Encompassing Gender

Book excerpt: From Beijing to Seattle, women's movements within academe and in local-global communities are growing at an unprecedented rate, raising pointed questions about paradigms of Western feminism, development, global trade, and scholarship. Despite this growing visibility, the perspectives of far too many women, especially from the Global South, are still excluded from mainstream U.S. scholarship. Presented with the task of preparing students for life in this new and rapidly shrinking world, many scholars have found themselves overwhelmed by the need to cross disciplinary and geographic borders. But some faculty are leading the way -- often in defiance of academic traditions and prejudices -- to a curriculum that reflects consequences of globalization. Encompassing Gender is the long-awaited anthology of more than 40 essays by 60 scholars, many of them working in curriculum-transformation groups that cut across the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences, all of them committed to an interdisciplinary approach to internationalizing the curriculum.