"Varför måste Butler vara så jävla akademisk?"

En diskussion om feministisk kunskapsteori och akademiska undervisningsrum

Abstract

The article discusses personal experiences gained by a teacher in gender studies and how she has addressed challenges such as the theoretical development and institutionalization of feminist theory on one hand, and the increasingly widened enrollment to higher education on the other. The argumentation is underpinned by concrete examples taken from a course where feminist poststructuralism is introduced. Special reference is made to Donna Haraway’s epistemological standpoint that all knowledge production is situated and that knowledge, in itself, always has social implications. If we transfer these insights to our classrooms, we need to consider how we, as teachers, articulate, motivate and establish our own culture of academic knowledge production. The power, in this situation, concerns how we relate to clashes of interests and the diversity of the range of possibilities, both in the interaction between teacher and student and between the students themselves. How we relate to these issues will result in different opportunities for different students to conquer the conceptual tools the course is aimed to give them. The author is therefore both giving arguments and, with practical examples, showing how an approach based on ‘walking your own talks’ can facilitate more equal power relations in our increasingly diverse classrooms.