Rethinking Women's and Gender Studies Volume 2

The second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies addresses the complexities and inherent paradoxes within the expansive knowledge project known as Women’s and Gender Studies for audiences both inside and adjacent to the field. Each of the volume’s chapters identifies and critically examines a key term that circulates in this field, exploring how the term has come to be understood and mobilized within its everyday narratives and practices.

In constructing provocative genealogies for their terms, authors explicate the roles that this language, and the narratives attached to it, play in producing and limiting possible versions of the field. The ongoing aim of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, both in the original volume and this entirely new extension, is to trace and expose important paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the field – from its high theory to its casual conversations – that rely on these terms. Forging collective conversation and intellectual community from its thoughtful and critical lines of inquiry, the second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies remains bracingly original and full of fresh insight. It provides a perfect complement for Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses offered in Women’s and Gender Studies and related fields.

Catherine M. Orr, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita in Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College, where she worked for 22 years. She is co-editor of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies (Routledge 2012), co-author of Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies (Routledge 2017), and has published in Souls, Atlantis, Feminist Studies, NWSA Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Hypatia. She served as Conference Chair (2006-08) and Conference Co-Chair (2012-14) in the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and held a number of leadership positions on the organization’s General Council. Her scholarship, teaching, and professional development have always been about interrogating the contradictions of cultural and institutional histories, especially those in which she feels deeply implicated. She now works as a DEI consultant, serves on the board of Urban Triage in Madison, Wisconsin, and has become a passionate mixed-media artist who translates complexities about whiteness and its histories of violence to new audiences.

Ann Braithwaite, Ph.D., is Professor and Coordinator of Diversity and Social Justice Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. The co-author or co-editor of three books (Troubling Women’s Studies, Sumach Press / CPSI 2005; Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, Routledge 2012; Everyday Women’s and Gender Studies: Introductory Concepts, Routledge 2017), Dr. Braithwaite’s scholarly work examines the ways in which disciplines reflect a set of embedded ways of knowing, asking how these citational practices shape any field and elaborating on how attending to those questions matters. Both at UPEI and beyond, her passion is to engage others in exploring how to bring questions of inclusion and justice to the classroom and to curricular programming. She is the recipient of numerous teaching, educational leadership, and service awards at UPEI, including the 2014 AAU Anne Marie MacKinnon Educational Leadership award, and is a 2021 STLHE / SAPES 3M National Teaching Fellow.