Perhaps the most notorious department in any given university for capricious naming, known to alter their department name almost as frequently as some change their panties, is the Women’s Studies department, also frequently known as the Gender and Women’s Studies department. Now UC Santa Barbara is renaming the department the Department of Feminist Studies.

According to the Feminist Majority Foundation:

A graduate program that will offer Master of Arts and doctoral degrees in feminist studies at the University of California Santa Barbara has been approved. The women's studies department has also been renamed and will now be called the Department of Feminist Studies.

 

The first cohort to begin the new MA/PhD program will begin in fall 2009. The program has three areas of focus: race and nation, genders and sexualities, and productive and reproductive labors.

 

In regards to renaming the department, Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and chair of feminist studies told the UC Santa Barbara 93106 that "we offer a critical lens into understanding the social, economic, and political life of women and men, and apply a feminist perspective...It's a broadening of women's studies. We don't want to argue over which bodies are included in our field of study, we want to generate new ways of analyzing the world through diverse feminist perspectives."

One might ask if there is a difference between women’s studies and department of feminist studies, and yes, there clearly is. Women’s studies entails the study of the history, philosophies, etc. of women. Feminist Studies implies a particular theoretical framework, which though prevalent in women’s studies, should not be the only structure for such scholarship. By choosing to make a supposedly academic department so clearly riddled in bias, UCSB loses its academic legitimacy. And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?