never considered issues of race and colonialism relevant to feminist studies.
