The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion

"Most feminist scholars rely on a stock narrative of the history of feminist scholarship, which purportedly defines its processes and outcomes by decades: the white liberal feminist 1970s; the women-of-color, postmodern 1980s; and the poststructuralist, difference-focused 1990s, which they assume is adequate. Identifying the deficiencies of this stock narrative, the book develops alternative accounts of feminist scholarship in its formation, contrasting the explanatory possibilities of approaches drawn from the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and Foucauldian archaeology. These three accounts illuminate intricate and unexpected connections between academic feminism and geopolitical forces, such as the Cold War, increased federal funding for higher education, changing priorities within philanthropic foundations, and the emergence of development studies, area studies, and subfields, such as Women in Development and Gender and Development. By complicating the narrative history of feminist studies, the book offers a fresh interpretation of the centrality to academic feminism, particularly in postcolonial and transnational feminist scholarship, of key concepts advanced by U.S. scholars of color, above all intersectionality"--