Meeting the moment with Rebecca Jordan-Young: 50 years of ‘The Scholar and Feminist’

A conversation with Professor Jordan-Young, Interim Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Photo by Janani Rajeshwer/The Barnard Bulletin

By Jaya Shankar

March 3, 2026

Hosted annually by the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), “The Scholar and Feminist Conference” has united researchers, activists, and feminists of all generations in dialogue and discussion since 1973. From February 27 to 28, scholars, speakers, and artists across disciplines and geographies gathered on Barnard’s campus for the conference’s 50th session to explore feminist thought and activism against the backdrop of today’s political climate.

Rebecca Jordan-Young, Ann Whitney Olin Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is the Interim Director of the BCRW and studies the science and social manifestations of gender, race, sexuality, and class. I spoke with Professor Jordan-Young about “The Scholar and Feminist,” intersectional science and feminism, and the ways we meet crises within and outside the College.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jaya Shankar (JS): I want to start with the name of the conference: “Fifty Years of Meeting the Moment.” What moment are we in right now — on campus, in New York, globally — and how is “The Scholar and Feminist” meeting it?

Rebecca Jordan-Young (RJY): We are in a moment of overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises that all resonate with the deep concerns that BCRW has engaged from its very beginning. We are engaged in a massive efflorescence of violent misogyny, globally. The crassness of the sexualization and trivialization of women and girls and the attacks on reproductive justice and bodily autonomy are completely connected with attacks on queer women and girls. I’m talking about trans women as well, very explicitly. I’m talking about a kind of crisis that blends particular forms of misogyny with attacks on groups of women who have never been at the center of power. 

Some self-proclaimed feminists have made very comfortable bedfellows with attacks on trans people, women in the global south, [and] migrant women. That has been the case for virtually all authoritarian regimes that I know of: there are things about gender and sexuality that are taken as critical to control, for some sense of order and the restoration of masculine authority. Many scholars I could mention have indicated for a very long time the global intensification of attacks on the very analyses of gender. The people and the politics that expose the violent relations inherent in gender systems are seen as an enormous threat in authoritarian regimes.

Another major crisis is the break from the notion that good and just forms of social organizations are one of the highest goals of higher education; although higher education has always been implicated in holding up structures of domination, whether that’s racial capitalism, colonialism, sexism, or classism. During my lifetime, there was a norm of recognizing and at least formally endorsing the notion that increasing social, political, and economic equality would be good for us and was something that higher education should be engaged in. Critical engagement in understanding those systems and taking a stand was something that was legitimate for students to do, for professors to do, for all of us. What we’ve seen over the last few years has been a radical refusal of that norm. 

And it’s not just crackdown on the right of students, faculty, and staff at universities to protest — it goes together with the attacks that we’ve seen on DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and on any kind of structural effort to redress exclusion and inequality on college campuses. [The attacks] began many years ago: the minute that there was any kind of legal move to create opportunities for more people who had been traditionally excluded (especially racialized people, Black and brown people, people in the working class, and women), the backlash was immediate. 

I’m going hard on the politics here, because I think this is a real crisis. It’s not that those ideas and those politics haven’t been present all the time, but there is an overt and explicit endorsement of it, and a failure to advance legal challenges, that is leaving us in a very different moment. It changes the kinds of strategies that are open to us to challenge those politics. 

There’s one more crisis that I’ll mention, which is the crisis of the university and college in general. There has been a shift in the model of governance and funding for universities and colleges over the last 20 years, with a real acceleration in the last ten years, where withdrawal of public support for education has been going hand in hand with a greater reliance on large donors to decide what will go on at colleges and universities. There’s been a big reduction in faculty and student power and governance, in favor of a more corporate, hierarchical model that matches what we see in finance, where it’s a very fast notion of investment and returns. People are thinking not about long-term values and health of an institution but are much more narrowly thinking about the interest of an institution in terms of endowments. 

JS: That is a lot of moments.

RJY: All of these things are deeply entwined. The rise of neoliberal ideology and structures is absolutely at the heart of what’s happening at universities. It’s connected to the disinvestment in social infrastructure and the withdrawal of the idea of any kind of commons — that we owe each other something, that we’re not just a bunch of entrepreneurial individuals out there in the world, but that we have collectivities and collective interests that matter.

JS: There’s a lot of overlap and connection between all of these things, and they’ve all been building for a while – even if in these past few years it feels like it’s been much more aggressive or violent. In the history of the BCRW and “The Scholar and Feminist,” what are some examples of previous “moments” that this conference has met? How did the discussions and research address those things?

