Re-thinking the possibilities of feminist scholarship in the contemporary Australian university
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2010
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This thesis explores the possibilities of feminist scholarship in the
Australian university in a time when the conditions of the university are
sufficiently different from those at women's studies inception as to warrant
a re-assessment of the field. Feminist scholarship is being re-thought in
response to the epistemic transformation of feminism from a social
movement into an institutionalised practice of feminist knowledge
production (what I refer to as feminist scholarship) and the effects
produced by this transformation over the past 40 years.
The research begins from the observation that contemporary feminist
literature is framed by a 'crisis' narrative. This is understood as
problematic because it elides the complexity of the field and limits its future
possibilities. By relying on an unproblematised 'origin' for feminist
scholarship, the crisis literature fails to account for its more diverse history
and intellectual premises. Furthermore, through the general absence of
personal or biographical accounts, the literature does not account
sufficiently for the diverse trajectories of the lives of women who
constitute(d) the field. This thesis argues that we need more multifaceted
and nuanced accounts of feminist scholarship in order to attend to the
complexity of what the field has become.
This thesis has four methodological components: to re-theorise the
'personal is political' by generating personal accounts of the field to
address the problems within the literature; to produce accounts of
individual scholars to address the absence of biographical accounts in the
literature; for these accounts to be on-the-record, thereby contributing to
the public record and producing a more complex account of the history of
the field and finally, to focus on influential scholars whose experiences
provide insight into the epistemic transformation of feminism as a
movement into feminist scholarship.
This thesis is presented in two volumes. The first explores the possibilities
of feminist scholarship by critiquing the ways in which it has been
discursively produced in the feminist literature and through analysing the
texts produced by this research to provide an account of contemporary
feminist academic practice. The second volume re-presents, in
'ghostwritten' form, the personal accounts of the seven influential
Australian feminist scholars who participated in this research.
What is produced by this research is not an alternative 'history' but a
collection of accounts and engagements with the field of feminist
scholarship by key players within the field that seeks both to challenge the
existing literature but also to re-imagine the field in ways previously
unwritten and thereby produce different conceivable futures.
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