Tracey Jean Boisseau and Heather Rellihan

“The Only Thing I Have an Enduring Allegiance to Is Feminism”: WGSS, the Refusal to Regret, and the Survival of the Field

In the immediate wake of the 2024 US election and through spring 2025 during the first few months of the new presidential administration, we collected oral histories from over thirty academics working in higher education in the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS). We asked WGSS practitioners about how they had come to the field, what their experiences had been over their career trajectory, and, most importantly, how they felt about the field and their choice to align themselves with it, especially, although not exclusively, in the current political moment. Our aim was to understand the effects of two longstanding, combined threats to WGSS that were amplified through and after the 2024 presidential election: 1) neoliberal corporatism and anti-intellectualism with its valuing of higher education as workforce credentialing, and 2) “anti-DEI” politics that reject liberatory education projects. Our prior research on the state of the field, conducted in 2022 and 2023, revealed the necessity of understanding the effects of these political and ideological currents on our field’s human resources in addition to its material resources.¹ That earlier study indicated the biggest threat was not cuts to programming or resources. While painful, cuts in some areas appear to have been balanced by growth in others and indications of broadened student interest in the field overall. We concluded that the greatest threat to WGSS lies with the decline of the emotional health of its practitioners following several decades of accelerating neoliberal and illiberal political pressures. Given our earlier study’s somewhat surprising finding that — despite WGSS programs holding fairly steady through the political storms of the previous half-decade — nearly half our WGSS colleagues were considering leaving academia altogether, we designed a new oral history project, hoping to map these emotional currents with more nuance and thereby gain a keener understanding of where our field may be headed.

Our pool of interviewees in 2024 and 2025 was comprised of two groups: respondents to our earlier survey who had agreed to follow-up interviews, and those who responded to our solicitations for interviews distributed at the 2024 National Women’s Studies Association conference and via the WMST–L email list. The hour-long interviews were conducted via video call. Interviewees received basic questions in advance — questions that directed them to consider their emotional relationship to the field over the course of their careers as students and professional academics. This format allowed the interviewees to tell us what was important to them and to choose how best to narrate their own stories. This oral-history approach contrasts with the mostly quantitative methods of our earlier study, which aimed to document recent objective and measurable changes in WGSS programming and available resources as reported and experienced by practitioners. The more limited space we devoted in that survey to eliciting qualitative comments revealed pronounced levels of emotional precarity in the form of disappointment, resentment, pain, and fatigue which our respondents attributed primarily to actions taken by respondents’ own institutions, often linked to regional political culture or state legislatures perceived as actively hostile to their programs. Our new research reveals consistently high levels of emotional precarity triggered by perceptions of a more tangible and dangerous threat to both WGSS and higher education — this time with an emphasis on national politics and to actions and statements emanating from the executive branch.² If the earlier survey elicited clarion calls for more politicized feminist engagement within our institutions, our new data points toward the generative potential of the current crisis for imagining WGSS in a wholly different relationship to the academy. And, while our earlier analysis found angry and exhausted faculty feeling defeated — in part by the compromises they had made, as individuals and as a field, to survive in the academy — our more recent research finds WGSS practitioners reflecting on their alignment with the field with joy, pride, and gratitude as refracted through what we see as a refusal to regret.

Despite the widespread and palpable sense of fear and alarm shared by all our interviewees, the most important finding of our current study is that this new level of precarity has not produced widespread personal regret for having joined the field, despite a significant disappointment in the academy itself. Indeed, in the course of collecting oral histories from feminist academics at all stages of career from graduate student to emerita, inclusive of those who had not obtained tenure or even consistent full-time employment, we were stunned to find that not one would say they regretted their decision to locate their academic career in the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Regardless of the many expressions of sadness, disappointment, anxiety, and fear, every interviewee emphatically declared they had “no regrets!”—the simple sentiment many loudly proclaimed when we put the question to them directly. This is not to say we heard optimism about what the future holds — either for the field’s survival in the academy, their programs’ future at their own institutions, or for themselves as individuals dependent upon those institutions for their livelihoods. Amidst expressions of extreme pessimism and real worry, to find no one who regrets their decision to make the field a centerpiece of their lives and careers is, to say the least, unexpected. The fact that our interviewees are not experiencing personal regret despite seeing the current moment in higher education as a highly regrettable situation, marks what we view as an intentional refusal to engage in the kind of defeatism that feelings of regret often give rise to. In what appears to be a communal refusal to regret, we discern possible new directions for the field that may help to enable its survival, albeit in potentially radical new forms.

