Abstract
This article reviews current debates on epistemic habits of critique and affirmation, specifically focusing on approaches which combine criticality with ways to encourage unfoldings of alternative futurities, figurations and worlding practices. Embedded in a process of critical self-reflection regarding epistemic habits, the article discusses disidentification (Butler 1993, Munoz 1999), cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), and everyday utopianism (Cooper 2014) understood as examples of such habits. The article explores how feminisms, unfolding within academia, and thus institutionally embedded in the logics of global capitalism, neoliberalism and particular nation-state politics, on the one the hand, are bound to a performance of cruel optimism, glossing over dilemmas and contradictions, and, on the other hand, perhaps enabled to enact messy kinds of everyday utopianism. Finally, the article reflects upon possibilities for changing one’s epistemic habits, suggesting a couple of changes: to systematically integrate reflections on changing conditions of academic knowledge production, as well as on geopolitical grammars. These issues are addressed as being interwoven with and mixed up in the epistemic practices that are produced by messy links with both feminist activist resistance and institutionalized and professionalized academic feminisms.
Highlights
In this article1, I shall draw a personalized cartography of some epistemic habits regarding critique and affirmation in academic feminisms2
The third item in my cartography, cruel optimisms, will be discussed as interwoven with the institutionalization of academic feminisms within neoliberalized universities, and with the ensuing process of becoming disciplined in order to comply with neoliberal, capitalist governmentality and with different nation-state goals embodied by state universities
I shall start my cartographic exploration of the interwoven epistemic habits of academic feminisms in which I have been immersed with the notion of disidentification (Butler 1993)
Summary
I shall draw a personalized cartography of some epistemic habits regarding critique and affirmation in academic feminisms. Other kinds of Western leftist and feminist critiques have found themselves caught up in epistemologies of ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana 2007), when confronted with decolonial, anti-racist and posthuman critiques (Spivak 2003; Chow 2006; Lionnet and Shih 2011; Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012; Haraway 2016), which pinpoint how, at the outset, humanities and social science disciplines, inter- and sub-disciplines, on which much critical intellectual work has been grounded, are blinded by tunnel visions as far as issues such as structural whiteness or beliefs in human exceptionalism are concerned Against this background, it seems timely, as suggested by the editors of this special issue, to review epistemic habits, which often are implicitly given rather than explicitly discussed. I shall reflect upon possibilities for changing one’s epistemic habits, and advocate some changes
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