‘Door Bitches of Club Feminism’?: Academia and Feminist Competency

Abstract

‘Feminist competency’ is a nascent term that has been identified in three general critiques of contemporary feminism that emerged in the course of research for The Great Feminist Denial (2008), a book on feminist debates in Australia that I co-authored with Monica Dux. The first critique highlights the importance of feminist knowledge, typically generated through the academy, to feminist identification. The second posits a perceived lack of feminist competency as an obstacle to feminist affiliation. The third assessment insists that spokespeople for feminism should be sufficiently competent. Using these responses to feminism as a starting point, combined with a reflection on my own framing as an academic feminist in the public sphere, I make a case for the potential value of ‘feminist competency’ as a means to assess the impact of academic feminism, in Australia and elsewhere.

Storying female academics’ career development in Indonesian Islamic higher education: a postcolonial feminist analysis

“…Based on the classification above, the last group; Muslim feminists are scholars, mostly academics, who fight for women's rights. As defined by Simic (2010), an academic feminist is a feminist who has conducted feminist research in multiple disciplines, and is influenced by women academics' perceptions, and their history in academia. Academic feminism is influenced by how women speak about feminism in higher education.…”