| Sumario: | This essay examines how researchers' differing definitions of core categories of analysis in women's and gender studies have yielded a wide variety of knowledge about gender, women, and sexuality across research institutions. The paper draws on historical records from five women's and gender studies programs and departments in the U.S. and interviews with their faculty. In their formative years these programs defined their purpose similarly: to address the paucity of research on women and the social problems of sex inequality, where the working definition of "woman" was ontologically uncontested. Gradually scholars incorporated a broad range of analytic epistemologies into the women's studies' aegis, including gender identities, masculinities, and human sexuality. The degree of intellectual diversity within gender studies programs in the U.S. reflects the relationship between the conceptualization of "gender" as an object of study and the institutional "ecologies" of important departments--understood in terms of program histories and identities, the flow of resources in universities, the attempts of scholars to adapt their research to the local intellectual milieu, and the relationships of gender studies units to other academic departments in their respective institutions.
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