What women's studies programs do that mainstreaming can't

This article draws some conclusions about the limitations of ‘mainstreaming’, based on a comparison between the author's experiences as director of a ‘mainstreaming’ project (in this case, on Ethnic Studies) and her experiences as coordinator of a Women's Studies program. Integrating the curriculum and building autonomous programs are fundamentally different projects.‘Mainstreaming’, while important, cannot represent the full scope, complexity, vitality, and contextuality of Women's Studies. Women's Studies has its own subject, gender, just as other disciplines have their central subjects. The new body of knowledge and theory about gender cannot be assimilated into ‘traditional’ departments and disciplines. Women's Studies is in the process of constituting itself a discipline; and knowing a discipline implies familiarity with the central issues of a given discourse, a knowledge of its central questions and controversies, an awareness of resonances among texts, and participation in the institutions and activities generating new knowledge and ideas. It is this sense of relationship among texts, ideas, empirical findings, theories, even the personalities and visions of individual human beings that cannot be fully transmitted in any mainstreaming project. Only in autonomous programs can Women's Studies continue its evolution toward disciplinary status and achieve its full intellectual and political promise.