Er tiden inde til et skifte fra genus till genus*?

Om navngivningspraksisser i akademisk feminisme

Abstract

The article discusses naming in academic feminism, suggesting that institutionalising naming practices should take into account the multiplicity and diversity of what bears the name Gender Studies by attaching an asterisk: Gender* Studies. The idea is borrowed from Transgender Studies and politics which sometimes use an asterisk, “trans*” to spell out the problems of fixed and essentialising, binary gender identities. The asterisk signals an opening towards multiple expressions of gender diversity and dissidence. The timeliness of a parallel shift from gender to gender* in institutionalising discourses on Gender Studies is argued through a series of examples of historical and current key discussions in the field, which, sensu strictu, cannot be contained within the framework of something defined as studies of a delimited, ”proper” object, called ”gender”. The historical part is introduced through the author’s personal history as an academic feminist activist who has taken part in the building up of “Gender Studies” institutions in Denmark, Sweden and on a broader European basis since the 1980s. The contemporary part introduces examples of current key discussions within the field which share the problem that they can be contained within the framework of Gender Studies only when this term is understood in a broad umbrella like fashion. The discussions referred to are among others transgender critiques of cisnormativity, feminist intersectionality debates and feminist technoscience studies studying other phenomena than “gender”. Against the background of these and other examples, it is argued that adding an asterisk to “Gender*” in ”Gender Studies” could signal excess and diversity, aptly addressing what Judith Butler (1993) conceptualised as the “constitutive impossibility” of finding non-exclusive names.