How Can Feminist Sociology Sustain Its Critical Edge

The arguments in “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology” (Stacey and Thorne 1985) took shape through long distance phone conversations in which Judith Stacey and I shared our feelings of disgruntlement with American sociology and our sense that feminist transformation of discipline-based knowledge had been more extensive in anthropology, literature, and history, although much less successful in political science and economics. At the time, Judy was teaching at the University of California‐Davis and I was at Michigan State University. Our perceptions resonated, no doubt, because we had both gone through graduate school in the Brandeis University Sociology Department; I, in the late 1960s, and Judy in the early 1970s. The Brandeis department, which emphasized Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, phenomenology, the sociology of knowledge, and qualitative methods, had been a particularly generative and permissive site for pursuing the questions raised by the women’s liberation movement (Thorne 1997). But the unorthodox Brandeis curriculum and culture hadn’t quite prepared us for the “reality shock” (to use Everett Hughes’s [1971] term) of our later encounters with mainstream sociology. By the early 1980s, when Judy and I began to share our feelings of discontent, we were both teaching in conventional sociology departments while also engaged in local efforts to build interdisciplinary women’s studies programs. As feminist sociologists we felt in some ways like “outsiders within,” to borrow a term from Patricia Hill Collins (1990). Trained and positioned in the discipline, we were also animated by progressive political values and invested in the broad, cross-disciplinary outlook and critical perspectives of feminism. Critical feminist questions, frameworks, and debates—the life force of this field of inquiry—have gradually shifted over the last thirty-five years, as highlighted by this symposium. Judith Lorber reflects on changing paradigms in feminist social science. She also enjoins a persistent source of tension within sociology: the gathering of statistical (and, I would add, narrative) data requires the use of categories; we can’t seem to do without the terms “women,” “men,” and “gender.” But categories imply the bounded and the fixed, whereas gender and other mutually inflecting lines of difference are contextual and fluid. Lorber responds, in effect, to Christine Williams’s question about how it might be possible to “queer” the categories in survey research, while in another article, Raka Ray observes that focusing on gendered practices rather than categories opens to more processual and complex strategies of analysis. Ray’s forward looking comments reflect her multiple positioning not only in sociology and in feminist studies, but also in the interdisciplinary field of South Asian studies. Writing as one of a new generation of transnational scholars who participate in, even as they study diasporic processes, Ray highlights the parochial and U.S.-centered dimensions of American— including feminist—sociology and calls for transnational theorizing that is based, in part, on learning from scholars in other parts of the world. Leila Rupp also discusses transnational