ABSTRACT
As with the first volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies (2012), we want to conclude here not by wrapping up the varied provocative and illuminating arguments of the many authors of these chapters with their repetition or our own broad perceptions of them. Those chapters have no doubt taken readers in numerous directions; in those journeys, we suspect, they have also asked probing questions, pointed out the many stakes for Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) and other academic fields and social movements, and hopefully opened up new vistas of understanding complete with new sets of questions to pursue. And that’s terrific! As is no doubt obvious by now, we (the editors) believe that the strength of WGS is precisely its ability to go “meta”—that is, to always challenge whatever becomes taken-for-granted in the field, even as the field itself also challenges the world around us. WGS is marked, as many authors here have argued, by its constant drive both to conceptualize and to enact a more just world for more people. But that drive, as they have also laid out so starkly, must mean asking difficult questions about our own closely held assumptions, always challenging how WGS approaches its objects of analysis and the language it uses in those approaches.
