Positioning Fugitive Feminist Knowledge Production As Resistance in English Universities

Gender and feminist studies in England experiences unprecedentedly strong regulation and interference by state actors. Humanities and social sciences are increasingly required to prove their ‘value for money’, while debates about gender and feminist studies’ relationship to free speech animate emotive responses across policymaking, public life and university governance. Feminist factions join right-wing political actors in challenging the field’s central categories. It thus might seem straightforward to defend the field from perceived attacks by highlighting its inclusivity and pedagogical value.

However, such responses can preclude an engagement with the complex ways in which feminist and gender studies is entangled with the ideologies and narratives that motivate this current contestation. Drawing on interviews with 34 academics interested in feminist and gender scholarship at four case study universities in England conducted in 2018-19, my paper begins to explore these entanglements. I draw on scholarship on academic racial capitalism (Gerrard, 2022) and on the epistemic and material violences of a neoliberal politics of recognition (Fergusson, 2012; Hong, 2015; Melamed, 2011) to conceptualise the ‘paradoxical’ (Pereira, 2017) relationship between English universities and feminist academics. I argue that marketised universities are governed by a logic which combines a selective inclusion of difference with the disavowal of ongoing racialised and gendered violences. Thinking through the lens of fugitivity (Harney and Moten, 2013) allows us to recognise the resistant potential of feminist knowledge that does not seek to defend its existence within universities but aims instead to escape them.