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

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this text, with an autobiographical methodology, 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 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 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).