‘Feminist theory is proper knowledge,but …’: The status of feminist scholarship in the academy

The epistemic status of feminist scholarship: An ethnographic approach

I explore the above questions by drawing on material from an ethnographic study of negotiations of the epistemic status of women’s, gender, and feminist studies (WGFS) ³ in Portuguese academia. ⁴ In this study, I propose the term epistemic status to refer to the degree to which, and conditions in which, a knowledge claim, or body of claims, is recognised as fulfilling the requisite criteria to be considered credible and relevant knowledge, however those criteria may be defined in specific spaces, communities and moments. My formulation of the concept seeks to articulate three modes of analysis of the processes through which knowledge claims and their producers become marked as authoritative: a) feminist epistemology, most notably the work of Lorraine Code (1995); b) literature in science and technology studies, particularly Thomas Gieryn’s (1999) analyses of scientific ‘boundary-work’; and c) Michel Foucault’s proposal of the term episteme (as redefined in his later work) to refer to an ‘“apparatus” which makes possible the separation […] of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific’ ([1977] 1980: 197). Like these authors, I do not consider the separation and ranking of claims on the basis of how scholarly or scientific ⁵ they are to be a process of objective identification of the intrinsic epistemic properties of those claims. Rather, I conceptualise such demarcations as ongoing, context-specific discursive and performative achievements (Gieryn), which generate a range of truth- and power-effects (Foucault) in ways that generally reflect, and reproduce, broader social and political structures of inequality that tend to mark ‘women (and other Others) [as] […] unknowing’ and less credible (Code, 2006: 147). ⁶

Portugal is a rich site in which to analyse the extent to which WGFS is recognised as a field capable of producing knowledge worthy of being funded, published, quoted, and taught. WGFS emerged relatively late in Portugal, but the past decade has been characterised by an acceleration and consolidation of its institutionalisation (evident, for example, in the creation of new postgraduate programmes and increase in literature on WGFS), against a backdrop of wider national and international transformations in science and higher education (HE). I am not able to map the present configuration of the Portuguese WGFS landscape here, ⁷ but I do want to highlight some key trends, several of which can also be identified in other countries. Over the past ten years, Portuguese HE institutions have seen their state funding reduced and have come under increasing pressure to expand and diversify sources of income. As WGFS courses and degrees currently attract student interest (and income), and as several WGFS scholars are high performing, well-networked and have good track-records of securing funding, universities and academics have become more accepting of feminist scholarship. This recognition that feminist work has financial and institutional value – combined with other changes in Portuguese academia, including greater acceptance of interdisciplinary and qualitative scholarship – seems to be dissuading many non-feminist scholars from explicitly questioning in public its epistemic value. Hence, the climate of open repudiation of feminist work that characterised several disciplines and institutions for many years has largely been replaced by one of public recognition of its relevance. Nevertheless, this climate coexists with a regular unofficial dismissal of feminist scholarship and scholars in the form of corridor talk, in Gary L. Downey et al.’s sense: it is ‘the unsaid, but frequently said anyway (though not to everyone)’ (1997: 245).

Much like colleagues in other countries, several Portuguese feminist authors have argued that one of the biggest obstacles to producing a comprehensive feminist transformation of social science theory and research is the continued mainstream defusing of the critical thrust of feminist contributions (see for example Amâncio, 2003; Neves, 2012). According to them, as WGFS becomes more institutionalised in Portugal the conceptual contributions of national and international feminist authors – most notably the formulation of the concept of ‘gender’ and its framing as a key axis of inequality – have been integrated relatively easily and are now widely accepted (although still frequently absent from, or secondary in, non-feminist teaching and research). At the same time, however, the feminist methodological, epistemological and political critiques which ground and frame those conceptual proposals, and are harder to reconcile with mainstream paradigms, are almost entirely overlooked or openly dismissed. One senior feminist scholar described this in an interview:

The concept of gender got in easily and now appears in every [non-feminist] text, although those texts do not acknowledge the work carried out by feminist researchers and even the theoretical implications of the concept of gender for that [mainstream] work. […] [Gender] enters without reflection, without an understanding of the concept’s political implications. […] Everyone thinks they can mention women and men and it’s enough, it doesn’t demand a change of perspective or critical stance, it doesn’t have implications in the disciplines and how they are constituted, and I think these aspects are the most important bit of our work. ⁸

