ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to answer some questions: How do Women’s, Gender, Feminist Studies (WGFS) scholars put WGFS on the map of proper knowledge? What maps do they draw to negotiate the epistemic status of WGFS? It examines the fieldwork in Portugal to identify five particularly frequent, but not exhaustive, maps. The epistemic map focuses on three key epistemic terrains: WGFS, proper science and mainstream science. The chapter highlights the proximity between WGFS and specific traits of proper science, while at the same time positioning mainstream science as more distant from those traits. The theoretical, methodological and epistemological positions of boundary-workers or those who support them were identified by interviewees as shaping the chilliness of climates. The claim that scientificity is produced through practices of boundary-work is based on the belief that boundary-work is performative. Thomas Gieryn argues that scientificity is not an essential property of claims, methods or disciplines but an achievement constituted in and through its local, ritualised enactment.
