Q & A with Lisa Bitel, Director of USC's Department of Gender Studies

If anyone knows anything about gender-related resources at USC, it's got to be the director of the Department of Gender Studies and long-time feminist scholar, Lisa Bitel. Teaching a combination of History, Religion, and Gender Studies courses, she is making her mark on the department, as well as her students.

Amanda Rossie: How long have you been the director of USC’s Department of Gender Studies, and how did you get here?
Lisa Bitel: I began my appointment as Director of the Gender Studies Program in August of this year, although I’ve been jointly appointed in Gender Studies and History since 2001. (Actually, now I’m jointly appointed in three units, because I’ve added Religion.) Before I came to USC I taught at the University of Kansas, where I was also jointly appointed in Women’s Studies and History, and where I directed the WS Program for two years.

AR: What drew you to the field?
LB: I’m a historian of medieval Europe and I’m a lifelong feminist. I went to Smith College for my undergrad degree because it is a women’s college and I believed the college’s publicity about a women-only campus encouraging leadership roles for women. Women ran the newspaper, ran student government, ran everything, and when they left Smith they took that experience into the larger world. We learned that feminism was life. As I went on to grad school, I never considered practicing scholarship without sensitivity to women’s and gender issues. The first thing I ever published—an Irish antiquarian journal—was about women in early medieval Ireland.

AR: What courses do you teach?
LB: A combination of History, Religion, and Gender Studies courses—everything from a survey of the history of Britain and Ireland up to 1000 C.E., to a seminar on religious visions across religions and across centuries, to a class called “From Goddesses to Witches: Women and Religion in Premodern Europe.”

AR: What kind of scholarly research is coming out of the department?
LB: One of our faculty members is writing a book about the relocation of queer cultural centers from the big coastal cities to suburbia, and exploring how ethnicity and popular media influences that transition. Another is working on an oral history of famous 20th-century feminist artists. Yet another has written books about cross-dressers and pregnant men in the early modern Spanish empire. Meanwhile, I’m writing about religious visionaries in the Middle Ages and the modern Mojave desert.

AR: What kind of contributions do USC gender studies scholars make to the field as a whole?
LB: Like any other collection of humanities and social science scholars, we pursue mostly individual research that reaches the public as books and articles, conference presentations, websites, appearances in popular media as talking heads or onstage as performers. We sit on the boards of journals and academic organizations. We interact with other scholars in mainstream disciplines and scholars of women’s, gender, and queer studies. We try to bring what we learn from the larger community of gender scholars back into the classrooms and lecture halls of USC.

AR: What are the strengths of the program?
LB: Our strength lies in the diversity of interests among both teachers and students and their joint commitment to feminist work. It’s harder to do a GS major than to do a mainstream major. Students have to take the four required SWMS (GS) courses that frame our major, but then they also have to put together a portfolio of courses relating to gender taught in other departments, and thus frame a coherent program that suits their interests. Meanwhile, faculty in Gender Studies are in at least two departments/programs at once, which means double the service obligations. But this means that students and faculty don’t just happen to land in Gender Studies, they share a particular dedication to its study.

AR: What are the weaknesses of the program?
LB: Three things:

1. First, our courses need constant updating. Feminist politics and gender studies move fast—just when we think we’ve got a curriculum on the cutting edge, some scholar in some corner of Gender Studies turns the field around and we have to figure out how to get the material to our students.
2. Second, our program is too small. Our jointly appointed faculty has so many obligations in other departments that we often lack folks to teach our basic courses.
3. Finally, we need to organize the students in our graduate certificate program and mentor them better. It’s fairly easy to earn the certificate while working on a doctoral or master’s degree in another department, it’s just a matter of taking some gender theory courses and writing a dissertation that deals with gender. But we in GS want also support the new scholarship that these students are producing, help them find jobs, and prepare them to be feminist and gender-sensitive players in the world beyond USC.
   

AR: What resources could make the program better?
LB: Money to hire new faculty! But also a realization among chairs of other departments that our current faculty have to be allowed to fulfill their teaching and service obligations to GS without being penalized for neglecting their other departments. I also think that the university needs to encourage gender-based research projects.

