ABSTRACT
In September 2002, Ellen Messer-Davidow (2002a), at a talk about her book Disciplining Feminism, cited an incident where Donna Shalala, the former United States (US) Secretary of Health and Human Services, had maintained that academic research was useless to the Clinton administration when it was reforming welfare policy because it was too slow in coming out, produced conflicting results, used impenetrable jargon and failed to address questions that concerned policymakers. Shalala was not bad-mouthing welfare scholars, argued Messer-Davidow (2002b), she was simply calling attention to what the academy expects all scholars to do:
it expects us to complexify, theorise and debate problems that have been constituted by our disciplines … [S]uch fields as feminist, cultural and GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender] studies use highly politicised rhetorics and espouse social-change objectives but produce knowledge that has little impact on real-world politics other than igniting backlashes.
(Messer-Davidow, 2002b)