ABSTRACT
In 1991 I first read Conflicts in Feminism edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (1990), and was immediately taken with one of the last chapters titled ‘Criticizing feminist criticism’. Of particular interest to me in that chapter was the candid discussion among Jane Gallop, Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K.Miller of academic feminists’ changing status into new power/knowledge orders, of feminists’ moral discomfort with authority and power, the politics of feminists in authority ‘getting trashed’, ‘taken out’ by other feminists and students. Among colleagues I had often discussed these kinds of hidden tensions in feminism, but I had not come across literature that dealt with any of these issues. It seemed as though feminists adhered to some unspoken moratorium on going public with conflicts in feminism. At the time of my initial reading of this book, the contradictions and tensions between my theoretical commitments to feminism, and feminist pedagogy in particular, and my own pedagogical practices and experiences in the culture of the university were particularly highlighted.
