Anti Feminism In The Academy

Contending that the anti-feminist backlash in the academy is part of the broader "politically correct" rhetoric, this collection of writers, academics and activists is a much-needed response to the assault on feminist thinkers and critics in the academy today.

Essays examine the impact of women's studies on scholarship in fields, includ American history, political science, economics, literary criticism, and psychology.

This book harnesses the expertise of women academics who have constructed innovative approaches to challenging existing sexual disadvantage in the academy. Countering the prevailing postfeminist discourse, the contributors to this volume argue that sexism needs to be named in order to be challenged and resisted. Exploring a complex, intersectional and diverse arrangement of resistance strategies, the contributors outline useful tools to resist, subvert and identify sexist policy and practice that can be deployed by organisations and collectives as well as individuals. The volume analyses pedagogical, curriculum and research approaches as well as case studies which expose, satirise and subvert sexism in the academy: instead, embodied and slow scholarship as political tools of resistance are introduced. A call for action against the propagation of sexism and gender disadvantage in the academy, this important book will appeal to students and scholars of sexism in higher education as well as all those committed to working towards gender e/quality.

This text brings together writing and research on feminist experience in academia. It covers issues such as provision of care, maternalism in the academy and dynamics of interaction between women in higher eduction. There are challenging and provocative analyses of many questions: how large is the gap between rhetoric and reality in HE institutions? how do institutions behave towards disabled staff? how far is stereotyping still affecting the roles which women play in academia? what do women face when they combine motherhood with teaching or studying? coping mechanisms and survival tactics are brought under scrutiny, and the effect these have on the behaviour of female academics and their interactions with the institution of each other. This text should provide insight and evidence for researchers to further develop their own theories, and also many starting points for those wishing to undertake their own research. Written in collaboration with the Women in Higher Education Network.

This book is a general statement about universities and about the universities' response to and interaction with feminism. From the late nineteenth century to the current decade, feminists have confronted the university structure, infiltrated it as they have resisted and rejected it. Within the parameters of this tension and contradiction, feminist scholarship has paradoxically transformed the nature and content of academe while it has fought against the barriers higher education has imposed, to both feminist philosophy and to women. In this analysis, the author explores how such a contradiction was manifested in the mid to late ninteenth-century university, in the late 1960's, and in the 1980's in the modern research university in North America. She examines how the university as we know it, politically, economically and socially implements women's subordination through its institutional polity, its academic disciplines, and its ideological aerobics in promoting the private/public spheres. Finally, the author boldly suggests that the dissent of feminism offers perhaps the greatest and the most plausible alternative both to the ills which beset the contemporary academy and to the future of academe. In a word, such an academy must be created or face intellectual extinction-- not just for women, but for humanity.

Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality’s Critique of Women’s Studies and the Academy pushes back against the exclusive scholarship and discourse coming out of women-centered spaces and projects, which throw up barriers by narrowly defining who can participate. Vehement resistance to using inclusive language and renaming scholarly spaces like Women’s Studies and Critical Feminism expresses itself in concerns that women are still oppressed and thus women-only spaces must be maintained. But who is a woman? What are the characteristics of a woman’s lived experience? Do affinity and a history of oppression justify exclusion? This book shows how intersectional feminism is often underperformed and appropriated as a “woke” vocabulary by elite women who are unwilling to do the necessary emotional work around their privilege. As Trans Women, Femmes, Women of Color, Queer Women, Gender Variant, and Gender Non-Conforming scholars emerge, the heteronormative, cisgender, colonial idea of women and the feminine is rapidly under attack. The contributors believe that to engage in the necessary conversations about the oppressed performing oppression is to disrupt the exclusionary basis of monolithic understandings of the feminine. Only then can we advance the coalition needed to forge a multiracial, multicultural, queer-led, anti-imperialist feminism.

Brings together essays by leading scholars to explore the profound impact of feminist scholarship on the major academic disciplines.