ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the position and significance of women and feminists who teach in Higher Education. With Virginia Woolf (1928, reprint 1972) we can identify the language, concepts, codes and conventions of academia as recognizably ‘a man’s world’, which constitutes the very masculinity it honours. Acknowledging the roots of the academic and the scholarly within the psychosocial world of men has generally been resisted by male scholars, and there is now the added problem that women seeking to enter academia may feel that they have to ‘pass’ as men, as middle class, or as heterosexual, and, as a consequence, by contributing to ‘social frameworks which reinforce domination’ (hooks, 1989:14-15), oppress other women. In examining academia as both patriarchal institution and object of its own critical scrutiny, we discover our dilemma as ‘women’ and as feminists, and face the contradictory nature of Women’s Studies. What does it mean to be effective as feminist academics, while also challenging the roots of our complicity in our own and other people’s oppression? This is the practice of revolt, against how we are positioned historically and socially in relation to each other as women, which bubbles at the heart of any feminism.
