Lund, Sweden. The pursuit of gender studies developed a bias towards research focused on gender at the expense of other power relationships, marginalizing and reducing the visibility of other power structures.

This claim comes from doctoral research on what gender studies has achieved — and failed to achieve — during its 30 years in Sweden, one of the countries with the highest level of equality, where gender studies were first established as its own subject within academia.


It was during the 1960s and 1970s that feminist researchers in Sweden began to organize study groups on the situation of women and power structures. Around the same time, the Swedish government decided research was needed if progress was to be made on gender equality.

Feminist Knowledge Production?

Mia Liinason at Lund University has concluded that gender studies, as a political investment in equality, indeed has found its place in academia.

Gender studies researchers have succeeded in creating an arena for research on power relationships that concern gender, sexuality and ethnicity.

However, “in some cases, the subject may have helped to confirm the dominant notions of gender rather than the reverse”, says Liinason.Money was earmarked for equality research and since then the subject has often come under fire. “It is the subject’s political support that angers some people”, says Mia Liinason, who finds it no stranger that money is allocated for gender research than that it is allocated for specific medical research.

Mia Liinason is herself a gender studies researcher — the first person to gain a PhD in the subject at Lund University. She chose the difficult task of analyzing her own discipline. “It hasn’t been entirely easy. Many people warned me and thought I had taken on a difficult project”, she says.

The principal focus of Liinason's thesis was to analyze the process behind the institutionalization of interdisciplinary Women’s/Gender/Feminist Studies (WGFS) to examine how feminist knowledge is constructed in the first place. To understand how feminist debates on academic feminism can effect transformation, she asked three questions:

1. How has feminist knowledge been organized and institutionalized into the academy?
   
   
2. What are the effects of feminist knowledge production?
   
   
3. How does the location influence and shape feminist knowledge production?

Her studies show that the institutionalization of WGFS has challenged the traditional ways of thinking on the subject, but also demonstrates that feminist knowledge production can settle int a pattern that reinforces dominant feminist ideologies.

For Liinason, feminism and its academic tools can become so systematized that alternative views are marginalized and rendered to a less credible status. She argues that opposition to a newly orthodox vrsion of feminism — even by other feminists — are resisted as less legitimate. The difficult thing has been that there is a strong sense of allegiance to the subject in some parts, she explains. Feminists have always emphasized the importance of sticking together in the face of oppression and injustice. Therefore, criticism of their own subject has been waved aside.

According to Liinason, many have claimed that in order to achieve change the focus must be on shared experiences and objectives rather than internal differences and conflicts. There has been a fear that self-criticism would weaken the feminist movement. However, adds Mia Liinason, feminism is not a uniform movement, and other feminists have therefore argued for the necessity of also critically examining power relations within feminism’s own practices.

“It is these dominant features within gender studies and feminism that I wanted to study in my thesis”, says Mia Liinason.

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment