Field Materialities: Building Women’s and Gender Studies One Page at a Time

Abstract:Before becoming Women’s Studies Quarterly in 1981, the Women’s Studies Newsletter (WSN) chronicled the institutionalization of women’s and gender studies (WGS) through the 1970s. It maps the field’s early years and the range of creative, practical strategies educators, administrators, and students used to find space for a feminist education within a hostile institution. In this article, I explore the value of a publication like WSN and argue for its reincarnation in a twenty-first-century form by drawing on my experience as a WGS faculty member. Such a resource could offer practical tools for the quotidian, material field-building practices necessary to sustain and expand WGS, as well as for resisting the neoliberal status quo in higher education.