Commenting on this, Teresa Joaquim, a Portuguese feminist philosopher, writes:

The analytical category of gender became more present in Portugal from the 1990s […] It became a passe-partout term, namely in its migration and translation to institutional contexts where its use […] hides the critique that this analytical category implies […] It is an analytical category that has become an important theoretical contribution, but whose source is not recognised – it is ‘cut’ from the field of women’s studies, from feminist theories, leading to a depoliticising of the term. (2004: 89*, my emphasis) ⁹

Feminist scholarship produces proper knowledge, but … only when done in a certain way

During fieldwork in Portugal, I conducted participant observation at seven national and international non-WGFS conferences in a range of social science (inter)disciplines, and observed that non-feminist scholars rarely referred to feminist work in their interventions. In the very few occasions in which they did so, they never entirely and unequivocally questioned the epistemic status of that work. Their claims were almost always framed in positive, but adversative and conditional terms. They asserted that feminist scholarship can produce, and has produced, pertinent contributions to academic knowledge, but only to a certain extent, or only some of its strands, or only if/when conducted in a certain way. My first encounter with these adversative claims – i.e. propositions that express opposition or discrepancy through a ‘but’ or equivalent adversative conjunction – happened on the second day of fieldwork, as I attended a national conference for a particular social science discipline. As I mingled during the coffee break, I chatted with an older delegate whom I did not know. After a few minutes of conference small-talk, she asked what field I specialised in, and I said “gender”. “Gender?!”, she replied, “but I hope it’s none of that occult stuff which one often finds in that field, hey?! Gender, but properly, with your feet firmly on the ground.” I smiled politely and asked, “Occult stuff? What do you mean?” She responded matter-of-factly: “Oh, as you know there are things in that field that are driven by faith and dogma, not by science. They’re like a religion, and a religion like that is as bad as other religions.” She talked excitedly about a French acquaintance “who is researching gender in very interesting ways.” I nodded and she continued, taking on a disapproving tone: “But some people in her department do the most absurd research on gender.” “Really?”, I asked. “Well, I’m sure you’ve seen some of that very political work on gender! In my opinion, studying gender’s great, but just as long as it doesn’t become political and dogmatic. One must analyse things with, you know.” She stopped talking, as if the sentence were complete. I looked at her in silence, waiting for her to finish. “One must analyse things with impartiality. No, that feminist stuff’s too much.” She smiled and asked if I was enjoying working in the UK. This scene shows that epistemic boundary-work can begin suddenly and when least expected. More importantly, it illustrates that some non-feminist scholars’ reactions to references to gender are framed saliently on the basis of a distinction between research about gender that can produce credible knowledge, and research that is too dogmatic and political, “like a religion,” and therefore academically unacceptable. Another noteworthy feature of this exchange is the delegate’s implicit framing of feminist scholarship’s potential for unscientific excess as a commonly recognised characteristic of the field, which will be understood without examples or even if she does not complete all sentences. The tone is not directly confrontational: research on gender should be developed, but needs to be more observant of the crucial epistemic threshold that is seen to separate academic knowledge from religion, politics and partiality.

References to this notion that feminist scholars produce valuable knowledge but sometimes stray too far beyond the boundaries of the academically acceptable were made in several fieldwork sites. They were almost always very brief references made as part of broader discussions of another topic. However, I want to focus my analysis on those rarer cases of longer commentary on feminist scholarship to explore in more depth the complexity of boundary-work and its collective, negotiated character. I begin by examining an exchange in a seminar for a graduate social science course, taught by a senior non-feminist scholar. As the extract is very long I analyse a section at a time, to better highlight the gradually shifting forms of boundary-marking.

Student: as a social researcher, is it riskier to study a reality […] that I’m part of, […] or one that’s foreign to me? […]

Lecturer: That has been a debate since forever in the social sciences. Put simply, it touches on the epistemic privilege of the outsider or the insider. There are good arguments for the merits of one or the other. […] The epistemic privilege of the outsider was an argument developed in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. The epistemic privilege of the insider also has good earlier traditions, but has been more defended in cultural and feminist studies. [They claim that] being inside […] allows for an analytical sensitivity that outsiders cannot have. You’ll find arguments in these different traditions, none is simplistic in relation to this, I think, sometimes they’re even very sophisticated, although not always very consistent. […] But it’s an ongoing issue.

