Academic Writing As a Contesting Territory for Women

In this paper I present a discussion on the forces that come to play when talking about the production of knowledge in universities understood as international identities, particularly through the act of writing.  I use women’s interviews to explore on the meanings of academic writing today.  These interviews have been conducted to female professsors from different disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities in one university in Chile. My argument is that contemporary ways to reason universities as corporate institutions have important effects on the configuration of knowledge, subjectivities, and their relations. Discourses of internationalization of higher education that use institutional arrangements to promote specific practices to name themselves as successfully international, such as, international networks and circuits to publish academic work, designing and implementation of international collaborative research, high level indexed publications, etc., produce the idea that all these are the “natural” institutional outcomes and aspirations for professors.  These institutional practices create the conditions for a new institutional developmentalism (Sidhu, 2007) where the reconfiguration of international practices has taken the status of managerial tools. Institutional cultures produced through these discourses have privileged the constitution of a disembodied academic subjectivity that requires subjects to narrate themselves with no reference to gendered, racialized, nationalized, and sexualized intensities.  I explore on how this dis/embodiment is narrated and problematized by women through their acts of academic writing, particularly in disciplines related to Humanities and Social Sciences.