Historicising feminist knowledge: Notes toward a genealogy of academic feminism of the 1970s

Abstract

The feminisms of 1970s Australia are often perceived as a unitary, simplistic and predominantly uncomplicated whole. This reification of a feminist moment is repeatedly propagated in a history of Australian feminism that constructs an unsophisticat ed feminism at its beginnings in the 1970s and progresses to the supposedly sophisticated feminisms of the 1990s—feminisms of plurality, multiplicities of meanings and complex specificities. I want to ask why and how so much historiography has invested (and continues to invest) in a unitary conception of 1970s feminism, particularly of academic feminism in Australia during the 1970s. This paper is a careful thinking through of the theoretical and methodological processes involved in historicising a genealogy of feminist courses taught in Australian universities during the 1970s. I want to interrogate the historical situatedness of the very way we know. It is an exploration of the naturalised ground of feminist knowledge production—1970s feminist knowledge and that of the present.1 That is to say, this paper is as much an exercise in thinking through the uses of history within feminisms as they are constituted in the present, as it is a history of feminist thought as it was experienced and expressed in feminist courses taught in Australian universities in the 1970s. It is an exploration of the meta-issues of a larger history of academic feminism. My project, following Michel Foucault's genealogical methods, is 'a history of the present'.2 Foucault asks, 'What is history given there is continually being produced within it a separation of true and false?'3 Or, as Mitchell Dean, exploring the challenges of Foucault's work to historical methodology in his book Critical & Effective Histories asks, 'how is a history of truth possible, when we realise that truth has a history?'4 What I will call 'critical history' and what Foucault, following Nietzsche, called 'effective history' employs a theoretical methodology that seeks to problematise historical 'truths' in relation to the rules that govern the production of knowledge; the internal workings and unacknowledged practices that regulate the governing of the self and others. Critical history is characterised by a genealogical methodology, interrogating the very uses of history itself and the necessity to which it answers. 5 It is, therefore, history that investigates the practices of historical study. It exercises 'a perpetual vigilance and scepticism toward the claims of various philosophies to prescribe the meaning of history'.6 Critical history is suspicious of reconstructio ns of the past and the 'discovery'