Note that the lecturer starts by describing feminism (and cultural studies) as offering valuable arguments, explicitly stating that they are not simplistic. Feminist scholarship seems to be described here as one among a range of relevant traditions to be taken into account. He continued:

Lecturer: I don’t have an answer, but I’d like to draw attention to two, three points. […] I feel that the traditional arguments for the epistemic privilege of the outsider and the feminist and cultural studies arguments for the privilege of the insider when taken up completely are too absolute and somewhat caricatural. But each one does make some pertinent points. So what I’d probably have to do is transport with me what is valuable in each, and then channel that to a subtler process of epistemological control. […] A statement like ‘I’m an insider and therefore my perspective will be better’ demonstrates a completely inappropriate determinism, and contemporary social sciences, with their sophistication, wouldn’t subscribe to this. They wouldn’t subscribe […] to the claim that […] because I’m white or black, man or woman, etc., I have epistemic privilege and guarantees of producing better knowledge than my colleague who has another social status, right?

He then continues the discussion, focusing specifically on feminist work.

Lecturer: Anyway, there are people who defend this, but I’m not convinced. [laughs] I admit there are arguments. For example, you might say that the problems of inequality and abusive domination that women have been subjected to have been analysed mostly by female researchers. That’s statistically true. […] But does this mean more epistemic privilege or quality? I have the biggest doubts. I think what it means is more personal interest in the theme, right?

[Some students start talking simultaneously rendering it difficult to understand what they say]

Student: But for example with the issue of women, if we talk about a theme like domestic violence, maybe a victim of domestic violence will feel more comfortable talking to a woman.

Lecturer: But think for example of research on early childhood. [laughs] […] What would we do then? [laughs. Some students laugh. Tone becomes humorous] Do we get a child and take it with us to carry out research? [laughs. Some students laugh] I don’t want to waste too much time on this, but what I want you to see is that when we extrapolate a principle like this one, in one or two cases it looks appropriate, but when we start generalising it as a methodological principle, it becomes clear that it has feet of clay. [laughs] […] [Being an insider] may give access to lots of information, but does it always mean capacity to decipher social processes? I have the greatest doubts.

The lecturer begins this section with an acknowledgement that there are valid arguments for a feminist defence of epistemic privilege, but takes an explicitly sceptical position in relation to that defence (‘I’m not convinced’, ‘I have the greatest doubts’) and frames it as an issue of personal interest rather than epistemic quality. When a student questions his scepticism, he offers a humorous analogy that has a powerful effect. He aligns this feminist stance with a research situation positioned – both through the words used and tone of voice – as nonsensical and ridiculous. ¹⁰ This caricatural comparison works to portray a feminist perspective as itself also caricatural, an exaggerated position that students should be wary of aligning themselves too closely with. The argument is then restated in a more nuanced and explicit way, when he claims that this position is appropriate in ‘one or two cases’ but cannot be generalised, and therefore cannot provide a basis for a sound research approach. His tone throughout the section is both ironic and ironising, in Jonathan Potter’s sense: ‘ironizing discourse […] turns [the object of description] into [something] which is motivated, distorted or erroneous in some way’ (1996: 107). His use of humour plays an important role because it creates an ‘ironic halo’ (Henriques and Pinto, 2002) around feminist theories: it frames feminist scholarship as risible and creates a separation between the laughing lecturer and students, on the one hand, and the laughable potential implications of feminist epistemological and methodological principles, on the other. As John Carty and Yasmine Musharbash suggest, ‘[l]aughter is a boundary thrown up around those laughing, those sharing the joke. Its role in demarcating difference, of collectively identifying against an Other, is as bound to processes of social exclusion as to inclusion. Indeed, the two are one’ (2008: 214, original emphasis). Let us now return to the class discussion and consider the lecturer’s next (and last) sentences.