AR: Do you think that there are any stereotypes surrounding Gender Studies courses?
LB: Sure, there are stereotypes. Some [students] come into class expecting to be surrounded by angry feminists, transvestites and trans-sexed people, lesbian recruiters, and all sorts of
fearsome creatures. Some men expect to get picked on. Women feel that they have to hide their opinions about fashion or sorority life. Conservatives tend to keep their opinions quiet at first. And, of course, almost no one will admit to being a feminist. On the other hand, there are
always a handful of self-identified, left-leaning students who feel impatient with the seemingly retrograde politics of others in the class. But GS faculty is used to bringing these issues into open discussion. We work to make clear the difference between personal opinion and the intellectual work we’re doing in class, and also to show that people’s opinions won’t affect their grades.

AR: How do you think the student body feels about gender-related issues?
LB: I think a small group of activists tries to keep gender issues visible through the usual events—Take Back the Night marches, Clothesline Project, productions of the Vagina Monologues, that kind of thing. If students in my classes are any indication, USC has the same wide variety of student opinion about gender, sex, sexuality, and feminism that every other campus has. I see students who assume the feminist project is completed, who take feminism for granted, who missed the feminist movement entirely, who believe men are eternally superior to women, who are homophobic, who are radical separatist lesbians, and who are everything else you might think up. But they don’t bother to consider these opinions unless provoked. It’s our job—the job of gender scholars—to provoke them.

AR: How would you like to change the way the campus deals with some of these issues?
LB: It depends on the issues. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to get more students into GS classes, just to teach them to notice gender issues and issues of sexual politics. GS and CFR also put on lectures and performances that could draw larger crowds. It’s hard to engage students on difficult issues without some sort of lure—why worry about patriarchy when you’ve got homework to do and a party tomorrow night? Maybe what we need is a better alliance of student activist groups and GS personnel who could collaborate on consciousness-raising.

AR: Who have you looked up to in the field? Why?
LB: My hero/ines tend to be other geeky historians who have brought their politics into their academic work, served as role models for other feminists and gender scholars, and produced important new ideas for the benefit not just of other historians, but for any intelligent person who reads about them. My graduate advisor at Harvard wasn’t a famous feminist—in fact, he was a nice Catholic family man. He supported his female students equally with his male students. He also showed us how a person could be a scholar and a loving, working parent at the same time. Since then I’ve encountered a community of dedicated feminist working in several fields of academe to who aim to help each other, mentor younger scholars, and do collaborative work rather than the kind of individually competitive work that too often occupies ambitious scholars.

AR: Based on your teaching history, what kind of changes (if any) do students experience after taking their first gender studies course?
LB: Again, there’s a range of reactions. Some students come into the course and leave it unchanged, so far as I can tell. Others tell me that they’ve learned stuff that has changed the way they approach everything they study—that a feminist approach or gendered approach will make them see all their subjects differently from now on. Others become energized politically and want to go out and apply what they’ve learned to their own situations and the larger world. And still others have personal transformations—maybe talking about sexualities has allowed them to be honest about their own sexual preferences, or maybe reading about sexism has led them to resist it in their own lives.

AR: What is one thing that the student body should know about the program?
LB: Gender Studies isn’t just a subject, and it isn’t just a single political perspective. It’s a method for thinking, learning, and living politically.
Plus, our faculty are way hip.

AR: If you could, how would you re-define what it means to be “male” or “female”?
LB: Look, I’m a medievalist. I study things that last for millennia. I’ve seen these words mean so many things in so many languages, and I’ve come to understand that they mean something different to every individual in every single historical moment. What I’d like is for more people to understand that individuals and groups constantly make and act the meanings of these words.
AR: How do you think the Los Angeles environment effects gender portrayals?
LB: It seems to be true that body image has more importance here than in other parts of America, and most of us are familiar with the gendered implications of body image. Just take a stroll down Roberston or Melrose. Sometimes I still get what I call that “Eddie Murphy moment”—you know, the scene in Beverly Hills Cop where he sees an outrageously dressed fashionista walking around and just breaks into hilarious laughter. But the obsession with body afflicts college-age people everywhere thanks to, among other causes, media globalization.

AR: In your opinion, how does gender effect one’s position in the world? How does it affect one’s worldview?
LB: How does gender affect our positions in the world? If we’re women, we’re oppressed. Women are still underpaid by comparison with men. Men perpetrate sexual crimes against women at home and at war. Legislators are still trying to take away our rights to our own bodies. There aren’t as many female as male CEOs, prime ministers, judges, leading scientists, etc etc etc. Come on, we’re struggling over whether to elect our first woman president and people interviewed on television and radio still say things like, “I don’t think a woman could ever run the country.” Men and women should be looking out at the world and saying, let’s change this right now.