Feminist scholarship and the 'performative university'; a book review of Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship, An Ethnography of Academia by Maria Do Mar Pereira

Abstract

How do scholars in countries such as Portugal, the US, the UK, or Scandinavia situate feminist scholarship in the current academia? How is the claim to scientificity in women’s, gender, and feminist studies (WGFS) produced and negotiated? And what happens to these emerging fields, and the individuals inhabiting them, under the accelerated corporatisation of higher education? This book provides insightful and novel answers to these questions and anticipates future directions of research on the institutionalisation of feminist scholarship. The book is based on ethnographic research of academia mainly in Portugal. During the years of 2008–2009 and 2015–2016, Pereira interviewed 36 WGFS and non-WGFS academics and conducted participatory observations at national and international conferences, WGFS associations’ meetings, lectures, and PhD vivas also in Sweden, the UK, and the US. In her feminist discursive analysis, she focuses on the question of ‘how academics demarcate the boundaries of “proper” knowledge, and how WGFS scholarship gets positioned in relation to those boundaries’ (p. 2).