A key to understanding the power that lies in the refusal of WGSS practitioners to regret can be found in the way our interviewees told the story of their relationship to the field and their participation in the building of a feminist community. Narratively, our interviewees framed WGSS as the path that led them to the versions of themselves they are today — as so formative as to not be able to imagine themselves apart from their engagement with this field and so fulfilling that it led them toward what they viewed not so much as a vocation as a calling. “My entry point as an undergraduate,” MK recalled, “just so excited me, I don’t regret it, I absolutely hold on to the content as a deep part of my identity. [It shapes] how I function and see the world and engage … it’s given me a lot of meaning and purpose.” ³ Virtually all of our interviewees spoke about how transformative the field has been for them as people, not only for their studies, their intellectual growth, or even their career paths, but at a deep level of the self. For example, “It’s now … who I am. It’s part of my identity. So, it will be here regardless of what kind of job I’m at,” BD insisted. Indeed, many of our interviewees became emotionally overwhelmed attempting to express the gratefulness they feel for the sense of fulfillment the field has brought them. Representing the tenor of so many of our interviews, MK, her voice shaking with emotion, recalled and attributed her ability to “find” herself and find “meaning in life” to the writings of the founding scholars of this field, saying they are “the reasons I am the person I am.”

Our interviewees’ self-narrations of their careers in WGSS also contained a strong contrapuntal motif in the form of awareness of becoming what Sara Ahmed calls a “hated body” (in this case, of knowledge) in the academy. Rather than depressing interviewees’ spirits, such hatefulness seems to have elicited a powerful counter-memory of love for and pride in a field originating outside and at the margins of that academy.⁴ While many WGSS scholars’ lived experiences of hate across oppressive and often multiply interlocking structures of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, and other identities position them differently within this context of hostility toward the field of WGSS — with the degree of precarity expressed by our participants depending on their differently situated contexts along axes of identity as well as institution and rank — the positioning of the field as a “hated body of knowledge” functioned generatively across our interviews to invoke a chorus of resistance. Recalling that she had “infiltrated higher education to be a spy and a double agent,” ZY explained how, in her view, “when we go wrong, it’s because we forget that [WGSS] is a movement and not just a field of study.” Like many of our interviewees, ZY seemed ready to imagine a future outside the academy, but not outside the field — membership within which goes beyond employment in our respective institutions. “The academy was always just our vehicle,” she explained, “a really effective tool, and a way to bring ourselves into existence.” “But now,” she insisted, “now we exist, I mean our community exists as a movement that exists within or without the academy.” ZY captured what many of our respondents appear to be feeling at the moment when she said, “Whether it wants us anymore or not, whether the academy does work anymore, or whether it just doesn’t work for us, what we need to do is get ready to exist outside it.” In ZY’s testimony and that of a surprising number of our otherwise demoralized colleagues, we find confidence that our very marginalization within our institutions has produced a collective strength that may serve us well moving forward — as long as we can mobilize that strength to forge new organizational structures and find new platforms.

While the work of so many of our colleagues has long been aimed at persuasively demonstrating the necessity and value of WGSS within academia, our conversations with our colleagues point to the generative potential of this political moment for imagining new and alternative futures for WGSS outside or alongside academia.⁵ IG, expressing the vision of many of our interviewees, asserted a solidarity of resistance and hope for a future of the field that exceeds the academy, insistently proclaiming “my allegiance has never been to an institution … the only thing I have an enduring allegiance to is feminism.”