ABSTRACT
Thinking of Women’s, Gender, Feminist Studies’ (WGFS) epistemic status as sets of movements, and not just as a state of 'low status' as it is often framed, is key to making sense of the paradoxical position and status of WGFS in many contemporary performative universities. The epistemic status of WGFS is always on the move, but it also regularly gets settled and stabilised within material and symbolic hierarchies. In the performative university, epistemic capacity and value are often structurally framed not as something that an individual or institution has, but something they must continuously enact and evidence, through regular and profitable production of a defined range of countable and accountable 'outputs'. WGFS publications usually end here: a diagnosis of a problem in our knowledge, followed by a call to produce more knowledge, or to produce knowledge differently, in the hope that this might change power in the world or within WGFS.
