Academic Feminisms: Between Disidentification, Messy Everyday Utopianism, and Cruel Optimism

Lykke, Nina

doi:10.20897/femenc.201703

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(8 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A few years ago, I received an invitation to a symposium in Finland entitled A critique of our own: On the epistemic habits of academic feminism. 1 The theme of the gathering was timely, in line with the growing interest in historiographies and methodologies of academic feminism (Lykke 2017) after two decades of institutionalisation, topics I had spent considerable time researching (Dahl et al 2016). Moreover, the organising metaphor was intriguing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nordic Academic Feminism and Whiteness as Epistemic Habit

Dahl

2020

Feminisms in the Nordic Region

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This chapter is a contribution to ongoing discussions about Nordic academic feminism. It asks why and how this field continues to assume and reproduce whiteness as its naturalised point of departure and orientation and for forming a Nordic feminist “we.” It is largely conceptual, and I draw on a lived archive of 15 years of participant observation in ”Nordic” academic feminism as it has taken shape at conferences, in network and research meetings, and in classrooms and public debates. Building on the work of Sara Ahmed, Sirma Bilge, Lena Sawyer, Marta Cuesta and Diana Mulinari, I propose that whiteness can be understood as an epistemic habit of and within Nordic academic feminism. To that end, the chapter sketches a framework for understanding how whiteness is habitually and epistemically reproduced in broader logics of narration about the field, in forms of assembly and in responses to critiques of racism. Thus, whiteness is not simply a question of over-representation of white bodies, it is also about the orientations and comfort of white bodies, and about how some critiques and stories become understood as “ours” and others not.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nordic Academic Feminism and Whiteness as Epistemic Habit

Dahl

2020

Feminisms in the Nordic Region

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There was a strange alliance with neoliberalism. I have been writing about this process (Lykke, 2017b), trying to come to terms with the dilemmas and the contradictions through the lens of two notions; on the one hand, Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011), implying that you produce an optimism that only exists at the surface, to which you are attracted, while erasing the underlying problems. I think we became very good at navigating in the messy waters between performing cruel optimism, and on the other hand, twisting and turning neoliberal agendas, making space for the unfolding of everyday utopianism -an important notion coined by Davina Cooper (2014).…”

Section: / 12mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Long March Through the Patriarchal Institutions: A Dialogue Between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke

Skewes

Adrian²

2021

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The dialogue between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke took place at Aarhus University in Denmark in September 2018. The event was organised by the Gendering in Research Network and the three editors of the special issue of Women, Gender and Research called Feminist STS at Work 1 (Adrian, Skewes and Schwennesen, 2018). In this special issue, Lykke featured with an interview about how her academic career had been entangled with her activist intentions of rethinking knowledge production and epistemology (Skewes and Adrian, 2018). We invited yet another inspirational activist and feminist researcher, Braidotti to join in the reflections about her experiences with the long march through the patriarchal institutions.Braidotti and Lykke have collaborated in multiple ways throughout their careers. Together they edited Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs (1996). They have also been among the driving forces in a multitude of key feminist research and teaching networks in Europe, such as the European feminist curriculum development organisation Athena, which grew into the European Association for Feminist Research and Teaching At Gender (https://atgender.eu/), as well as the Noise Summer School (https://graduategenderstudies.nl/education/noisesummer-school/), gathering feminist students for summer schools annually since 1994. Furthermore, they have collaborated within the framework of a Marie Curie network for feminist PhD education GENDERGRADUATES. All of these networks and collaborations across disciplines, universities and countries illustrate their passionate desire to establish a solid basis for feminist researchers.Braidotti and Lykke are close friends. Their academic careers have in different ways been dedicated to the struggle to expand the fragile spaces of academia's interdisciplinary feminist borderlands and included transgression of national borders. Both are openly married lesbians, Lykke widowed since 2014.Braidotti describes herself as having led a nomadic life-born in Italy, growing up as a migrant in Australia, only to move to Paris in order to complete her PhD and start her academic work in the Paris campus of Columbia 1 The event was made possible through funding from Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and the Danish feminist journal, Women, Gender and Research.

show abstract

“…Angry and explicit disidentifications were the order of the day in the past as they are today! As I have argued elsewhere (Lykke, 2017), due to intersectional differences, feminism is to be understood as built on disidentifications rather than identifications.…”

Section: Intersectionality and Its Discontentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist Feminism and Epistemologies of Ignorance

Lykke

2020

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Through a personalized story, anchored in historical reflections on the formative years of feminist research in the Nordic context in the early 1970s, the article engages in transversal conversations. The focus is dissonances and resonances between intersectional feminisms and socialist feminisms, and their critiques of monocategorical (neo)liberal feminisms. The method is transversal dialoguing, implying that participants in politically conflicted conversations, shift between "rooting" (situating their own stakes along the lines of feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges) and "shifting" (seriously trying to imagine what it takes to inhabit the situated perspective of interlocutors). A starting point for the article's transversal conversations is recent critiques of white feminist intersectionality research in Nordic and broader European contexts, claimed to neoliberalize and whitewash intersectionality. Shifting to the perspective of the critics, the author takes responsibility for her stakes in epistemologies of white ignorance. A historical reflection on her becoming a socialist feminist in the context of New Left students' and feminist movements in Denmark in the aftermath of the students' revolts of 1968 is used as prism to a discussion of socialist feminisms in the Nordic context in the 1970s, and their paradoxes of being attentive to class, while entangled in classic marxism's eurocentrism and epistemologies of white ignorance. To dig further into the question of genealogies of leftwing epistemologies of ignorance, characterizing Nordic socialist feminism in the 1970s (and haunting European socialism more generally), the article critically rereads a piece of the authors' research from the 1970s-an analysis of the work of socialist feminist, Alexandra Kollontaj, and her role in the Russian revolution. Rooting, the author suggests that the epistemologies of white ignorance in Nordic feminist research rather than emerging from monocategoricality and (neo) neoliberalism, as the critics suggest, should be sought after through a critical scrutiny of leftwing versions of eurocentrism.

show abstract

Academic Feminisms: Between Disidentification, Messy Everyday Utopianism, and Cruel Optimism

Cited by 6 publications

References 7 publications

Nordic Academic Feminism and Whiteness as Epistemic Habit

Nordic Academic Feminism and Whiteness as Epistemic Habit

The Long March Through the Patriarchal Institutions: A Dialogue Between Rosi Braidotti and Nina Lykke

Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist Feminism and Epistemologies of Ignorance

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About