Forum: Gender, Women’s and American Studies

More than 40 years ago the first courses in women’s studies were introduced in American universities: it was the beginning of a revolution which was going to transform academic institutions in radical and unforeseeable ways. The feminist focus on the ways in which political assumptions shaped all instances of knowledge production and dissemination called into question no less than the epistemological apparatus on which universities had traditionally relied. Raffaella Baritono and Valeria Gennero argue that the turn from women to gender in search of higher levels of critical coherence and theoretical complexity has led to a transformation of the field of American Studies, introducing references to transnational practices and histories that complicate received ideas about sex, culture, sexuality and politics. In this context, the category of intersectionality, first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, has been widely invoked as a way to resist single-axis analysis of identity. In order to highlight the richness and diversity of the academic work which explicitly identifies feminist theory as a crucial paradigm for contemporary thought, Baritono and Gennero asked five major scholars from various fields and backgrounds – Italian and American, historians and literary critics – to describe their perspectives on recent developments in our academic investigations into women’s knowledge production and dissemination.