When we start noticing that a certain theme is studied mostly by scientists with a certain profile, as in research about women’s issues, I think that as a scientific community we must try to go against that. [he laughs] There’s something there that isn’t completely open, completely right.

Note that in this long excerpt the lecturer never explicitly rejects feminist contributions: he describes himself as completely open to them in principle, but just not entirely persuaded by their demonstrated epistemic merits. There is no direct repudiation, but his discursive framing of feminist work – the highlighting of the distance between some feminist epistemological interventions and contemporary social sciences; the use of analogies and humour to describe them as laughably extreme and unsuited to application outside ‘one or two cases’ – works to cast it as a limited, constraining and partly untenable subject position for a ‘sophisticated’ scholar. He acknowledges that there are debates on this, and that others would offer opposing arguments, but he externalises and objectifies his personal position as widely shared, namely by saying that ‘contemporary social sciences […] wouldn’t subscribe’ to certain feminist claims. This externalising enables him to ‘produce descriptions which will be treated as mere descriptions, reports which tell it how it is’ (Potter, 1996: 108, original emphases). When woven together, these discursive moves produce an epistemic splitting of feminist work. They separate it into its ‘valuable’ bits – which can be, and have been, integrated into ‘subtler’ social theory – and its less epistemically solid dimensions, which can be justifiably disregarded because they are too specific to be of broad relevance and application, or too outdated, biased and deterministic, therefore raising cause for suspicion. The ironisation of feminist principles is not total: they only have weaknesses if taken up fully; when used selectively and sceptically, they can be helpful. It is not just the epistemic status of feminist work that is being negotiated in this long excerpt: through it, the lecturer is also enacting his own academic credibility. Reed (2006) observes that feminist critiques have been so influential that it becomes harder for non-feminist academics to justify bypassing them completely. Evans has also noted that ‘academics are generally unwilling to put their names to statements that can be interpreted as anything less than objective or considered’ (1982: 61). By portraying himself as someone who is open to feminist critiques and has carefully examined them but concluded, like other non-feminist scholars, that they have ‘feet of clay’, he is able to distance himself from the undesirable position of the (male) academic who is unreasonably and biasedly anti-feminist.

My interviews with scholars and students show that this framing of feminist scholarship in mainstream social science teaching is not a one-off case or idiosyncratic discourse specific to this individual. Indeed, all of the nine students I interviewed, based in a range of disciplines and institutions, described hearing this kind of account of feminist work across different courses. Two MA students described such experiences as follows:

∼In one undergraduate social theory course, the lecturer mentioned feminist authors, but used them to demonstrate that there’s a risk of taking these feminist critiques too far. […] The reading list was deceptive. […] It had feminist references, but then they were framed in class as negative examples. […] The lecturers acknowledged the existence of heterodox positions, but described them as not to be taken entirely seriously.

∼My experience of lecturers’ relationship with feminist work at [current university] and at [university where interviewee studied as an undergraduate] is one of mentioning it but devaluing it, belittling it, showing that it’s not entirely credible, more than direct and explicit hostility, but these things tend to be connected.

Research on gender is relevant … but can be done (better) with non-feminist theories

In my analysis above, I drew attention to how the lecturer affirmed the possibility of integrating the ‘valuable’ dimensions of feminist work within mainstream social theory, thereby bypassing the former's weaknesses. This is a significant discursive move in that it frames feminist scholarship as potentially partly replaceable by non-feminist work. I therefore want to devote this section to examining other examples of claims that research about gender is important, but is/can be sounder if/when it uses non-feminist theories and/or is conducted by non-feminist scholars. An interview excerpt provides a vivid illustration of such claims. The interviewee is a non-feminist scholar whom I contacted after hearing him make a comment in a conference discussion about the current state of social theory. He had mentioned that he was examining gender (as one among other variables) in a project using mainstream social theory, and was having some surprises. I was curious to hear about those surprises, and arranged an interview. He spent much of our short interview explaining that he was finding it enjoyable to research gender and was learning a huge amount from that experience and the work of colleagues who adopted an explicitly feminist perspective. He then added,

I really admire and support the work of my colleagues who’ve been studying gender for a few years. But I also often tease them, saying that we need to develop measures to protect men! Because you [women] are always interested in finding positive things about women. I’m not interested in finding positive or negative things about men or women! […] In my research I’ve been using some of the latest social theories. […] They are not new to me. But they have led to results that my [feminist] colleagues weren’t expecting. […] They couldn’t believe it, but it was true. The data demonstrated it! So I have learned a lot from gender research, but I think my colleagues who do this research would be able to understand their objects better if they weren’t always so attached to gender theories and looked at the issues also from these broader perspectives.

