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News and Views
Spring 2002 Volume 12, issue 2
From the Director
Dr. Angel Kwolek-Folland
As you can see from our cover page, we are in the midst of planning a major celebration for our program. Our 25th anniversary is this year, and we will mark it in October with a symposium that will feature a variety of campus and community events. This is a major milestone for us, but also a shared milestone in the history of our field. As one of over 700 Women's Studies programs in the U.S., and over 50 internationally, and with the growing number of graduate programs and scholarly journals in our field, we can enjoy the sensation of having "arrived." But with that solidity comes the question, "Where do we go from here?" Last fall, Emory University hosted a conference on the future of the Ph.D. in Women's Studies, and across the country and around the world Third Wave feminism is giving way to new ideas, impulses, and human rights crises for women and men. Our challenge is to retain our vision, creativity, and intellectual relevance in the face of a changing world situation.
This
summer, we plan on hosting our first women's studies Study Abroad course,
in Ecuador. This course is designed to give our students the opportunity
to work with people on projects relevant to all participants, in contexts
that will challenge their abilities and enhance their understanding. This
fall, we will admit our first group of Master's students, fulfilling a
dream only barely glimpsed in the earliest years of the program.
We also continue to work toward the creation of an independent BA degree in Women's Studies. A recent survey of over 650 UF undergraduates demonstrated that the study of women and gender remains a compelling course for our students. Of those polled, 40 percent said they would be interested in pursuing a major in Women's Studies, and 58 percent said they knew others who would be interested. Not surprisingly, 46 percent of the female students were interested; notably, however, 17 percent of the male students also marked the major's appeal to them.
As we celebrate our achievements in the coming months, we will remain mindful that Women's Studies faces a new world. I can think of no intellectual field or collective theory of human potential better equipped to be a leader for these new times. -AKF
Sex, Gender, and Mating Systems
Amy Zanne and Laura Sirot, Zoology doctoral candidates, have combined their educational backgrounds to structure a biological science/women's studies course that looks critically at research that has been done and presented in their fields. Sex, Gender and Mating Systems: A Comparison Across Living Organisms encourages students to think outside of their human perceptual filters and also cautions them against using observed animal behavior to justify human behaviors. Through guest lectures, informal class discussions, and by taking a very critical look at the textbook, students have begun to express new realizations about their own perceptions. Examples such as cellular slime molds with thirteen sexes, wasps that mate with their own kin, and sharks that cannibalize each other within the womb encourage students to step away from the traditional dichotomy and look at sex, gender, and mating from a continuum perspective. This analysis then provides students with the tools to de-bunk inaccurate human parallels and sensationalism found in media reports and even textbooks. -Laura Sirot
