Akademisk feminism. Institutionalisering, organisation och kritik

Abstract

This article is an examination of what consequences our passion for critical research has had on our relation to Gender Studies as a discipline. The examination begins with the exclusion from, and escape from, another discipline, to the space and possibilities offered by Gender Studies. This move is, however, also an escape into a new discipline and a new order of normativities. We move on to identifying these normativities: 1) Gender Studies as constituted through a compromise with research ideals, where, for example, the concept gender (genus) is depicted as more inclusive than other concepts, and Gender Studies as less critical and political than Feminist Studies, 2) the dogmatism of sisterhood, as an identity based limitation for research, and 3) the constant mix-up with, and adaptation to, both governmental gender equality politics and activist organisations outside the university. In order to exist, Gender Studies has, in some way or another, compromised with all three of these normativities. We do not assume that this development is automatically bad or good – the normativities do not always reinforce each other, incongruences and gaps sometimes appear when they meet, and a compromise also implies that there still remains something of that which is ‘other’, of that which was ‘too much’ and had to be compromised. However, for the moment they seem to interact with a neo-liberal governmentality that restructures politics, activist demands, and identifications as well as research focus and university organisation. Hence, we see a need for a re-organisation of academic feminism, using Gender Studies as a platform, but constituted by neither the traditional object of study (“women/gender”) nor the idea of infinite inclusion and flexibility (“intersectionality”). Instead we propose that passion for critical research (including responsibility of that research), organised around the untimely idea of a non-competitive collegium, constitutes the guiding rules for a non-nostalgic and non-identical academic feminism.