Identity and Intervention: Disciplinarity as Transdisciplinarity in Gender Studies

Abstract

Within the past 40 years, feminist studies/women’s studies/gender studies/studies in gender and sexuality has effectively grown into a globally practised academic discipline while simultaneously resisting the notion of disciplinarity and strongly advocating multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. In this article, I argue that gaining identity through refusing an identity can be viewed as being a constitutive paradox of gender studies. Through exploring gender studies as a transdisciplinary intellectual discipline, which came into existence in very particular multidisciplinary historical conditions of the feminist movement, I suggest that transdisciplinarity within gender studies takes on a meaning which results in a radical problematization of the academic goal of ‘knowledge production’. Instead of such ‘knowledge production’, transdisciplinarity in gender studies promotes intervention which reaches beyond the concepts of accountability, innovation and corporate management. I argue that Jacques Derrida’s promotion of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1982 in its particular relationship to the tradition of philosophy provides a parallel example of such an attitude. Adding to Joan Scott’s and Clare Hemmings’s insights on gender studies in terms of critique and transformation, I argue that transdisciplinarity as practice of ‘intervention’ is crucial for the construction of gender studies disciplinary identity, based upon apparent non-identity.

Worthwhile work? Childcare, feminist ethics and cooperative research practices

“…These processes will build up explicitly, and asynchronously, into a combined understanding of the policy challenges that must be faced, and local remedies that might be applied, to change materially and emotionally the lives of early childhood workers. This resonates with Pulkkinen's (2015) comments about the critical place of intervention, of an activist sensibility, within the 'transdisciplinary discipline' of feminist academic work. While we do not claim this is the only way to do feminist work in the academy, we believe this notion of cooperation -of research configurations -offers a powerful challenge to the atomisation and competition currently existing within many research settings.…”

Contradiction of Terms: Feminist Theory, Philosophy and Transdisciplinarity

“…From here on I use 'gender studies' (lower case) as shorthand to include gender studies, feminist studies, women's studies and masculinity studies. In this I follow Tuija Pulkkinen (2015). 3.…”

The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth Grosz's Deleuzian Feminist Theory: Sexual Difference, Ontology, and Intervention

“…But, it must be asked whether a general theory of change explains change rather than keeps change open, and whether such a general theory closes thought down to one option, rather than enhancing intellectual experimentation. The stakes here are crucial: as I have recently argued elsewhere, feminist theory is and should be theorizing and research that challenges explanations and politicizes truths, rather than “knowledge‐production” (Pulkkinen ). In feminist scholarship the primary stakes are in intervention rather than in explanation—or at least, I think they should be.…”

“…By privileging scientific evidence, this mode of discussion also introduces a sense of single and evident truth that is traditionally foreign to feminist debates and gender studies as a discipline (Pulkkinen ). Although Grosz's work is clearly philosophical in its stakes, its potential effects on feminist discussion are similar to those pointed out by those who criticize the “new materialism” of privileging natural sciences and “bringing in the voice of authority in guise of science” (Sullivan , 307; Irni ).…”