Inhabiting the in-between: walls, bridges and interstices in our feminist academic practice

Abstract

In this text, with an autobiographical methodology[Q3] [Del Valle, Teresa. 1995. “Metodología Para la Elaboración de la Autobiografía.” In Actas del Seminario Internacional Género y Trayectoria del Profesorado Universitario, edited by Sanz Rueda, 281–289. Madrid: Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas/Universidad Complutense; Gregorio Gil, Carmen. 2023b. “Teresa del Valle Murga, maestra y mentora: precursora de la antropología feminista en el Estado español.” In Maestras de la antropología en España: una aproximación a través del relato de vida, edited by María Jesús, Pena Castro, Elena Hernández Corrochano, and Anastasia Téllez Infantes, 153–170; Okely, Judith. 1992. “Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge.” InAnthropology & Autobiography, edited by Judith Okely, and Callaway Hellen, 1– 28. London: Routledge], we consider what it has meant for us to position ourselves as feminists in academia, inhabiting research lines and spaces in the field of Gender Studies. In our context, where[Q4] universities are divided into teaching departments based on areas of knowledge, placing ourselves in a peripheral, subordinate field such as that which is termed Gender and/or Feminist Studies, as well as involving a dual task, this has positioned us at times as ‘traitors’ to our fields of knowledge. In this paper, we aim to go beyond analyses demonstrating the subordinate place women occupy in universities [Acker, Sandra, and Anne, Wagner. 2019. “Feminist Scholars Working Around the Neoliberal University.”Gender and Education 31 (1): 62–81. https://do.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296117; Angervall, Petra and Beach, Denis. 2020. “Dividing Academic Work: gender and academic Career at Swedish Universities”. Gender and Education, 32(3), 347–362, https://do.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1401047; Aiston, Sarah, and Chee Kent. 2021. “The Silence/ing of Academic Women.” Gender and Education 33 (2): 138–155. https://do.org/10.1080/09540253.2020.1716955] to explore how, although situating ourselves in this in-between place resulted in a dual task and has been a source of conflict, it has also been a space of escape (from the hierarchies which are the backbone of departments) and of oxygen (by enabling dialogue between knowledge and disciplines from our ethnographic perspective).