Chapter 2: The Life and Times of Academic Feminism

Clare Hemmings

The life and times of academic feminism This chapter re-examines two debates central to the current state of Gender and Women's Studies. The first is known as the autonomy/integration debate, which asks whether feminist enquiry should seek to influence the academy from within particular disciplines, or establish itself as a separate ‘discipline’ drawing on interdisciplinary theories and methods. In critiquing dominant modes of evaluating institutional success in this context, I provide an overview of the current state of academic feminism from a range of intellectual and geographical positions. The second debate concerns the ‘proper name’ of academic feminism. Here I focus on the proliferation of writing which condemns or endorses an institutional move from Women's Studies to Gender Studies, suggesting that we need to situate such claims in the geographical and as well as theoretical contexts from which they arise. Throughout this chapter, I stress the importance of thinking through ...

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