Introduction

This chapter argues that boundary-work over Women’s, Gender, Feminist Studies (WGFS) can best be analysed through feminist discursive ethnography; in other words, through a feminist ethnography that focuses on discourse. Conceptualising scientificity through this lens renders the epistemic status of WGFS a problem, in two ways. Academics within and outside WGFS are involved in negotiations of epistemic status every day and are well-versed in their language and rituals. Feminist epistemology and other critical theorisations of the politics of knowledge production are invaluable and inescapable, but shed relatively little light on how epistemic categories are actually invoked and understood in everyday, located academic practice. Ethnography is especially suited to a study of 'local culture-in-the-making' and 'knowledge-in-the-making', and to a conceptualisation of objects as 'accomplishments' rather than facts. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.