I was also keen to observe how the relationship between feminist and non-feminist scholarship was framed in conferences, as key sites in which ‘academic authority is negotiated and established performatively’ (Friese, 2001: 286). In one case, I observed a Portuguese scholar present a paper at an international conference in Lisbon. She began by explaining that her paper would ‘propose an articulation between the concepts of gender and class. This implies a confluence of Marxism and Weberian approaches with feminism’. ¹² She presented slides describing the first two approaches and discussed them at length, briefly mentioning criticisms of these frameworks advanced by ‘radical feminism in the 1970s’. After she finished, a non-Portuguese delegate asked how she planned to empirically operationalise this theoretical framework, and noted that she was using ‘a very classical definition of gender and class’ and might want to consider more recent feminist work. In her reply, the presenter acknowledged that feminist work had made important contributions to understandings of women’s lives, but explained that

We are pretty sure that when thinking about women’s position these [classical] theories of class are still relevant, because when feminism talks about women, it tends to assume that women are almost the same, a homogeneous unit, but women from upper classes don’t have the same living conditions as women from lower classes. Maybe upper-class women have better conditions, more power than men of lower classes. That’s why we need to conceptualise things through these classical theories.

When examining this example, the key question to be asked is not which theories are really better or more sophisticated, nor whether this particular scholar, or others, can be categorised as less competent for failing to appropriately acknowledge feminist theory. Indeed, it is important to note that the very limited (but growing) stock of feminist publications in Portuguese academic libraries or of WGFS courses in universities severely constrains researchers’ opportunities of accessing feminist scholarship. The important question is, rather, how dominant modes of describing and evaluating the epistemic status of feminist scholarship act to ‘locate and contain it, limit the discussion, [and] control the work’s possible reception’ (Code, 1995: 10), and how communities and audiences respond to this, reproducing, resisting or reframing those modes. But even these questions are far from straightforward. This episode took place in a disciplinary conference, so one could analyse it from a different perspective. The referencing of key (male) names of a discipline may be understood as a strategy for securing space and recognition for feminist work in a context where such research might be dismissed, ¹³ instead of being interpreted as an instance of marginalisation and containment of feminist contributions by subordinating them to non-feminist scholarship. What were speakers’ actual intentions? (Can the question even be framed like this?) What was the impact of this presentation on the demarcation of the epistemic status of feminist theories? Was it positive because it made it possible to place gender and women on the conference agenda? Or detrimental because it reinforced the arguably dominant framing of feminist theory as specific and only partially valuable?

Predictably, I cannot answer these questions because any one instance of non-feminist engagement with feminist scholarship may have plural and contradictory effects. The reactions to Pierre Bourdieu’s La Domination Masculine (1998) offer an interesting illustration. This French sociologist is one of the most influential and frequently cited scholars in Portuguese social science research and education (Machado, 2009; Pinto and Pereira, 2007). He devoted one of his last books – in English, Masculine Domination (2001) – to gender. It has been the object of intense debate, with scholars in France, Portugal and elsewhere denouncing his refusal to cite or recognise the work of feminist theorists (Amâncio, 2003, 2005; Armengaud and Jasser, 1994; Ferreira, 2001; Mottier, 2002) and his representation of feminists as being better suited to making artistic, rather than scientific, contributions to analyses of masculine domination (Ramalho, 2001). Witz argues that through his framing of feminist scholars as having a ‘tendency […] to let their politically interested stance get in the way of an appropriately “reflexive analysis” and to produce “bad science”’ (2004: 215), Bourdieu is able to position himself as someone who can ‘mak[e] a better job of engaging with the problem of masculine domination than feminists have’ (2004: 215).

