“We love you, but we just can’t afford you”: A very Canadian approach to breaking up with Women’s and Gender Studies

Bringing together scholars from Canada and the United States, the Gender Studies Now panel asked us to think about a range of pressing issues affecting the gender academy. What made the questions especially compelling was that they opened onto a comparative conversation about forms of threat that do not always look the same. In some places, Gender Studies is being targeted through open hostility and direct political attack. In others, the pressure arrives less dramatically, through enrolment targets, austerity language, restructuring, and suspended admissions. At Nipissing, that less dramatic approach has nonetheless had a dramatic outcome: the closure of the Gender Equality and Social Justice degree and the enfolding of only some of its curriculum into Sociology. While this paper reflects on the strategies that brought GESJ to this point, it more crucially considers what is lost - by faculty, students, institutions, and societies - when WGS curricula and research are de-specified and WGS departments are effectively disappeared from spaces of higher education.