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Megan D. Jones
Negotiating Woman: Respectability, Heterosexuality, Gender
In Australia in the 1970s academic feminism took on the task of
representing "woman" as its primary epistemological project. Defined
essentially as a site of belonging; one in which belonging to "woman" and
belonging to Women's Studies was entirely compatible, if not identical,
academic feminism articulated its intervention via demands for women's
space. Always active in producing the meanings of the positions they
inhabited (or refused to inhabit), participants of academic feminism were
both strategic and self-conscious in mediating between the specificities
of "woman" and its constraints.
One of the most significant ways that participants in academic feminism
in Australian in the 1970s came to negotiate the category of "woman" was
through respectability. I use the term respectability to refer both to
the idea of academic respectability whereby academic feminism and its
participants strived to be considered intellectually worthy, reputable
and meritorious in the eyes of the institution, and to the idea of
respectability in relation to societal expectations of behaviour
appropriate, proper and acceptable for women. Respectability was one of
the most ubiquitous signifiers of status and credibility, of
institutional value and legitimacy in the academy at that moment.
moreover, it was one of the key mechanisms by which these women
positioned themselves, and how they in turn were positioned.
I investigate the ways in which such identifications were secured and
destabilised by representation and I ask what subject positions were
available for occupation. While academic feminism's intervention into the
academy was premised on woman's sexed specificity, it was at once a claim
for the right to recognition and a refusal of recognition. That is to
say, those participating in academic feminism both inhabited and refused
to be fixed by the category of "woman". indeed in mediating between the
specificities of "woman" and its potential constraints, participants took
up a position of resistance and agency, one in excess of the apparatus of
gender and heterosexuality.
Bio:
Megan D. Jones completed her PhD in the School of Philosophical and
Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney in 2002. Her thesis,
Remembering Academic Feminism, is a critical genealogy of 1970s academic
feminism in Australia. It crosses the disciplinary boundaries of feminism
and history in its analysis of the positions that have come to structure
historical narratives of academic feminism.
<mdymphnaj@hotmail.com>