The book, published in Portugal in 1999, was mentioned (unprompted) in nine interviews and five events during my fieldwork, with several feminist scholars referring to it as ‘offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’. According to them, it has contributed decisively to making gender a credible and worthwhile object of study in Portuguese social science. However, they argue that this heightened recognition of the relevance of studying gender comes at the expense of the continued invisibility of feminist theory, not just because Bourdieu himself does not engage with it, but also because Portuguese non-feminist scholars now tend to draw heavily (in some cases, exclusively) on Bourdieu when discussing gender. Two interviewees, both senior feminist scholars, discussed at length the book’s contradictory impact on the status of feminist scholarship:

∼I was so shocked when I read Bourdieu’s book. What he does is invent, in scare quotes, what feminists had already enunciated decades ago. However, he didn’t mention them. But what’s curious is that, as soon as it came out the book became a weapon for me, and I used it in all possible occasions. Any occasion – chats over coffee, meetings – would be good to remind my colleagues of the book and quote it in some way, to show that the themes I’m researching are actually important and can be proper sociology.

The dismissive recognition of feminist scholarship: Concluding reflections

Much literature on leadership and management notes that the phrase ‘yes, but …’ is a pervasive and powerful term in the everyday life of organisations, functioning as ‘a little two-step that gives with one hand as it takes back with the other’ (Thompson, 1994: 7; Van Brocklin, 2010). In this article, I have argued that explicit and implicit ‘yes, but’ claims also play an important role in academic discourse, and particularly in negotiations of epistemic status. In contemporary Portuguese academia, feminist scholarship is overwhelmingly described in public sites of work and sociability in positive, yet adversative terms. Briefly commenting on the impact of ‘yes, but’ statements as a mode of academic criticism, Ruth Barcan suggests they enable a ‘logic of blockage’ (1995: 92). Indeed, I demonstrate here that the ‘but’ at the centre of these adversative claims enacts, and depends on, the marking of an epistemic threshold, i.e. a discursive boundary that separates proper academic knowledge from knowledge that is supposedly too outdated, specific, interested. Feminist scholarship is portrayed as straddling that epistemic threshold: some elements of it (certain people, concepts, theories, methodological or epistemological principles) are (brought) within, others are (cast) outside. Feminist scholarship is thus represented as residing partly within, and partly outside, the space of proper knowledge. This produces a double move, whereby the epistemic status of feminist work is both asserted and denied, enabling what I call a dismissive recognition of feminist scholarship. I therefore see these discourses about epistemic status, and the forms of splitting that they instantiate, as one important means through which feminist work is simultaneously replenished and contained in contemporary academia, to use the words of Kate Campbell that opened this article.

I argue that two features of these forms of epistemic splitting and dismissive recognition render them particularly effective. Firstly, they express no direct repudiation or hostility towards feminist scholarship and no incitements to audiences to steer completely clear of it. Some consideration of feminist work is more or less explicitly encouraged, but positions of partial engagement and full alignment with it are contrasted in ways that frame the former as the more desirable, balanced subject position. This does two things. On the one hand, it fits with, and helps to maintain, a public epistemic climate of openness to feminist scholarship, an important matter at a time when research on gender is seen by Portuguese institutions as having the potential to attract much-needed revenue in the shape of research funding and student fees. On the other hand, it validates the credibility of the speaker as a reasonable, informed and open-minded academic who keeps up-to-date with theoretical developments in Portugal and abroad and who has thoughtfully considered the merits and limitations of feminist work, learned from its valuable arguments, incorporated them … and moved on.

