[AlecSchueler]

I think you're looking for only a certain type of reward and ignoring many others.

If you study women's studies in the 70s then maybe you can't help someone with their homework today. Ok, so in a sense you're less well off because you can't do something that someone who studied physics can do?

But women's studies today is different because the field has moved on to much, so much has been exposed in the way that women are treated in our society, so much has been changed for the better, huge impacts have been made on people's lives etc. And people who have worked in the field have contributed to this. Have they really had a negative reward in your eyes?

[gtrevorjay]

I wouldn't dispute that the field of women's studies has positively impacted society. So have the sciences. Assuming their impact was similarly positive, we're back to the question of where are you now if your major investment in these fields was 30 or more years ago (as a way of predicting what an investment today would reap). My claim is that because science is more additive in how it builds itself that your older knowledge is more useful today.

And I can literally say that many who studied women's studies and related fields in the 70's have had a negative reward. There is simply no scientific analog to JK Rowling and the battle between "waves" of feminist in the sciences.

[Spivak]

Sure there is! The thread that binds it all together is history. Understanding what's going on with JK's axe she's grinding starts in the 1970s with the rise and splintering of the Radical Feminist movement, the rise of Radical Lesbian Feminism and in particular the seminal book for what people now call TERFs, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male written in 1979 by Janice Raymond. Absolutely nothing uttered by JK is her own original idea and you can trace them all the way back to where they actually came from and what was going on in history at the time that precipitated them.

Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but focused on a particular topic.

[gtrevorjay]

Correct (and bonus points for mentioning Raymond, we should hang out). But, and maybe I'm misunderstanding but aren't you just emphasising my point? As you show, Rowling is in many way a good 70's feminist but according to today's feminist, she's bad. In fact, she's considered a monster. Compare to a 70's physicist: They might be considered outdated for not knowing the proposed extensions to the standard model or that the standard model was empirically justified but nothing they believe is now considered wrong. The only conclusion to draw is that the field of feminism/women's-studies is known to peddle... for lack of a better term, anti-knowledge. Rowling would be better off today being ignorant of everything she was taught in the 70's.

[Spivak]

I guess it depends on what you think the point of gender studies is, because I've never really seen it as a how to guide for feminists with a prescriptive "here's what's right or wrong." To me it's about giving you the tools to understand and critically examine feminist writings and the social dynamics at play that inspired them with the goal of, for lack of a better phrase, letting you "see the matrix." When it all clicks you can express your own thoughts and explain the ideas that people feel but can't quite grasp.

So it's less important that people view Raymond, Jeffreys, or Greer as wrong on their treatise of transgender persons (because it wasn't as if they didn't face plenty of criticism in their day) because it's still important to the history of feminism and informs so much of modern discourse. I don't think you just throw away everything in response to new information because the before was wrong, but that the history becomes even more important because it's the key to understanding where we are now.

My takeaways from their writings isn't necessarily a right or wrong thing but that they very eloquently and with more detail and awareness than you could ever ask for explain their own feelings that reflect the understanding and attitudes toward trans people at time. Today I think people would recognize those feelings as transphobia (or I suppose wokeness if you're one of their descendants) but right or wrong the knowledge is still useful.