In When Women Ask the Questions, Marilyn Boxer traces the successes and failures of women's studies, examines the field's enduring impact on the world of higher education, and concludes that the rise of women's studies has challenged the university in the same way that feminism has challenged society at large. Drawing on her experiences as a historian, feminist, academic administrator, and former chair of a women's studies program, Boxer observes that by working for justice—and for changes necessary to make the attainment of justice a practical possibility—women's studies ensures that women are heard in the processes and places where knowledge is created, taught, and preserved. The intellectual transformation behind the emergence of women's studies, Boxer concludes, is one of historic proportions. Like other great moments in human experience, it has given rise to a flowering of art, literature, and science, and to the challenging of previously accepted authorities of text and tradition.

This edited collection addresses the institutional context and social issues in which teaching the women's studies introductory course is embedded and provides readers with practical classroom strategies to meet the challenges raised. The collection serves as a resource and preparatory text for all teachers of the course including experienced teachers, less experienced teachers, new faculty, and graduate student teaching assistants. The collection will also be of interest to educational scholars of feminist and progressive pedagogies and all teachers interested in innovative practices. The contributors discuss the larger political context in which the course has become a central representative of women's studies to a growing, although less feminist-identified, population. Increased enrollments and changes in student population are noted as a result, in part, of the popularity of Introduction to Women's Studies courses in fulfilling GED and diversity requirements. New forms of student resistance in a climate of backlash and changes in course content in response to internal and external challenges are also discussed. Evidence is provided for an emerging paradigm in the conceptualization of the introductory course as a result of challenges to racism, heterosexism, and classism in women's studies voiced by women of color and others in the 1980s and 1990s. Sensationalist charges that women's studies teachers, including those who teach the Introduction to Women's Studies course, are the academic shock troops of a monolithic feminism are challenged and refuted by the collection's contributors who share their struggles to make possible classrooms in which informed dialogue and disagreement are valued.

Activists and educators explore ways to strengthen the ties between the classroom and the world.

Examines the roles of historical, cultural, and personal identities in the classroom Can whites teach African-American literature effectively and legitimately? What is at issue when a man teaches a women's studies course? How effectively can a straight woman educate students about gay and lesbian history? What are the political implications of the study of the colonizers by the colonized? More generally, how does the identity of an educator affect his or her credibility with students and with other educators? In incident after well-publicized incident, these abstract questions have turned up in America's classrooms and in national media, often trivialized as the latest example of PC excess. Going beyond simplistic headlines, Teaching What You're Not broaches these and many other difficult questions. With contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, the book examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and personal identities impact pedagogy and scholarship. Essays cover such topics as the outsider's gaze as it applies to the study of non-white literature; an able-bodied woman's reflections on teaching literature by disabled women; and the challenges of teaching the Western canon at an African American college.