Abstract

PEREIRA, Maria do Mar. «You can feel the exhaustion in the air around you»: The mood of contemporary universities and its impact on feminist scholarship. Ex aequo [online]. 2019, n.39, pp.171-186. ISSN 0874-5560.  https://doi.org/10.22355/exaequo.2019.39.11.

Science and higher education have undergone profound changes in recent decades, leading in many countries to the institutionalisation of academic cultures of performativity. In this article, I examine how that institutionalisation shapes women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) in paradoxical ways. Drawing on an ethnography of Portuguese academia, I show that the growing emphasis on productivity has created opportunities for WGFS but also produced a mood of exhaustion and depression that has extremely detrimental impacts on WGFS academics’ bodies, relationships and knowledge production. I use this paradox to call for more debate in WGFS about contemporary academic working cultures, and our ambivalent personal investments in work.

Keywords : academia; feminism; gender studies; work; higher education.

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