RJY: One of the things that we’re really proud of is the understanding that feminism can never be a single-axis struggle. Feminism can never be about “empowering” or “freeing” or “liberating” some abstract, cleanly defined “women,” in this flat, global way. From very early, one of the ways that the conference “met the moment” was to recognize the deep contradictions within second wave feminism that involved serious exclusions and racism within the movement. One of the early conferences, in 1979 (obviously, that’s not that early; it’s already quite late in a way), was the recognition of how we engage multiple axes of power and domination at the same time.

In 1979, the theme was “The Future of Difference,” and it featured Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Nancy Chodorow, Alice Jardine, some others. This resulted in a beautiful book, “Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control,” where deep shortcomings within second-wave feminism were named and were a point of organizing and analysis collectively. I don’t want to be overly celebratory, but I want to be clear that this conference was a relatively early site of engagement within broad academic feminist movements. One reason that was huge was that during the rise of post-Great Society attacks on women on welfare and back- and front-door attacks on desegregation of schools, those battles were being fought by women of color, largely Black and Latinx women. It took a while to understand broadly among white feminists that these aren’t issues that should be called “Black women's issues,” they’re feminist issues, fundamentally. So that was one crisis. 

The 1984 conference was a really big one — Temma Kaplan was the director at that point, and her work was looking at dictatorships in Latin America; in particular, the role of women. She was very interested in women of the right. Because of the rise of right-wing politics in those movements, and because of the way the U.S. had funded and directed a lot of the authoritarian takeovers in Latin America (Pinochet, as an example), “The Scholar and Feminist” was looking at the global politics of the rise of authoritarianism in a way that helped to mark the connection between the U.S. and what was going on in Latin America and also looked quite critically at what was getting passed off as a “women’s politik” in some of those right-wing places. 

That’s a really strong precedent for the moment that we’re in right now, because there are very high-profile women who are supporting attacks on reproductive justice, labor fairness, migrants, trans women, there are lots of high-profile women in the Trump government, there are lots of high-profile women globally who are contributing to these movements. So, this is a really important moment to look at what that means for feminism. What does this term actually mean? How do we understand the ways in which we, as people in the U.S., are implicated in global inequalities? I think it challenges the old easy slogans, like “sisterhood is global.” It should be, when we’re doing work on transnational feminist solidarity, but that doesn’t come out of some essence of being a woman and understanding women everywhere. That’s something you have to work for: you need analysis, and you need to understand what forms of solidarity can support it. And so that 1984 moment is one of the best precedents for understanding what we need to do right now. 

JS: I want to ask a little more about you. You’re a professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, you’ve researched the science of sex and gender, and published a book about testosterone [“Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography,” 2019]. You bring feminist questions to scientific research and scientific questions to feminist studies. 

RJY: My first book got banned when [United States Secretary of War] Hegseth was banning books at the Naval Academy. I was astonished. At first, I laughed and said  “I wouldn’t have thought the Naval Academy had my book!” That book is called “Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences.” I challenge a dominant theory about “male brains” and “female brains,” the idea that there is such a thing, and that human cognition and personalities and forms of love are somehow divided by sex. It’s a very broadly supported idea, even among a lot of scientists, but in fact it’s really, really sloppy work that supports it. It’s this huge mountain of evidence, but the evidence is like a big, sloppy, trash pile: it doesn’t actually go together in the way that evidence has to go together to support a theory. It’s interesting to me that the Naval Academy would find this analysis of sex and gender so threatening that they would ban it. 

JS: How did that scholarship bring you to the BCRW, and what has being at Barnard been like with that background?

RJY: One of the things that anyone who studies how science works immediately understands is that science is political. It’s not separate from social and cultural formations, it’s one of the many forms of practices and authority that form the way we relate to each other as humans. I got very interested, even before I went to graduate school, in scientific claims about sexuality and gender. For many years, I taught a big lecture class about women and health. I will probably return to that at some point. 

At Barnard, I’ve been really invested in helping students who don’t study sciences, typically, to understand the ways in which scientific practices and claims are involved in the social and historical process that they’re interested in, and I’ve been very dedicated to helping students in the sciences understand that their positions are not outside of these social and political operations. 

In this last year, beginning last spring, it’s become more obvious and overt how the work that I do matters, politically. One of the very first things that Trump did when he became president was to write these executive orders declaring that sex is binary and making gestures towards “science.” He makes a lot of claims about “scientific truth” and biological truth. But those references are not actually backed up by any kind of attachment to empirical evidence of any sort. They’re anchored in something that we refer to as “scientism,” which is the ceding or awarding enormous authority to the notion of science, the idea that science is the way to resolve any social and political questions — but at the same time is completely detached from actual scientific practice or evidence. So I began teaching the executive orders. The point isn’t to condemn them, the point is to see what they’re doing. What’s the evidence for them? How are the claims made? How are they anchored? 

JS: To go back to something that you were saying earlier about universities: as an Ivy League in New York City with a history of student activism, Columbia is an incubator of these social moments — we’ve seen a lot of that on campus over the past few years — and in another sense is arguably very insulated from that landscape. How does the BCRW and “The Scholar and Feminist,” an academic conference at a private college about a global movement, approach this contradiction? 

