Unsettling Relations: The University as a Site of Feminist Struggles

Abstract

UnsettlingRelations: The University as a Site of Feminist Struggles is a collection of challenging and readable essays by five women, each of whom is involved in feminist politics and academic teaching/research. As its title suggests, the book is concerned with the university as a set of social relations which are involved in the production of power and privilege, together with feminist struggles to resist and change them. Framed in this general way, the book is located intellectually within the now quite long history of feminist critique of the academy as a maledominated, liberal and middle-class preserve. Not surprisingly, therefore, some important parts of its conceptual framework are drawn from previously well-known feminist workparticularly that ofthe feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith. Two features are worth noting here: one is the notion that academic knowledge production is always inscribed within social and cultural relations of ruling. The second is the conviction that authentic (rather than simply 'academic') knowledge is intimately connected with although not a direct reflection ofour bodily, sensuous and practical experiences in daily life. Where the book is quite distinctive is in the sustained, detailed and critical attention it pays to the powers and privileges which are to be found, and which must be challenged, in the social relations of feminist pedagogy and research. Here, the authors' starting point is in more recent critiques of the way that many women have been socially positioned as 'other' and as 'different' by a white, middle-class, heterosexual and able-bodied hegemony in feminist knowledge. As one of the contributors to the volume has written previously, such practices have produced 'silences or absences, creating gaps and fissures through which non-white women, for example, disappear from the social surface' (Bannerji, 1987:11). A further aim of Unsettling Relations, therefore, is to write the experiences of many previously neglected women into analyses of feminist academic relations. In order to achieve this, the introduction describes how each contributor to the volume has been enjoined to centre 'race' and class as well as gender, and to reflexively include a history of her own personal experiences of social positioning, within her chapter. Following a brief 'introduction' to the background and aims of the book, a number of the main themes are developed in the first chapter by Linda Carty. Her own experiences of racism in education are used to illustrate the history of black people's marginalization in academic knowledge including feminist theory, given the construction of whiteness as a 'neutral' reference point. Kari Delhi explores how her whiteness has positioned her in relations of power over other women, and argues that white middle-class women must resist the comforts and seductions of university as 'home'. The third chapter by Himani Bannerji poses the question of why feminist research and pedagogy has been unable to validate non-white women's experiences, subjectivities and direct agency. She then answers this question by providing a critical account of feminist epistemologies (essentialist, politics of difference and Marxist/ socialist), and by arguing for a 'reflexive and relational social analysis which incorporates in it a theory of agency and direct representation based on our experience' (p. 94). One important benefit of this approach is that it works out a political position