PROGRAMS
WOMEN, CULTURE & DEVELOPMENT MINOR - ABOUT
The goal of the Women, Culture and Development
minor is to allow students to study aspects of women's subordination and
resistance to that subordination in the Third World, and to ensure that
cultural aspects of women's lives are taken seriously when analyzing women's
position. In other words, Women, Culture and Development is located at
the intersection of three cutting edge areas within the academy: feminist
studies, cultural studies and Third World studies.
Feminist studies has suggested that both policies and analytic/critical
work are impoverished if adequate attention is not paid to women. That
is, the invisibility of women in most writings about global and international
developments has meant that the labor, cultures and histories of women
are rarely taken into account, or, when they have been taken into account,
women are most often seen as lacking agency - as merely victims in a society
of cruel and unjust inequalities. Thus, much work which focuses on the
Third World either operates with a conception of women as beings without
agency, or does not analyze the roles played by women in both the public
and private domains. In addition, such work also rarely comments upon how
women's role in the private domain impacts upon the public domain.
Cultural studies has directed attention to the importance of analyzing
cultures within their context - both locally and globally. It has also
suggested that cultures may be conceptualized not simply as habits, customs
and mores of a particular society - but, rather, that culture refers to "structures
of feeling" - that is, that culture may best be analyzed when it is
understood as the lived experience of people in a society. However, the
approaches particular to cultural studies, while drawn upon by feminist
scholars in the West, are rarely utilized to provide insights into specific
aspects of societies in the Third World.
Third World/Development studies is an area of inquiry that resists being
incorporated in a singular way into the projects of globalization. Third
World studies implies that global and international processes need to be
seen in situ, in particular for countries of the Southern Hemisphere. Thus,
if it attends to gender, Third World studies suggests that gendered divisions,
alongside their political, economic and social aspects are important in
order to analyze what actually occurs in these countries. However, it is
rare for Third World/Development Studies to integrate the examination of
culture with gender - or to view such integration as either a source of
information or as a vehicle for change.
There are two required seminars in Women, Culture and Development - GLBL
180A and 180B (cross-listed as Soc 156A and 156B) - which will be taught
at the upper division level, and minors can choose their remaining 16 upper
division units from a list of almost 100 courses based in 15 departments.
Each student who takes this minor will be assigned a faculty advisor who
will work with you to help you decide which courses could best be taken,
and when, in order to fulfill minor requirements.
UCSB scholars who have developed this minor include Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Kathleen
Bruhn, Martha Davis, John Foran, Nancy Gallagher, Mary Hancock, Barbara
Harthorn, Mary Jacob, Chris McAuley, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Susan Stonich and
Mayfair Yang.
Not only is the UCSB Minor in Women, Culture and Development a new way
to approach gender, third world and cultural concerns, but, in addition,
the three areas above are all explicitly interdisciplinary approaches -
ones that span the humanities and the social sciences. The UCSB campus
has a growing reputation for being especially strong in interdisciplinary
work. It also has internationally recognised scholars in feminist and women's studies.
The UCSB campus is the perfect place for this initiative for it is known
as a campus that fosters interdisciplinary study, of which the Women, Culture
and Development minor is one example. Graduate students in sociology, history,
English and anthropology have been involved in the development of this
initiative. The WCD program holds a graduate student conference (held every
other year) on this topic, in which undergraduate students and faculty
have also participated. We also held an international conference in February
1999 with speakers such as Cynthia Enloe, Caren Grown, Dessima Williams,
Valentine Moghadam, and Ruth Gilmore. In March 2000, we held a 2-day conference
on Gender, Sexuality, and Globalization.