Abstract
Based on the 2009 lecture series “Feminist Knowledge Reconsidered: Feminism and the Academy” at York University, this edited collection seeks to address some of the contemporary issues and challenges of feminist research in universities by drawing perspectives from a diverse body of scholars. Although feminist scholarship had made significant contributions to university curricula during the 1970s and 1980s, the role of “feminism” in higher education remains ambiguous. Indeed, many scholars have offered optimistic visions on the knowledge-producing potential of feminist research—that with new “knowledge, and education, and time, we may, someday, create a new society” (p. 14). Yet against this vast potential of feminist scholarship is the unsatisfying persistence of gender-based “epistemic Apartheid” in both academia and the society at-large. Indeed, “feminism’s focus on half of the human races” (p. 14) means that it should not simply be another “women’s studies” or “gender studies” department on the college campus; instead, feminism should have the capacity to transform fundamentally the existing academic knowledge landscape and thereby lead to normative changes in our society.
In this context, the contributors to this anthology engage a broad range of theoretical and practical problems, including the capacity of feminist research to catalyze educational policy changes, the relationship between feminist scholarship and social liberation movements, and the ways in which we might approach feminist cultural history and historiography. The essays in this collection, edited by Meg Luxton and Mary Jane Mossman, are organized into three parts. Part I focuses on feminism as a site of political resistance by highlighting the connections between feminist knowledge production and cases of liberation movements throughout the world. Part II of the book focuses specifically on the current challenges of feminist research within the formal domain of higher education. Part III then turns the reader’s gaze to the past, where authors seek to find new possibilities of feminist resistance and knowledge-production through historical reflections.
Luxton and Mossman impressively amassed essays from a large number of different academic disciplines, including sociology and anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, history and education into a tightly-packed and coherently-arranged anthology of fewer than two hundred pages. While these essays raise many critical questions concerning the state of feminist research in contemporary academia, these excellent points are not explored in-depth, given the brevity of the book. Though slightly attenuated in terms theoretical development, professionals in higher education and graduate students in related fields will find this book a time-efficient read on some of the key tensions between feminist scholarship, knowledge production, and the contemporary university framework.