Secondly, this epistemic threshold can be positioned in many different places, according to the characteristics of each (con)text of boundary-work. Indeed, as other analysts of scientists’ discourses have argued, ‘the strength of this justificatory strategy [of using the notion of “bad science” to disqualify others’ work] is its in-built flexibility – allowing the discussant to dismiss any scientific enterprise if they can establish a believable process of contamination’ (Kerr et al., 1997: 288) (see also Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984). This flexible positioning of epistemic thresholds enables institutions, communities or individuals to adjust their position vis-à-vis feminist work according to the ‘contingencies of the moment: the adversaries then and there, the stakes, the […] audiences’ (Gieryn, 1999: 5). This shifting and strategic engagement with feminist scholarship has been observed in other countries: Alice Červinková and Tereza Stöckelová (2008), for example, argue that movements of approximation and distance play an important role in relations between sociology and gender studies in the Czech Republic. In a study within the sociology department of a Czech university, they observed that feminist scholarship is kept ‘out/on the margin of “proper” sociology’ but ‘mobiliz[ed] […] as “sociology” when convenient’ (cited in Mayer, 2009: 10). The contingency and variability of epistemic thresholds, as well as scholars’ interest in positioning them in one place rather than another, are nevertheless rarely acknowledged in the discourses I have analysed. Claims are externalised and reified, and thus made to appear as widely shared, neutral descriptions of the intrinsic characteristics of that body of scholarship.

I see adversative statements as producing these effects, but also want to argue that such effects must not be taken as given or straightforward; on the contrary, they are contradictory and cannot be read directly off discourses alone. I highlighted, for example, that referring to feminist insights without foregrounding feminist authors can make feminist scholarship disappear, but may also create the conditions for its appearance in a specific classroom or conference. In addition, a speaker may deploy several strategies to frame claims as persuasive, but this does not mean that audiences will identify with the subject positions discursively constituted as appropriate. Not only do students directly question lecturers’ narratives, as I show here, but they may also remain silent in class while later commenting on how outdated a lecturer’s position is, as I sometimes observed during fieldwork. Analysing public claims, as this article seeks to do, is therefore an important but limited approach to the study of negotiations of epistemic status. It can help identify how discourses are structured so as to ‘permit [the] separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within […] a field of scientificity’ (Foucault, [1977] 1980: 197), but it is less able to examine the extent to which those demarcations of acceptability are themselves accepted. Therefore, it is indispensable to consider how the truth- and power-effects of epistemic claims are shaped by the contexts and conditions in which they are made, an issue which I explore in depth elsewhere (Pereira, 2011).

It is also important to note that it is not just non-feminist scholars who speak about feminist work in adversative terms. During fieldwork, I observed feminist academics describing others’ feminist scholarship as going too far beyond particular thresholds of epistemic acceptability and, as in the examples analysed here, using caricature, humour and ironising discourse to represent the epistemic qualities of other feminist work in a ‘sceptical frame’ (Potter, 1996). ¹⁴ Therefore, scholars concerned with the epistemic splitting of feminist scholarship cannot search for its roots and manifestations only in the claims of non-feminist scholars. We must also critically analyse our own practices of boundary-work, to examine how they too may contribute to producing and legitimating a representation of feminist scholarship as always precariously positioned vis-à-vis epistemic thresholds, as always partially ‘too far’, ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’.

This referencing of feminist interventions as straddling the threshold of acceptability, as being reasonable and credible but only up to a point, does not occur only in academia. Recent analyses of media and interview talk (Dean, 2010; Edley and Wetherell, 2001; McRobbie, 2009; Pereira, 2010) have shown that in many (con)texts there have been shifts towards greater openness to feminism, but in non-linear ways and with both enabling and constraining impacts on feminist scholars’ and activists’ ability to secure space in institutions and public debates. According to Rosalind Gill, ‘[i]t is precisely the contradictoriness of contemporary representations of [feminism] that makes [its analysis] so difficult’ (2007: 2). It is also, as I suggest here, what makes such representations especially effective. Indeed, this coexistence of recognition and dismissal is not just a sign that some dimensions of academic practice change faster than others. It is a key mechanism in epistemic and institutional boundary-work, because it allows institutions or communities to access some of the benefits that feminist scholarship can yield – funds, publication ratings or a reputation as a modern institution, committed to diversity and equality – without having to recognise the validity or relevance of feminist critiques of dominant modes of knowledge production. This coexistence of recognition and dismissal makes contemporary forms of containment and splitting of feminist scholarship particularly difficult to name and challenge. Being attentive to, and trying to make sense of, the adversative interweaving of recognition and dismissal in everyday discourses about feminist scholarship must thus be an ongoing task in our discussions about, and interventions into, the production of academic knowledge.

Funding

This research project was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/27439/2006). Part of the article was written during a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Centre for Excellence in Gender Research (GEXcel), University of Örebro.