Illdisciplined Gender: Nature/Culture and Transgressive Encounters

Abstract

I set out to critically engage with the concept transgressive encounters. Given the heritage and weighty presence of the term transgression in Feminist, Queer, Trans and Gender Studies debate, such a discussion would be a review of Gender Studies. From activism to texts, we can trace the multiple heritages, ties and examples of transgression within the broad category of gender research: the historical moments where particular forms of gendered power have been successfully challenged; reinterpreting, refracting and redirecting the production of knowledge; operating as a conduit between different academic disciplines; engaging issues outside of disciplinary domains; and subversive bodily acts and the fleshy politics of everyday life; thinking and doing gender research is a transgressive act. I do not want to draw a line between academic debate and activism. Thinking is, after all, doing, and doing generates new knowledge as exemplified by scholars such as Gayatri Spivak who have constantly crossed between ‘activism’ and ‘academic’ (see, e.g., Spivak 1999). This is not to suggest that all transgressions are similar but to emphasise how they share a common thread, providing critical perspectives and articulating different questions. Gender Studies has shifted across academic and disciplinary boundaries and occupied spaces in the borderlands between disciplines, on fringes, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the academy as well as in dedicated research institutes and departments. In a description of ‘intellectual activism’, Patricia Hill Collins (2013) describes two core mechanisms by which lines are blurred between activism and the academy. These two mechanisms are ‘speaking truth to power’ and ‘speaking truth to people’. The contributions to this volume might sit most squarely in the former – they speak from within the academy, from a particular context, and they offer the experience of doing interdisciplinary research in particular spaces.