More about our Department ’s research & teaching emphases

One of the reasons we are unique and deeply collegial as a Department is because our core faculty members are trained in advanced interdisciplinary methods. We use what we regard to be the best of the methods from traditional disciplines while also interrogating how certain disciplines came to be so powerful in the first place. Our various research projects require us to traverse disciplinary boundaries in order to understand how the politics of knowledge are related to social inequalities.

Another distinctive element of the UCI Women’s Studies Department is that our focus lies not on different areas of the world but on the key discursive sites in which gendered and sexualized subjects and forms of knowledge are produced. We look at various forms of authority and study how they have contributed to our understandings of gender and sexuality. We reverse the gaze, if you will, to examine the authority of sciences, technologies, images, narratives, laws, and religions as these have been so formative in producing gender ideologies. We also look at how necessities of everyday life are related to larger historical processes in a manner that shapes norms of gender. We ask how phenomena such as war, state-based brutality, forced migration, weather-related disasters, and labor exploitation shape the conditions of women’s everyday lives. We interrogate how commodity consumption plays a part in the everyday lives of many women, affording us the tools for understanding, for example, what anorexia might have to do with the militarization of fashion, or what an epidemic of substance abuse among women college graduates has to do with mounting credit card debt? Using Feminist Transnational Cultural Theory these questions can be fruitfully addressed.

Professors Inderpal Grewal and Laura Kang have worked extensively in Feminist Transnational Studies and are recognized as such in academic and scholarly circles; Grewal co-wrote, with Caren Kaplan, the first textbook for undergraduate education on this topic. Much of the work in this area examines the conflicts between different ideas of modernity within nations, and the ways in which European colonialism was the force through which these encounters occurred. We believe that thinking transnationally goes against regional divisions (as constructed within traditional Area Studies programs) since it examines the histories of gender that came about as a result of cultural encounters rather than as different and parallel trajectories in different nations. 

Professors Jennifer Terry and Kavita Philip are developing a new initiative in Feminist Science and Technology Studies, allowing us to collaborate with faculty from across the campus. The initiative encourages research into the ways in which modern scientific thought produced ideas of gender and sexuality, both in colonial contexts as well as in the so-called “west.”

Professor Lara Deeb’s work on gender, modernity, and religion engages with contemporary feminist politics in relation to Islam and Christianity in both the U.S. and the Middle East. Her first book on pious Lebanese Shi’i women introduces critical theories of religion into the arena of feminist politics and scholarship, and provides an important intervention in key debates in feminist studies at this time. Her ongoing research program in the U.S. and the Middle East articulates with the Department ’s focus on transnational feminist analyses as it examines the ways that religiously-informed concepts and ideologies are discursively deployed in relation to transnational gender ideologies and constructions of modernity.