RJY: There’s a recognition at BCRW that a deep understanding of the world and of processes of social change cannot only be generated from within a college campus, especially not an elite one. So there’s been a commitment to reaching beyond the campus and understanding what organizers, activists, artists, and others are outside of the College boundaries; how people understand what’s necessary for the struggles that we’re all invested in. From the very beginning, these conferences were not just for people at Barnard; they were not just for other scholars. They’re not like other scholarly conferences where nobody would bother coming if they weren’t a Ph.D. That’s not what these conferences are. 

When we invited people to speak at this conference this year, we put it this way: BCRW has always understood feminist knowledge to come from action in the world and to be for action in the world. There’s a connection that is not abstract and esoteric. 

There’s also a feminist epistemology which says that people’s actual position in the world — social, geographic, political, etc. — shape the contours of how we understand things and literally what we can perceive as the problems that we’re facing and the solutions that are possible. So if you only draw on one narrow group or class of people to try to develop understandings of how the world works and how you might change it, you’re never going to get very far. Building on that feminist principle, which is both a scholarly principle and a core activist principle, around inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives, and of respect for all people as legitimate knowers who have a legitimate capacity to analyze and who have the authority to make decisions and make change — that’s something that people at BCRW have tried to honor and respect from the beginning by trying to make this conference accessible. We’re really happy that we’ve got hundreds of people from outside of the Barnard and Columbia community coming on campus to be part of this. 

JS: We have Judith Butler as the keynote speaker, but who else or what part of the conference is most exciting? 

RJY: I’ll mention one person who is not a scholar per se, but who I think of as our other keynote — Judith Butler has been identified as our keynote, but we’re also having the musician Toshi Reagan. I think of Toshi’s performance as a musical keynote to this conference, because Toshi has a sophisticated Black feminist analysis that is global in scope, holistic in terms of looking across forms of domination and injustice, and deeply politically committed. But it’s also poetic, subtle, and forms the embodiment of possibility. The joy that Toshi brings, and the collective expressions of power that you get in a concert with her… I think of it as an alternative form of keynote we’re having. 

Then in the afternoon is “The University And/In Crisis.” Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a Dalit rights activist looking at challenging caste system and exclusion. She has an organization she founded called Equality Labs; she’s an artist, a media activist, a musician, and a storyteller. That’s a great example of somebody who’s not coming from the world of academia but whose work can really inform what we understand. I think [The University And/In Crisis] is a great panel to have somebody from outside to say, these are the ways which the crisis in the university fits into broader systems of marginalization and exclusion, and how we challenge them. 

Then the final panel, “How We Write Black Feminism Now,” also brings together scholars and several artists. Jaqueline Woodson is an incredible novelist who is best known for a couple of National Book Award-winning novels, but she’s actually a young adult novel writer, that’s been her main career. [Woodson] has a spectacular gift of distilling into very plain language and very plain narrative a lot of the core struggles with discerning the way the world works and how to be good people in it, how to be true to ourselves and the people we love. She’s an amazing writer. 

JS: Barnard is a unique place: it’s a women’s college with a co-ed undergrad community. And being a scholar, or a student, and a feminist is not the same as being a scholar of feminism. So knowing the things that Barnard students are interested in and the things that we do, what can we take away from an event like “The Scholar and Feminist,” and what can we learn about our own studies and our own participation in this community? 

RJY: The Barnard student body is a talented, brilliant, wonderful student body. I’m going to guess that the vast majority of Barnard students would identify themselves as feminists, and that might be an enabling condition for deciding to study at a women’s college. Not everybody comes for that reason, certainly, but understanding in a more historically grounded and globally informed way what that actually means — what it’s meant over time, the challenges within feminism, the struggles with other people who call themselves feminists — is something that I maintain would be really clarifying and valuable for anybody and in particular, anyone at Barnard.

People think of gender and sexuality as sort of obvious, something you get from lived experience, from talking to people and from knowing. I like to say, “Everybody has a body, that doesn’t mean you know anatomy.” You inhabit this body, you talk to people about your body, but if you want to do certain things in the world, you need to actually study, analyze, and challenge some of your everyday understandings and received wisdom in order to know what that body consists of and how it works. The same thing is true with gender and sexuality. 

That’s what we offer. In particular, our department [Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies] and the BCRW have a very strong commitment to an intersectional and inclusive way of looking at gender as a social system and a structure, not as an identity property that some people have in one way and other people have in another way. We understand that the kinds of divisions that are made change over history. But we’re interested in understanding how this operates as a social system and as a structure of power that’s implicated in other social systems and structures of power. If you want to make change in the world, you’ve got to know how this works.