Maktens skiftningar. En utforskning av ojämlikhetsregimer i akademin

Abstract

Against the background of the successful institutionalisation of gender studies in the academy and the increasing marketisation of the contemporary Swedish academic landscape, this article explores the complex shifts of power in the academy. It does so through an analysis of how inequality regimes, based on gender, race and class, interact in institutional as well as intellectual practices, in the academy at large, as well as in gender studies. To start with, the article discusses how interactions of sexism, racism and class inequality are produced in the academy at large through an inclusion/centering of some subjects and knowledges and an exclusion/marginalisation of other subjects and knowledges. This discussion is based on an analysis of strategies of compensation against discrimination, the existence of a whiteness- and middleclass privilege, links between the production of normative subjects and dominant forms of knowledge, and everyday discrimination. In its second part, the article explores the existence of normative assumptions within gender studies, based on an analysis of the ambitions surrounding the institutionalisation of gender studies as a subject in its own right, and the following debates around the process of institutionalisation. This analysis is carried out with the ambition to open up for a discussion about, on the one hand, if, and if so how, strategic choices within the subject area and ideas around the oppositional character of the subject area contribute to the reproduction of inequality regimes in the academy and larger society, and, on the other hand, to open up for a discussion about how gender studies can be/come a more accountable, attentive and more risky area of teaching and research.