Resisting ‘overing’: Teaching and researching gender studies in Sweden

Abstract

Synopsis The aim of this paper is to raise and explore some of the challenges we as gender scholars have experienced in Sweden today in what could be conceptualized as ‘overed’ academic landscapes. Our argument is framed by Sara Ahmed's (2012) statement that the very idea that we are ‘over race’ is how racism is reproduced where it also has to be emphasized that the notion of being ‘over race’ needs to be understood as intertwined with being over gender. With autobiographical methods, we take leverage in a problematization of gender studies as ‘a room of our own’ and discuss related themes in academe such as the paradox of gender studies as a perspective and/or a discipline, pluralism and the academic institutional division of labour, feminism and neoliberal New Public Management, collaborative interdisciplinary work in audit cultures. The paper concludes with a discussion about resisting ‘overing’ through the conflicted position of the feminist scholar.