Associate Professor, Program for the Study of Women & Gender
Neilson Library B/18; (413)585-3634
earmstro@email.smith.edu

B.A., Pomona College
M.A. and PhD., Brown University

Fifteen years ago, I began to follow the survival and growth of one women’s organization, The All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA). My involvement developed into a research project on globalization’s local and regional politics of gender in India. AIDWA has flourished in neoliberalism’s shadow. I am now writing up this story as Neoliberalism’s Other: The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalization’s Politics. An essay about AIDWA and the 2004 tsunami is forthcoming in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism.

My first book, The Retreat from Organization: US Feminism Reconceptualized, re-examines the ideology of US second wave feminism. The tangled and fraught debates on the lines of sexuality, racism, and class hierarchy illuminate how women activists constructed their political subjectivity. Many of the best of the theorists held fast to the crucial category of “organization,” whose place in their texts enabled a richer deployment of the categories “theory” and “practice” than is available in much theory of our present time.

I teach courses in cultural studies, feminist theory, and gender and globalization. Most of my courses include a component of community learning where we explore how our studies must be illuminated by the lived knowledge around us, and how our skills as researchers can enrich others.